Online Recruitment - the bigger picture (Tim's blog)

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Never say never (and all that sort of stuff) but I think this is my last post on this blog. I used to write 'Online Recruitment - the bigger picture' because I worked in online recruitment and had a passion for online stuff outside of the recruitment space. While I'm still very interested in all things online, I no longer work in online recruitment, so writing an online recruitment blog seems wrong - I don't really have the inclination and certainly no longer have the insight to make it interesting.

However, rather than delete the whole blog, I'm going to pay the annual sub to keep it live (for now anyway), you never know, I might change my mind or re-emerge in a new online recruitment role at some stage in the future. If not then this blog will serve as an archive of my online recruitment experiences from 2006 - 2009 (pretty niche I know, but I guess there's a place for everything online). I have though changed the comments from 'open' to 'moderated' - meaning that I don't have to check for spam every night, so don't be offended if you make a comment and it takes a couple of weeks to go live!

I've enjoyed writing the blog and hope you've enjoyed reading it. In its two and a half years I've made 215 posts, received 180 comments and totalled 23,000 page views - meaning on average each post was viewed about 100 times (you can take the boy out of research...). Highlights for me included BeesleyGate, early views on Twitter, Fulham's great escape, tracking IAB spend figures and theories on how people use mobile devices.

So I hope you find this archive useful, even if it's just for checking old IAB / NORAS figures, I won't be blogging for a while, but you can follow me on Twitter (although my activity might be slightly sporadic) if you want proof that I'm still alive / are vaguely interested in what I'm up to.

Just for the record ('important' research results)

I sneezed the other day. This reminded me of a 'promise' I made at the start of the winter colds season last Autumn - to use this blog to record the number of colds I had over the winter in the interests of science and research. I figure the colds season must nearly be over, so the results show that I had four colds in this period (I wonder what the average is?) in October, November, January and February. The best cold cure suggestion came from Matt Bush who suggested an immediate 10K run at the first hint of a sniff. I haven't done a run yet, but I have bought some running shoes and for now that seems to be doing the job! Running shoes as a deterrent if you like.

I'm also thinking of taking an extended blogging holiday, so if you don't hear from me, that's where I am!

UK online recruitment advertising worth £325 million in 2008

The IAB 2008 internet advertising spend figures were out the other day and show that online recruitment advertising was worth £325 million in 2008, a 13% year on year increase from £287 million in 2007. The figures also show that the credit crunch had started to bite by the second half of the year with online recruitment advertising worth £181 million in H1 2008* and falling to £143 million in H2 2008 - placing the overall figure below the £400 million originally predicted for 2008.

Interestingly all online advertising (not just recruitment but other classifieds, banners, paid for search etc) was worth £3.35 billion in 2008, a like for like increase of 17.1% year on year and slightly above the IAB's prediction of £3.2 - £3.3 billion given at the half way stage of 2008.

Other figures show that the overall advertising market (including TV, press etc) was down 3.5% year on year with press classified recording the biggest year on year loss of 17.3%. The IAB also averaged predictions for 2009 advertising figures from Carat/Aegis, Group M and Enders and concluded that all advertising revenues will fall by 10% in 2009 and that online advertising revenues will be roughly flat year on year.

*this appears to have been adjusted from the previous figure of £195 million given for H1 2008?

Twitter is sooooooo last year

The first gathering of recruitment twitterers in the UK (which unfortunately I can't make) might be over-subscribed, but elsewhere in the digital landscape commentators are already dismissing Twitter as last year's trend and looking for the next big thing.

The latest take on this was in an excellent article that I read in Revolution magazine. The piece focused on the transitory nature of early adopting social networking audiences and said that they tended to move on from one trend to the next as soon as the original trend becomes mainstream. Social networking sites are like cool underground bands, as soon as they become popular they are, by definition, no longer cool. Although this explains the demise of Friends Reunited and changing attitudes to Facebook (hilariously described in a Guardian article last week as the "Reuters of inanity") I don't wholly agree with this over-simplified view - there must come a time when the utility of a site makes it indispensable? Maybe Twitter is heading that way, weaving its way into the very fabric of the internet?

