Advertisement

The $58 Billion Candidate

Apr 22, 2008
This article is part of a series called News & Trends.

If you knew that nearly half the job seekers who have Internet access are not using online media to look for a job, would that make you spend more or less in the next few years?

When January 1 rolled around, and the first baby boomers became eligible to collect Social Security, it seems that an alarm bell went off to figure out, once and for all, the employment sector over the next five years.

That must be why, according to a study by Research and Markets, entitled Snapshots U.S. Advertising 2008, recruiters will spend $58 billion this year on recruitment advertising across all media, local and national.

While $58 billion can buy a lot of ad space, can it buy quality candidates? Or is it simply being funneled out without much thought behind the workforce that is replacing the boomers? The study points out that nearly half the job seekers who have Internet access are not using online media to look for a job. This is despite the fact that recruiters are currently spending nearly 60% of their budgets on online media.

How about that wake-up call to make you re-think your recruiting strategy? A colossal budget to find talent, yet many still haven’t realized that it probably wouldn’t be that hard to integrate Gen X and Gen Y if companies started realizing these are distinctly different generations, with vastly different wants and desires.

Even more interesting is that it is expected that over the next four years, recruitment spending will increase 25% to a whopping $73 billion in 2012. The beneficiaries will be online media and full-service employment agencies. Online spending will increase 23.5% to a record high of over $11 billion, according to the Research and Markets report.

The study points out that the main losers of recruitment revenue will be large-circulation newspapers, which will see their job related revenues decline by 12% over the next four years.

Video is also expected to get hotter, however, with total ad spending for online video at $522 million in 2007. It’s expected to reach $10 billion by 2012. The study finds that early spending on video ads is going to job- and employer-related video.

This article is part of a series called News & Trends.