industry and demographics

This page considers online recruitment industry statistics, the shape of the industry and major studies.

It covers -

• who is searching and advertising?
• the industry

    who is searching, advertising and deciding?

There is considerable uncertainty about use of online job search (and its effectiveness) in Australia, the US and other locations.

That uncertainty is exacerbated by confusion over terms such as "internet recruitment". It is reflected in uncritical acceptance of assertions such as "employers and recruiters use the Internet to make 48% of all their hires" - we suspect that a somewhat greater percentage also use telephone and paper in hiring.

A small-scale Pew Internet & American Life Project study in the US claimed that 61% of internet users in the 18 and 29 age cohort have looked for jobs online, compared to 42% of those in the 30-49 and 27% of those in the 50-64 age cohort, with 50% of online US men having sought job information compared to 44% of online women. Supposedly 10% of online unemployed conduct an online job search on a typical day. 44% of whites have sought jobs online versus 60% of online African-Americans and online Hispanics.

On a typical day online the most active job searchers were online office workers (consistent with other research suggesting that 50% of clerical staff spend between one and five hours per week surfing on company time); Pew unsurprisingly found few skilled laborers and service workers hunting online. It did not provide detailed figures for satisfaction rates.

A 2004 US commercial study suggested that 60% of candidates preferred securing a new job through personal referrals; with 50% using recruitment agencies and 55% through online job boards.

A 1998 US survey of businesses had earlier found that about 37% of participants use online recruiting of employees, including 71% of selected US technology companies, 42% of those in the financial services industry, 39% in healthcare, 45% in insurance and 59% in telecommunications.

Nielsen//NetRatings reported in 2004 that

the overall unique audience for career development increased 30% from last year to reach 27.2 million. Monster remains the leading career development Web site in terms of unique audience, with about 9.6 million visitors, followed by CareerBuilder at 9.3 million and Yahoo! HotJobs at 7.1 million.

Monster boasted of over 50 million job seeker members worldwide, a database with 41 million resumes and over 150,000 member companies.

     the industry

Figures for the size of the online recruitment industry, its profitability and its effectiveness are contentious.

IDC forecasts the world market will be worth US$13 billion by 2005; Forrester's prediction in 2000 was a more modest US$7.1 billion for "online recruitment networks", with a forecast in 2004 that the US job-search market would double to US$1.9 billion by 2008.

As noted above, revenue and expenditure is attributable to subscription and success fees paid by applicants, position advertising and success fees paid by employeers, advertising paid by other entities, web design and hosting charges, psychological evaluation service fees, credit reference service and credential verification fees, work by resume-writing and resume-posting services and costs associated with marketing job search services in online/offline venues.

Much of that marketing takes place in print publications, with online marketing expenditure supposedly concentrated in a narrow range of locations (in particular paid placement on search engines and in news sites).

As of late 2004 online recruitment services at the global and national levels essentially have the following characteristics -

• a handful of major sites that attract the most traffic (and most CVs), have a multi-sector coverage and operate on thin margins
• a large number of small multi-sector sites facing difficulty competing with the industry majors
• a smaller number of specialists that cover a specific region, industry or area of expertise, generally with higher margins

That landscape is similar to the online matchmaking industry profiled elsewhere on this site.

We have identified several thousand sites in what was not a comprehensive trawl of the web. Commercial metrics studies suggest that the industry majors are typically in the top ten or top twenty destinations of surfers measured by those companies. Success rates appear to vary considerably, with 'niche' operators (some of which are owned by the multi-sector majors) probably having higher success rates and profitability on a smaller population.

Ownership varies, with key players being

• offline recruitment specialists that have expanded online through acquisition or development of an independent online presence
• major newspapers, with example several multi-publisher consortia in the US and EU (eg Tribune and Knight-Ridder's Careerbuilder, which acquired Careerpath.com established by the New York Times, Washington Post, Hearst and Gannett)
• some industry/professional organisations, that are balancing revenue generation with a service to their members
• portal operators such as Yahoo!
• 'born online' internet recruitment specialists

The web has not meant the death of print, with for example reports from the UK that in 2003 the "recruitment industry" spent around 95% of its £1.5 billion advertising budget on traditional print and broadcast media.

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