Borrell: Online Recruitment Spending Passes Print

Authored by Peter Krasilovsky on December 22, 2006 - 6:36am.

Online recruitment spending has surpassed print recruitment spending for the first time, according to my friends and former colleagues at Borrell Associates Inc. The line was crossed in 4Q 2006 (now) and online now accounts for $5.9 billion, while print accounts for $5.5 billion. Borrell further reports that newspaper Web sites have 18.6 percent of that market, or $1.1 billion.

But the prognosis for newspaper recruitment dollars isn’t especially good – despite the recent pacts with Yahoo and Monster. Borrell projects that metro dailies will lose 20 percent of their annual recruitment revenue from 2006 through 2011, which will translate to a loss of 3.1 share points. Suburban and community newspapers, which are more insulated from national competitors, will gain 25 percent in revenue by 2011, but this will only be enough to maintain their current share of 0.9 percent of the total recruitment advertising market.

Borrell’s assessment is that the newspapers’ problem isn’t so much the portals as the intense fragmentation of the recruitment market, which is steadily moving towards tens of thousands of regional and vertical niche sites, such as nurses.com and computerjobs.com. “It is now far more cost and time effective for recruiters to advertise on a vertically focused hob board than it is to place a classified ad in 20 or 30 newspapers,” says Borrell.

Still, the potential for growth is huge. Unlike autos and real estate, where the majority of purchases are already directly impacted by Internet search, Borrell cites CareerXroads data showing that only 13 percent of U.S. adults currently use the Internet in a job search – although the Internet accounts for 25 percent of external hires.

Peter Krasilovsky

Note: This post originally appeared on Peter's blog, Local Onliner. His bio can be viewed here. Additional comments on this post can be viewed here.