Anyway, the article went on to list a handful of social networking sites that could be next year's Twitter, or last year's Facebook, if you know what I mean - Seesmic the video blogging site, Spotify the music streaming site that's already attracting a lot of attention, Gypsii that aims to capitalise on the increased use of mobile internet devices, FDCareer that looks like a place where you can track your personal development plan in order to keep recruiters updated on your development, Yammer that aims to harness the power of social networking for corporate productivity and Power that acts as an aggregator for all your social networking activities.

Check the sites out and see what you think, you never know, one of them might be the next big thing and you could be part of the wave of early adopters that establishes them in the mainstream.

Disclaimer - I've only been using Twitter since the start of this year, so it's obviously outrageous for me to claim that it's last year's trend, I'm still learning how to use it properly, I just thought the article was cool, made some thought provoking points and wanted to share it!

Good luck to Enhance Media

As documented elsewhere, Alastair and I have left Enhance Media, the company we started in 2001. I have to say it felt strange at first, things happening and stuff going on at Enhance Media without me being there, but then I suppose that was always going to happen at some stage, either we were going to sell the company and leave or retire at 65 having worked there for over 30 years, so I'm gradually getting used to it - all things come to an end eventually!

In the short term I'd like to wish Enhance Media best of luck at tomorrow night's Onrec awards, they're up for the education award again, having won it in 2006 and 2007 and been cruelly deprived of it by Broadbean's efforts last year. Be great if they could win it again.

In the long term, this blog might change slightly and could be less 'online recruitment' and more 'bigger picture', depending on which route I take next. It might also be less frequently updated as I do all those things that I should have been doing since 2001 and haven't had time to - I just wanted to structure your expectations!

ITV's dilemma - how long can they hold onto a rising balloon?

ITV faces a dilemma over its continued ownership of Friends Reunited, very similar to the dilemma so ably articulated by Danny in Withnail and I - 'how long you can you hold onto a rising balloon?' ITV's main problem is that their rising balloon cost £175 million and the price of letting go could be as much as £150 million.

ITV bought Friends Reunited in 2005 (then an exciting and fresh brand) for £175 million. The broadcaster announced results last week showing a loss of £2.73 billion for 2008 (including a £2.7 billion write down of online assets) and analysts now speculate that they would accept £20 - £50 million for Friends Reunited.

The Guardian reports that Friends Reunited's revenues fell year on year to £18 million, mainly due to the scrapping of their paid for subscription model and now account for half of the online division's total revenue of £36 million. Interestingly ITV's full results report says that "Whilst online advertising revenues continued to increase over 2008, supply of online advertising inventory - in particular "white space" banner advertising - has grown very rapidly, putting downward pressure on prices" This sounds flimsy at best to me, especially taking into account that ITV's X-Factor website offered advertisers 70 million ad impressions in 2008, compared to 1 million in 2007 (as reported by ITV at the IAB's 2008 conference) - surely a 70 fold increase in available inventory more than compensates for the downward pressure on prices? ITV's report goes on to say that online revenues were limited because of the blocking of the Kangaroo project and that overall, online losses grew to £20 million for 2008.

In terms of metrics, itv.com averaged 6.5 million monthly Unique Users in 2008 and reached a peak of 9.4 million users in November. ITV.com also delivered 86 million online video views over the year, though this is still dwarfed by YouTube's metrics of 72 million users worldwide watching 4 billion videos each month.

I think the central problem with Friends Reunited is that it's so obviously stood still in terms of functionality and relevance and been overtaken (from a standing start) by more relevant sites like Facebook, MySpace and bebo that were able to develop quickly without the legacy of a paid for subscription model - as Dom says, do you know anyone that's visited Friends Reunited recently, probably not, while most people are all over Facebook most of the time.

ITV bought at exactly the wrong time, at the top of the market and before the advent of web 2.0 social networking sites. But I don't think they should compound this error by selling at exactly the wrong time too.

Funnily enough, Friends Reunited is now run by Andy Baker (my old boss from Workthing and more recently MD of Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment) and my advice to Andy, in as much as he can influence these decisions, would be to keep holding onto the rising balloon - there's no point selling at the bottom of the market. There's also still a chance that new functionality or revenue streams can be generated that could transform Friends Reunited back into a relevant brand in the web 2.0 space. The biggest issue here though is whether ITV have got the stomach stay in this space in the light of such big losses and regrettably, for Friends Reunited, the answer is probably not.

