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

Slow down, you move too fast

I don't know if it's my age or the fact that I've recently moved from being an employer to an employee, but I increasingly find myself thinking that people should just calm down a bit and not take things so seriously (another option of course is that I think this because I'm wrong, and out of step with modern life etc).

On holiday last week I saw loads of blokes obsessed by their blackberrys, they had them at breakfast, on the beach, at lunch, in the bar etc. It all seemed very unnecessary, they can't all have been running Marks and Spencer or be BBC governors etc. Just put the blackberry down.

Yesterday on the train I listened in on a discussion between four people about whether they should use 'and' or '&' in their 50 slide powerpoint presentation; it got quite heated. I wanted to lean over and intervene, it didn't matter, the people they were presenting to probably wouldn't listen anyway.

I felt much the same yesterday when Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, referred to the behaviour of Ross and Brand as 'utterly unacceptable'. War, famine, genocide etc are 'utterly unacceptable', a radio prank that went wrong is unfortunate, ill-judged and a bit of a mistake. Does Mark Thompson realise it's possible to use a noun (unacceptable) without having to attach an inflammatory adjective (utterly) to it. Things can just be unacceptable or wrong, not everything has to be utterly unacceptable or totally wrong. Just calm down.

Websites getting smaller; TVs thinner

New research from IDC shows that Netbooks now account for 10% of PC sales in Europe. This is significant as Netbooks, such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, typically have a screen size of between 7 and 9 inches, about half the size of conventional laptop or desktop screens for which most websites are designed for. I know the whole internet looks dreadful on my pocketsurfer and that site designers are taking into account mobile devices when developing new sites, but I think that Netbook screens might be an even more significant development and that all sites will have be designed with these in mind.

On another note, if the credit crunch has left you with any money then this might be worth saving for - a TV that's 1cm wide - should be in the UK next year from about £3,500.

Following the figures

I've had my first cold* of the winter this week. Rotten.

I've also been following a range of macro economic indicators, this has never been so much fun. Here's the stuff that's been in the news this week that I've tried to keep up with in order to work out what's going on - FTSE (mostly down), oil prices (down), inflation (up), unemployment (up), IAB ad spend (up), Monster employment index (down), the Born job advertisement index (downish) and Jobsite weekly registrations (up).

The tabloids reaction to the current state of gloom has been funny to watch, trying to cheer Britain up etc. With the FTSE going down, the Sun were pleased to report the 'good news' that 'cup size' was going up (warning - don't click on this link if you don't like tabloid journalism or if you believe that user interaction is always a good thing, as some of the 'views' against this story prove otherwise and might shatter your illusions that web 2.0 is always a beautiful thing).

* in the interests of science I'm going to use this blog to track how many colds I get over the winter period. The current count is one. They'll be a prize for the best cold cure suggestion over the winter.

IAB advertising spend figures - more detail

Here are the IAB spend figures for H1 2008 broken down in a little more detail - you can also get more information at the IAB site (an excellent resource for all sorts of stuff).

Total spend = £1,683 million (an increase of £348 million year on year)

Paid for search = £981 million

Banners / embedded ads = £278 million

Recruitment classifieds = £195 million

Other classifieds = £167 million

Other stuff (sponsorships, email ads, interruptive etc) = £62 million

This is good growth year on year, interestingly though the whole online advertising market was worth £853 million in Q1 2008 and fell to £829 million in Q2 2008 - this is the first quarterly fall in online advertising spend since 2002 (the market fell a little Q by Q in 2001 when they started the measurement, but not much) - if this trend continued at the same rate then the total online ad spend for H2 2008 would be approximately £1,500 million. The IAB themselves are predicting a total for 2008 of £3,200 - £3,300 million, so are anticipating a slight downturn / leveling off for H2 this year - not surprising given the current economic madness!

Out of interest the IAB were only able to categorise 37% of the total spend by sector, meaning that my presumptions in this previous post were right.

Online recruitment worth £195 million in H1 2008

I've just got my hands on the IAB / PwC online ad spend study for the first half of 2008 (you can imagine my excitement) - the headline from a recruitment perspective is that online recruitment classifieds (jobs placed by employers on job boards) were worth £195 million (compared to £142 million in H1 2007).

This is a reasonable increase, means that we might not quite make the £400 million that we'd hoped for the whole of 2008, but a solid start. I'll pull out some more interesting stuff later.

IAB figures on Brand Republic

Brand Republic are running the IAB figures the day before they're actually out officially - very exciting.

