As any Midwesterner can tell you, it is not always easy to hear a warning siren in the midst of a tornado. As revenues and results from traditional classified advertising continue their steady decline, most recruiters are uninformed about their options and alternatives. Large sales forces, big marketing budgets and facile arguments often make it difficult for us to recognize an emerging trend in the recruiting marketplace.

Vendors are light-years ahead of recruiters in coming to grips with long term trends like audience fragmentation and the proliferation of so called alternative media outlets. Although late to embrace the real horrors of competition on the Internet, executives in the newspaper business and their recruitment advertising agency counterparts have focused on little else over the last half a decade or more. Given a tumultuous and roiling marketplace, how can a recruiting executive focus on effective transition in an environment where most of the available data is in the hands of people who are terrified you will learn what they already know?

A slight of hand
Savvy executives in major media concerns know that their revenues depend on remaining relevant in meeting corporate recruiting requirements. While telling their customers that they are the dominant players who can provide the most and best people, media companies are frantically focused on beefing up their access to jobs in order to appear relevant to candidates. At the same time, behind the scenes, they are shoring up content distribution agreements to bolster their apparent relevance to advertising decision makers. This sleight of hand is accomplished by claiming audience numbers based on their purported extended reach rather than their declining circulation.

Recent violations of trust by print media players have resulted in class action suits being filed against media companies for inflating circulation numbers in order to boost advertising revenues. They falsely claim a larger audience than they actually have. Couple this with falsification of stories and facts by hot-shot journalists hell-bent on reaching the big-time and editors more interested in engaging copy that arrives on deadline than in fact-checking and you gain some insight into the coming fall of big-media as a trusted source of news, opinion, and yes, even opportunity.

Consider the source
The old adage in the newspaper business is “consider the source.” When we consider the source of newspaper generated content these days we see things rather differently than we might have in days past.

Media diversification and audience fragmentation are two sides of the same coin. When you look at audience fragmentation from the perspective of publishers or media owners it looks like erosion of market share. Viewed from the vantage point of an advertiser, audience fragmentation might mean that you need to distribute your message to more venues in order to achieve the reach your previous advertising allocation yielded. In other words, declining circulation results in lower response rates. If you allocate a significant percentage of your recruitment advertising budget to newspaper classifieds you may be getting less for your money than you might care to imagine.

New challenges for recruiters
Audience fragmentation presents new challenges for recruiting leaders in corporate environments. Will their management empower them to choose “new media” outlets to achieve objectives previously attained through traditional media? How do you measure and track ROI in a universe where the numbers of people you reach are infinitesimal by comparison to the numbers who might see your ad in the Sunday classifieds? As the barriers to entry in the job board business keep getting lower how do you determine where you should advertise?

Like his competitors, JobThread’s Founder, Eric Yoon, believes that people will look for work in venues that deliver other forms of trusted content. By delivering a “job-board-in-a-box” software solution JobThread joins the ranks of Jobamatic and JobCoin in providing low-cost, turnkey job-board solutions for publishers.

Job boards from the sublime to the ridiculous
Companies like JobCoin, Jobamatic, and JobThread empower publishers to enter the job-board game at light speed with next to no financial investment. If you own a website and want to add an additional revenue stream by carrying job postings for a fee, these companies will put you in business overnight. This very low barrier to entry coupled with the prospect of a little “easy money” means that there will soon be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “job boards” that will quite literally range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Perhaps the most established of the companies working “the long tail” angle of the recruitment media market is the aptly named beyond.com. With the staggering claim of 15,000 “job-boards” in their distribution network and a recent venture capital investment of roughly $13m, Beyond’s business model might seem confusing.

The value proposition behind Beyond is partly based on understanding the behavior of search engines. Earning a passable rank in search engine results is easier if your domain name includes the keyword or phrase you hope to tout. Good placement in search engine results guarantees at least some traffic. Throw in some priceless gems like CollegeRecruiter.com which gets real traffic on its own merits and apply a web-ring approach to traffic management by bundling strong and weak domains into channels, and you have at least the appearance of a solution.

The art of domain names
As hard as it might be for some to understand how a network of domain names could translate into an effective candidate sourcing platform, the scheme might work. Investors, believing that “the long tail” approach to audience development will pan out, are placing big bets in hopes of reaping large returns. Traditional media companies have already poured more than $100m into the coffers of companies that deliver “job-board-in-a-box” solutions.

Why?

One view is that declining audience in the traditional media means that media players need ancillary distribution chains to convince advertisers that they are still receiving value for their money. CareerBuilder’s distribution strategy may be a case in point.

Another perspective is that at least some media companies are committed to ongoing field research at the cutting edge of community development as evidenced by News Corporation’s investments in SimplyHired and myspace. Further evidence of this perspective can be found in Reed Elsevier’s investment in jobster.

Recruiting trend: meta-aggregation
A more contrarian view is that the overwhelming growth of media outlets will result in so many alternatives that bewildered advertisers will stick with the trusted brands offered by corporate media. Whether or not we agree with any of these views, one thing is clear. A recruiting trend is evolving in the meta-aggregation of employer-owned job-content coupled with the explosive growth of Internet recruitment media outlets.

While companies like Indeed, jobster, and SimplyHired, are aggregating all the visible job content they can into a single data warehouse for present and future distribution (whether they own the content or not) companies like Beyond are simultaneously capitalizing on the fragmentation of the audience by delivering targeted content to smaller and smaller groups.

An unintended consequence of the extraordinary resurgence of job boards is that the credibility of the entire category is placed at risk by the sheer volume of outlets that are popping up like weeds. The obvious technical solution to the dilemma lies in the application of filtering and matching technology.

Recruitment media market redefined
The recruitment media market is being redefined. The era of monolithic institutional solutions offered by big media is drawing to a close at the dawn of the 21st century. Big is not necessarily beautiful anymore and maybe never has been…

The future “state of the art” lies in reaching very small audiences of very qualified people whose experience is directly relevant to the recruiting requirements at hand. This equation will be familiar to our friends in the executive search business and to contract recruiters everywhere.

The numbers game may not be over yet but it is changing. We are in for some interesting times.