FOR many people it would be the perfect job: selling beer to pubs and clubs around the country. But even Inbev — owner of Becks and Stella — was surprised when it received 15 applications within 25 minutes of posting a vacancy on Totaljobs.com.

The world of recruitment is changing. It is no longer necessary to spend hours searching through classified ads. Instead, you can log on to your computer and be instantly alerted when your ideal job is advertised. And job seekers are no longer restricted to searching by type of job: proximity searching allows you to find the jobs closest to home.

Internet recruitment is big business and Totaljobs.com — which is owned by Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch publisher — is fighting for the No1 spot with the likes of American-owned Monster and Jobsite, which is backed by the Daily Mail and General Trust.

Shobhan Gajjar, chief operating officer at Totaljobs, believes the internet has revolutionised the way people look for jobs. “A wider range of jobs is advertised and it is easier for people to search and apply,” he said.

Totaljobs carries advertisements for 100,000 jobs at any one time. The site — which charges anywhere between £10 and £200 per ad — is one of the most popular websites in Britain.

After years of investment and losses of several million, Totaljobs is now profitable — and increasingly thought of as a hidden jewel within Reed Elsevier.

While income at the media group’s traditional business magazines has been hit by the growth of the internet, revenues at Totaljobs rose 40% in 2005.

Gajjar is confident that the growth of Totaljobs will eventually more than compensate for falling advertising revenues in the group’s traditional business.

But it is becoming a crowded market. Totaljobs faces competition not just from well-financed rivals such as Monster and Jobsite but from a constant stream of start-ups. “There are 850 job sites in the UK and by the time we finish this interview there will be 855,” joked Gajjar. “The thing that matters is the critical mass. If you don’t have the depth of jobs, you are on a hiding to nothing. I was reading the other day about a jobs board for chefs on yachts — how can that survive?”

Totaljobs has nevertheless launched specialist sites — some of them connected to Reed Elsevier’s magazines, such as Caterer and Computer Weekly. The link with the Reed magazines means that Totaljobs is able to spend much less than many of its rivals on advertising. All the sites exploit the same software but cater for different markets and offer different jobs.

Gajjar is also looking to make a number of small acquisitions to further increase the group’s reach. “We are looking at regional sites as well as a number of specialist areas,” he said.

Job ads generate more than £1 billion of revenue a year for regional newspapers, according to Gajjar.

Totaljobs is also growing organically, moving overseas and investing heavily in a number of markets, including graduate recruitment.

Gajjar believes that in time recruitment in more and more sectors will be almost exclusively online. IT, not surprisingly, was first. Hospitality, engineering and retail will follow, he believes.

For now he is focusing on maintaining the business’s phenomenal growth rate. “Every month we sit down for a management meeting. It is getting boring because every month is a record month,” he said.

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