Traditional publishers dominate online recruitment

As other commentators have already stated, the purchase of JobSite by Associated New Media should be regarded as a positive thing for the online recruitment industry as it demonstrates that a credible UK media owner is prepared to invest £35 million in a job board.

Perhaps a more interesting observation though is the how this purchase further strengthens the hold that traditional media owners have over the UK’s major online recruitment players. Total Jobs is owned by Reed Elsevier, Workthing by the Guardian Media Group, Fish4Jobs by five regional newspaper organisations (including Guardian Regional Newspapers and Associated New Media) and now Jobsite is owned by Associated New Media, part of the Associated group of companies who publish the Evening Standard and The Daily Mail. Add to this Monster, which is owned by the recruitment advertising agency TMP, and arguably the UK’s top five online recruitment sites are owned by traditional offline companies.

The fact that many leading job boards are owned by traditional publishers may appear ironic, after all job boards were supposed to destroy traditional print recruitment advertising sections and erode the associated revenue that was so important to their owners. Perhaps the best understanding of this trend though can be gained from a phrase that was popular during the dot com boom of the early 90’s – ‘if you don’t eat your own children then someone else will’.

Traditional publishers have acknowledged that the internet will be the primary source of recruitment advertising revenue in the future and in a classic case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ have decided that the best way to preserve their current recruitment advertising revenues is to own a significant slice of the medium to which these revenues are migrating.

Expect to see more traditional media companies, as well as pure play non-recruitment online offerings, investing in the online recruitment market as consolidation continues. It could be that the UK online recruitment market will soon closely resemble the UK print recruitment market, with four or five major generic players supported by a range of specialist sites and with media owners currently in control of such a large chunk of the UK online recruitment market this similarity to the print market should come as no surprise.