Recruitology has scored a big win in the race to partner with newspaper publishers. Announced last week, Chicago-based Tribune Publishing, owner of the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times, and the San Diego Union Tribune, will have its employment sections powered by Recruitology.
“Our goal is to help media partners leverage their local brand while also being able to offer employers access to top national brands,” said Roberto Angulo, CEO at Recruitology. “We’re excited about this partnership. The end result is a one-stop solution for employers who gain access to relevant and interested job seekers both locally and nationally.”
The deal is similar to most. Sales folks at the various newspapers will offer employers job postings throughout the network. Additionally, they’ll sell programmatic advertising campaigns to distribute jobs on local newspaper sites, as well as national ones, automatically managing the bid price on the sites to which these jobs posted.
“As the trusted source of local news in each of its markets, Tribune continuously aims to innovate in order to bring the best solutions to its audience and advertisers,” said Gladys Arroyo, vice president of classifieds at Tribune Publishing. “We look forward to collaborating with Recruitology to offer employers a turnkey recruitment solution.”
For those keeping score at home, Recruitology has been successfully partnering with the the country’s most influential newspaper publishers. Readers may remember last year that it bumped CareerBuilder from its relationship with McClatchy. Then it partnered with the Local Media Consortium earlier this year and threw in Vegas for good measure.
Tribune Publishing, who used to be known as tronc for a short time, however, is arguably its biggest win to date. The company operates newspapers in 10 markets, owning titles including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, The Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, Virginia’s Daily Press, and The Virginian-Pilot, The Morning Call of Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and the Hartford Courant. It recently sold the LA Times and Union Tribune, but Recruitology will power those as well.
A look into the country’s largest newspapers reveals a pretty fragmented space, so there’s still room for Recruitology and its competition to gobble up real estate, but it seems to be in the pole position right now. PandoLogic is powering Gannett. The Tribune deal gives Recruitology two of the 11 biggest newspapers, although both of them together don’t add up to Gannett’s USA Today.
Angulo, however, was quick to downplay the traffic issue last year after partnering with McClatchy. “We’re not so much looking for traffic,” he said. “Yes, the job boards we’re powering for McClatchy will benefit from McClatchy’s vast audience across the U.S., but our goal is to help McClatchy leverage their existing traffic while also providing access to the traffic from job boards on our network in order to give their employers great results.”
Ultimately, I think partnering with newspapers is a strong move. It’s easy to dismiss them, since print isn’t exactly a growing business. However, in a world of “fake news,” traditional papers are in a good position to be embraced by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which have been under a lot of pressure to take out the garbage.
Newspaper content being treated favorably in the algorithms means more traffic. I’ll add that as Google for Jobs continues to own search results, job sites are going to need new ways to drive search traffic, and having your jobs amongst the content around newspapers seems like a pretty good idea.
