NOT so long ago recruitment advertising amounted to a bog-standard,
copy-dense, black and white job ad placed in the main-stream or trade press.
In the past five years it has undergone a revolution, driven largely by the
development of the internet.
The heads of recruitment-advertising agencies say the growth of internet
advertising has prompted a breathtaking rate of change in services offered
and creativity in a sector traditionally considered less glamor-ous than
product advertising.
“The landscape — in terms of media choice, who we compete with and what
clients want — has changed more over the past five years than in the
previous fifty,” said Robert Peasnell, chief executive of Barkers, one of
the biggest names in the business.
Andrew Wilkinson, chief executive of TMP Worldwide, another
recruitment-advertising giant, agreed. “I’ve been in the business for 26
years, since the days when there was a six-week wait just to get an ad in a
paper because of demand and a lack of flexibility about pagination,” he
said. “The sector has never changed as fast as it is changing now. It’s
phenomenal.”
Indeed, the shift of advertising away from traditional media and on to the net
reached a milestone last month when the Internet Advertising Bureau and
Price Waterhouse Coopers revealed that spending on internet advertising had
for the first time overtaken spending on national newspaper advertising.
Internet spending jumped 41.2% to £2.01 billion during 2006 compared with
0.2% growth — to £1.9 billion — in spending on national newspaper ads. And
recruitment is the fastest growing area in internet advertising.
Nobody knows how far the revolution will go. The challenges it presents to
newspapers are obvious, but it has also forced recruitment-advertising
companies to change and adapt in a search for new revenue streams. This has
meant a broadening of the services they offer.
“Companies used to specialise in buying press space and perhaps helping
clients draw up their ads,” said Peasnell. “Now we do more work around
employer branding and reputation. We are key in helping clients stand out
from the pack.”
So much has changed that on its website, Barkers explains that it prefers not
to talk about “advertising” in the context of recruitment these days because
it conjures up too many images of something that was “traditionally
unscientific and reactive”.
“Attraction”, the website argues, means something much broader now and
includes constantly changing online marketing opportunities, outdoor
campaigns to build brand and digital-television commercials aimed at
minority communities. Barkers, like many of the leading companies, now
offers services from strategy and research, through to the management of ad
responses and internal communications.
TMP’s Wilkinson said that while recruitment advertising companies still do a
large amount of traditional press advertising, along with online advertising
and the new services, they also have to meet customer demand for proof that
what they do works and is value for money.
And clients pay him to be ahead of the many innovations in the marketplace,
such as Second Life, a virtual world that was set up on the internet in 2003.
Andy Bamford, mangaging director of the boutique firm Thirty Three West, said
that the array of services now offered in recruitment advertising could
confuse clients.
“You have to be clear about what you want,” he said. “If you want to put text
in a box at the cheapest possible price then you probably wouldn’t go to a
boutique agency but to one of the biggest three or four companies. You have
to look at what the smaller companies specialise in. It might be employer
branding or online or something else.
“We realised early on we should invest in online. In 2005, 64% of our revenue
came from press advertising and 9% from online. In 2006, 53% of our revenue
was from press and 17% online. Only a handful of agencies do online really
well. We are combining effective press advertising with effective online.
The press ad directs people online. They are complementary.”
Nigel Monaghan, director of client development at the Bernard Hodes
recruitment and talent management consultancy, agreed that the recruitment
marketplace was now very complex. “It’s very diverse and offers a lot of
different services in different ways,” he said. “Navigating it can be
daunting to organisations, whether they are big or small.”
Bernard Hodes always offered services beyond ad placement, according to
Monaghan. Its focus on research, strategic issues such as employer branding
and its global reach always set it apart. The company believes that clients
ought to understand, through continual research, the labour-market dynamics
within employee groups. Exit interviews are a good way of gathering this
kind of information, it said, though companies rarely do this.
“Technology continues to have a huge impact on this area of business,” said
Monaghan. “If anything, there seems to have been an acceleration in the pace
of change in the past 12 months. However, the globalisation of the
recruitment market and the pressures on human-resources departments to
demonstrate their worth have also driven the change.”
While the changes forced by the internet revolution have caused a great deal
of stress for the industry’s executives, creative staff have been delighted
by the new freedoms it has brought.
“The recruitment ad used to be clogged up with copy,” said Jamie Haskayne,
creative director with Aia. “All the details about the job had to be crammed
into a small space. That stymied creativity. Now the expectation is that
there will be another step and that people will move on toa website to find
out the details of the job or to apply online.”
It’s easy to see how the traditional recruitment-advertising company has moved
in on employer branding — and a range of other areas, such as website design.
“You don’t want a wonderful ad that takes you to a terrible website or into a
rubbish online application process,” said Haskayne. “We do more for some
clients than others but it’s an end-to-end service now. We can support a
client all the way from the ad to the new recruit sitting down at his desk
on the first day.”
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