Home : Newsletters : 2005 : September
In the March 2004 Enhance Media newsletter, prompted by the acquisition of Jobsite by Associated Newspapers (publishers of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard), we noted that traditional publishers were starting to dominate the ownership of UK online recruitment sites. This trend has continued with the acquisition of OfficeRecruit (£1.85 million) and Top-Consultant (£2.25 million) by Associated New Ventures (a division of Associated Newspapers) announced on 26th August.
This news came after the announcement on 16th August that Trinity Mirror had purchased GAAPweb for £10.45 million with an additional £2.6 million dependent on earnings. Trinity Mirror has also recently purchased Smart New Homes - the property web site specialising in new developments.
Trinity Mirror's acquisition of GAAPweb was followed by the news on September 1st that, subject to certain conditions, the company was also going to buy Hot Group PLC for £50.5 million (which itself had acquired Workthing from the Guardian Media Group for £6 million in September 2004). In addition to a network of online recruitment sites (including Workthing, HotRecruit and PlanetRecruit) the Hot Group also includes five offline recruitment consultancy businesses and PeopleBank - a provider of careers site technology and response management software.
UK newspaper groups spent approximately £67 million on online recruitment sites in August and September. While traditional media owners have concentrated on the media that generates response to advertising, StepStone, the European technology company, chose to spend their money on i-GRasp, which was recently placed 57th in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100, paying approximately 17 million euros for the UK e-recruitment solutions provider in July.
What does all this mean for online recruitment in the UK? The price of advertising vacancies online will definitely change - but it could go up or down! It has been argued that posting jobs online will eventually be free (because of sheer competition and the willingness of even big players to give free trials) and that online media owners will make their money from upselling logos, buttons and banners and from the more interesting and interactive options made possible by the increased uptake of broadband. This model would certainly follow the online property advertising model where sites charge as little as 60p per property per week. But does this prediction still stand true? Will the media owners that have benefited from offline classified revenues really be willing to see those revenues eroded in favour of a free online alternative? A possible alternative to this free model is an increase in the price of online advertising where recruiters pay a premium for using job boards with the audiences and marketing support of large multi-channel media owners.
Another possible perspective points to the growth of vertical searching tools, such as the new Google Blog search that allows users to bypass Blogging sites and access the content within Blogs directly, and predicts a difficult future for job boards where job seekers can access any job on any website through giant portals. If this happens and impacts on online recruitment sites as negatively as some predict then the smart money will have been invested in companies that can handle, and not just generate, response.