Home : Newsletters : 2003 : April
Total Jobs www.totaljobs.com recently announced that they have partnered with MSN in a 'seven figure deal' to exclusively provide careers content for the new MSN jobs channel, due to go live on May 2nd. The new careers channel will replace the current offering www.msn.co.uk/careers that features content from many different online recruitment sites. MSN claim to be the UK's leading website attracting 11.8 million unique users each month. Of these 11.8 million, roughly 130,000 actually visit the careers channel of the site each month. Though it is probably fair to assume that because these users have actively chosen to find the careers channel within the MSN network that they are proactively interested in furthering their careers or changing jobs and therefore are a valuable commodity for recruiters.
Jobserve www.jobserve.com have just agreed a two year shirt sponsorship deal with West Ham United that will see the Jobserve logo featured on the West Ham shirt and links between Jobserve and West Ham's website www.whufc.com. West Ham have achieved an average attendance of 34,400 for home Premiership games so far this season. Based on data taken from ORES (Workthing 2001) it is safe to assume that approximately 10% of those attending games will be actively looking for a job at any one time, exposing Jobserve to roughly 3,500 active job seekers every other week.
Sponsoring a football team does much more than just expose the brand to those attending matches however. There is a certain kudos about being associated with football and Jobserve will gain additional exposure through coverage on television and in print and also will receive traffic directly from West Ham’s website. However the extent of this coverage will depend on West Ham’s performance in the next couple of weeks as they attempt to avoid relegation to the First Division and its lower levels of media interest.
There’s quite a history of online recruitment brands promoting themselves through sport. StepStone spent heavily on sponsoring all sport on Channel 4, Monster have been taking pitch side advertising at six nations matches and at premiership grounds and Smug One launched with a sponsorship deal with the BAR Formula 1 racing team.
However, the way job boards market themselves to job seekers has changed significantly in the last two years. At the time of the dot com boom brands such as StepStone, Monster, Reed and Workthing advertised heavily on television whereas now the focus of job board marketing activity is concentrated online, frequently involving pay per click deals. It’s possible to read into this that job boards have learned that coverage in mass media might raise brand awareness but does not necessarily deliver quality candidates and that a better way to engage potential candidates is to communicate with them in an online environment. One site that has a history of using online advertising is GoJobsite www.gojobsite.co.uk who use sites such as www.maxim-magazine.co.uk in order to attract job seekers.
Wherever you choose to spend your marketing budget one of the keys to developing a succesful strategy must be to fully analyse the effectiveness of your campaigns. Though less easy to assess the effectiveness of offline activity, advertising online makes this more straightforward through the range of reporting software associated with online advertising and pay per click systems. Not only can these tools be used to establish basic click thru rates, but ideally can also ascertain the quality of candidates provided by different advertising partners and help fine tune activity over time in order to develop a more effective marketing strategy. It will be interesting to see what impact the MSN careers channel has on Total Jobs’ traffic after May 2nd and whether or not Jobserve choose to renew their sponsorship of West Ham in two years time.