R21 media’s Richard Collins talks about the good and the bad of online and the rise of performance based recruitment advertising. Richard has spent 13 years in the online advertising world. CEO of specialist online recruitment media agency, R21, Richard previously held the position of managing director of Jobsite and ran his own digital media agency before selling it to global marketing giant WPP. Go to IT Jobs for more information.

I first started in the online recruitment world in 1995. Having been working as a recruitment consultant at the time, it was obvious that the internet was going to change the way that people looked for jobs forever. Thirteen years later, this has proved to be the case with over 80 per cent of job seekers now using the web to find their next job. It has become the first port of call for over 50 per cent of job seekers and 10 per cent of people use it exclusively – a figure that continues to rise.

In fact you would be hard pushed to find an employer who didn’t want an employee to be IT and internet savvy, yet, despite these facts some employers still insist on advertising in the offline press, and continue to employ outdated online recruitment strategies.

Many companies have embraced the potential of the medium, and have spent large sums of money building increasingly impressive recruitment sites. Whilst this was the right starting place, online recruitment strategies need to evolve to the next stage. With the current economic uncertainty, where budget and cost cuts are increasingly becoming the norm, there needs to be less focus on dressing the shop window and more on getting the customers though the door (for less) and, to stretch the analogy, buying stuff.

However it is not easy to break the continual development cycle, when an impressive site is something you can be proud of, get you recognised, and frankly it is fun working with creative advertising types. We are all human after all. But break it you must if you want to truly realise the internets’ full potential.

Let’s not get completely carried though, the web has its own fair share of problems which you will need to overcome, including:

The complexity of the online media landscape. There are over 700 job boards out there competing for your spend and offering a vast array of advertising options.

The volume of (unsuitable) responses: The nature of the internet means that it is very easy to apply for jobs, so how do you deal with hundreds of applications? Refer to IT Recruitment for more information.

One solution, especially favoured by the public sector and graduate recruiters, is application forms. Personally I find them abhorrent. The idea of advertising a job is to find the best candidate and not to put off as many applicants as possible so that you have a more manageable work load (better and more demanded applicants will find it easier to find a job, so by making it harder to apply, these will be the first to give up leaving you with a lower quality of applicant). If you don’t have the resources to process the applications, recruiters can always outsource the work of filtering out candidates who don’t meet your specification.

Also a CV says a lot about the applicant. To turn everyone into a vanilla application gets rid of an important tool in the decision making process. If there’s a specific question recruiters need answered, ask applicants to do so in their covering letter.

But what about the future, what is in store for recruitment advertisers.

To answer this we need to go back to the early days of the online (non recruitment) world, where advertisers paid every time an advert was displayed. The problem was that displaying adverts alone didn’t guarantee success. Until one day, along came Google and suddenly you only needed to pay when someone responded. Not only that, but you could also specify how much you were prepared to pay, depending on how much you wanted that response.

Comparatively, the recruitment advertising market is still in the dark ages, paying based on the time that an advert is shown. This suits media buying agencies and media owners alike, as they both make more money (and commission) as the advertiser spends more, however, as a client, you should be deeply unhappy about this.

We are likely to see this trend towards performance based advertising revolutionising the recruitment advertising sector over the next few years.

A small minority of media owners have already started to break rank by tentatively offering results based advertising. Perhaps out of strategic vision, perhaps for fear of Google launching a recruitment site in the UK, whatever the reasons, I applaud them.

But it is not just the media owners that need to step up to the plate. The recruitment media agencies need to start thinking in a more direct response way. This is the reason R21 media was created.

By focusing on performance based online recruitment advertising, we have one aim: To reduce clients’ costs per hire.

This is achieved by:

* Reducing clients’ media spend, whilst improving response volume and quality.
* Speeding up the recruitment process. (incurring less time and as a result cost)

We are so confident of our results that we will even take the media risk on your behalf, so that you only have to pay on the results achieved. Think back – if you have ever had a campaign that didn’t work, wouldn’t that have been great?

Visit Jobs in IT for further information.