Thing is, I don't think they've got it quite right (unless the IAB / PwC have changed things). They say the recruitment sector makes up 33% of the £1.7 billion spent on online advertising in H1 2008 and consequently is worth £554 million.

However, as I understand it, the IAB say that only a minority of the ad spend is categorised by sector (of the spender) and therefore you can't apply the sector percentage share to the overall spend figure as the result may not be accurate.

The figure we're really interested in is the 'classified recruitment online spend' total that was £287 million for the whole of 2007 - this is the amount that employers actually spend advertising jobs online - the figure that Brand Republic are talking about (I think) includes the budget spent by Total Jobs etc promoting themselves online via search, display etc.

This is obviously all subject to the fact that the IAB aren't able to categorise all online spend by sector of the advertiser - if they have changed their methodology from previous years and now do this then Brand Republic are right and I'm wrong - we'll have to wait until we get our hands on the full results presentation tomorrow!

IAB figures out on Wednesday

It should be an interesting week, the IAB / PwC online advertising spend figures for the first half of 2008 are out on Wednesday - as IAB members we should get the full results by the end of play Wednesday / start of Thursday, so I'll be sure to post the details as soon as I can.

Online recruitment advertising spend was worth £142 million in the first half of 2007 (£287 million for the whole of 2007 - more details on the Enhance Media blog). We predicted that online recruitment ad spend would be about £400 million for the whole of 2008 and as the economic outlook is fairly bleak for H2 2008 then I'd hope that online recruitment ad spend for H1 2008 should be £200 million plus; anything below that and we're unlikely to get to a figure of £400 million for the year, anything less than £150 million and we could be in real trouble!

It's difficult to judge the extent to which the recent economic crisis will have impacted on the figures, it seems like it's only had a marked effect over the last couple of months, so Q1 2008 should still be good with Q2 probably dropping off a little. We'll find out on Wednesday!

Disruption

I was ferreting around last night and visited Simon Waldman's blog, which I hadn't done for a long time. As well as having a new URL, Simon's blog introduced me to a new topic - Disruption - that I got quite excited about, like the first time I encountered phrases like the long tail, wikis etc.

Simon defines disruption very neatly here - to paraphrase, digital disruption is threat posed by the internet to existing business models and the actions they take to deal with this - there's also a much better definition (and some nice flash) than mine at Beyond Disruption. Simon's blog also looks a the way Microsoft is being disrupted by stuff like Google docs, from his blog it looks like the Guardian has started using Google apps instead of Microsoft office, something that I heard the Telegraph were also doing (correct me if I'm wrong on both counts)?

I'm not quite sure what this all means, but it took me to some interesting articles - here and here - it certainly applies to recruitment and recruitment advertising, have incumbent suppliers of recruitment solutions (recruitment advertising agencies, recruitment consultancies and print media) ever faced such disruption to their business models as the threat posed by the increasing use of the internet in the recruitment industry?

Max Beesley - the right face for online recruitment? I don't think so.

I don't want to come down too hard on the guys from Jobsite, their new homepage looks great and I'm sure they know what they're doing, but is Max Beesley really the right person to front their new ad campaign?

Their own press information goes on about targeting ABC1 working professionals, but for me Max Beesley (star of the truly dreadful Hotel Babylon) is far more C2DE than ABC1 (see Wikipedia for more details on these demographic definitions). The characters he plays always seem to be on the verge of some kind of petty con / benefits scam, not the sort of activity that ABC1 professionals want to emulate.

I think changing jobs is an aspirational activity, people change jobs in order to move on to better things* and as such surely consumer ads should use people that play on this aspirational / self improvement theme, rather than someone associated with being on the fiddle etc?

Maybe I'm being too harsh? Certainly the ads produced when I was at Workthing from 2000 - 2001 were far from perfect and it's a very difficult message to crack, but something about Max Beesley just feels wrong. If Jobsite wants to target ABC1 professionals then they should have chosen a more suitable actor, what they might find is that their new message drives their brand down in terms of demographics and they end up more C2DE than ABC1. This is obviously fine if that's what they're trying to achieve, but I don't think it is and a more C2DE audience delivered to advertisers seeking an ABC1 response won't go down well.

* - this is obviously less true in today's economic climate, where getting a new job could well also be about necessity, not aspiration.

PS - if you actually like Max Beesley then here's the link to the official Max Beesley site! Is his full name really Maxton?

That joke isn't funny anymore

Things were getting a bit gloomy yesterday, what with all this talk of glue kids and FTSE collapses, so I thought I'd lighten the mood. Here's one of those Microsoft ads that, according to Web User magazine and lots of other people, no one likes. Judge for yourself.