NORAS application levels - follow up post

As promised the other day I've had a dig around the NORAS data and looked at why the results show that less people have applied for a job they found online in 2009 than in 2008.

For NORAS 2008 we asked a series of three questions about applying for a job online - 'have you ever applied for a job', 'if you have applied did you get an interview' and 'if you got an interview did you actually get the job' with respondents answered 'yes' or 'no' to each question. This showed in 2008 that 76% of online job seekers had applied for a job found online.

For NORAS 2009 (in order to accommodate other additional questions) we combined these three separate questions into a single question and asked 'which of the following have you ever done (tick all that apply) - 'applied for a job', 'obtained an interview', 'obtained a job' or 'none of the above'. This showed that in 2009 68% of online job seekers had applied for a job found online.

19 job boards participated in both NORAS 2008 and 2009, so the best way to track any changes in the results between the two years is to just look at these sites. Some interesting results; only two of the 19 sites showed a year on year increase in the percentage of their users who said they had ever applied for a job online, while the other 17 showed a year on year decrease - 10 sites decreased year by less than 10% and 7 decreased year on year by more than 10% (with two sites showing a decrease of 17% year on year). This seems fairly significant.

We've talked it through in the office and have two possible explanations:

1) Changing the way we asked the question has affected the result, this is certainly possible, but it's a reasonably straight forward change.

2) The economic downturn has introduced job seekers to the online market (through redundancy etc) that have never had to apply for a job online before - the fieldwork for NORAS 2009 took place from September - December in 2008, so the effects of the downturn were certainly being keenly felt right through the data collection - maybe this is evidence of how the recession is impacting on job boards? It's a certainly a candidate rich market and maybe a lot of these candidates are relatively inexperienced online job seekers?

NORAS 2009 highlights

The results of NORAS 2009 are just out, this year's results feature more job boards than ever before (31) and use data gathered from more job seekers than ever before (52,667) - this is the last NORAS that I'll be involved in from an Enhance Media perspective, so on a personal level it's pleasing to pass on the NORAS baton in such a healthy state.

The results themselves throw up some interesting findings; firstly the percentage of online job seekers that say they only use the internet to look for jobs has increased to 14% up from 9% in 2008 and 6% in 2007 - this might not seem huge, but I think is significant - two years ago one in twenty job board users said they only used the internet and now that figure is nearer one in seven.

The results also show that one in ten online job seekers have actually used a smart phone or blackberry to look for a job. We changed the question about the use of technology this year, last year we asked 'do you have access to the following technology - desktops, laptops, blackberrys etc' and people quite rightly said - having access to these items is one thing, but do people actually use them to look for jobs? So this year we can definitely say that job seekers are using mobile devices to look for jobs (and not just to download ring tones etc) and whether or not 2009 will be the year for mobile marketing (either recruitment or consumer based), this is our little contribution to the debate.

Another question that we changed year on year was the question relating to whether or not people have applied for jobs, obtained interviews or obtained jobs as a result of an online application and as Julian points out, the figures have slightly decreased year on year - I'll have a more detailed look at this and compare a pool of job boards that participated in both 2008 and 2009 and try to get back with the results of this in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, you can download the NORAS results and use the interactive tool for free by registering at the NORAS website.

As a footnote (and also in the interests of research), I'm now deep into my fourth winter cold.

The rise and rise of netbooks

Netbook sales continue to defy the economic downturn as reported in PCPRO and the Guardian, with predicted global sales of 30 million units in 2009.

Why is this interesting? Well, when we talked about mobile internet use in the past, I always imagined that phones would get bigger and cleverer, but actually PCs are getting smaller and cleverer and that (along with mobile broadband via dongles) is what's driving internet use on the move. I wonder when the boundary between smartphone and netbook will blur, who will produce the killer netbook/smartphone hybrid? As the Guardian observes, it's interesting to note the Apple aren't in the netbook market. Yet.

Daily Mash keeps you sane

There's not much to laugh about these days. Not if you watch the news and read the papers. Unless of course, like me, you've discovered the Daily Mash, if you haven't here's how they've reported the news over the last couple of months (a kind of best of Mash if you like):

The UK banking crisis

BBC reporter Robert Peston

UK energy prices

BBC's stance over the Gaza appeal

Parents on snow day

Met Office advice on winter weather

Chelsea sack Scolari

England's tour of the West Indies

Happy reading.