Several years ago I joked with a friend who was the city desk editor of a newspaper that I cancelled my subscription when the parakeet died…I no longer needed paper to use as a cage liner.  A good natured jab, but I could tell that I touched a nerve. Later when I was contracted to recruit for an expansion to a digital media group, I was bombarded with applications from candidates seeking to escape from print and be granted asylum in electronic media. The story I heard over and over was that they didn’t just fear that something might happen to their jobs. They had seen the handwriting on the wall. Watching colleague after colleague drop by the wayside, most felt they were only months, maybe days, away from being jobless themselves. Everybody wanted to work in television or online media where the greener grass of security beckoned to them.
Of course the major cause of the demise of any business is profitability. Declining ad sales trimmed revenues and resulted in the entire industry having to scale back. Of course, trimming costs in most cases means trimming people. I watched as people passionate about their career in journalism were not only losing their jobs but their spark. Some who grew up in print media took it like a knife to the heart. This is not unlike some of the problems seen in other industries in this tough economy. Coaching the unemployed to “keep the faith†seems to be a hollow challenge since their life’s calling has suddenly become deaf and dumb. With the encroachment of digital-everythingness the old jobs make about as much sense today as manufacturing buggy whips.
Recruitment advertising has become very much a digital enterprise even within traditionally print organizations. In the true evolution of placing job ads the online versions of almost every major newspaper now has given up on competing in this arena. Knowing that historically people always went to the local paper to look for work they maintain the façade of providing the same service. For example, most have outsourced this function to less costly providers who can still draw income from advertising:
- New York Times – Monster
- Wall Street Journal – FINS (Dow Jones company, part of WSJ Digital Network)
- The Washington Post – Apparently remains in-house! (and one of the best)
- San Francisco Chronicle – Monster
- Los Angeles Times – Careerbuilder
- Houston Chronicle – Monster
- Chicago Tribune – Careerbuilder
- Boston Globe – Monster
- Atlanta Journal – Monster
In smaller market newspapers, there is almost exclusively a sellout to either Monster or Careerbuilder.
The traditionally print newspapers themselves are beginning to fund their online “newspaper†with readership subscriptions to augment ad revenue. They are also willing to annoy subscribers with pop-up windows and instant-on noisy video ads even though they are charging for the inconvenience. This is unforgivable considering that we have been trained not to tolerate commercials when we pay for premium channels on cable TV. As bloggers and free online resources put a bigger squeeze on these behemoths of the past they may just become extinct. Why pick up a newspaper to read on the train while commuting to work when you can have much broader input from something downloaded to an iPad? Online media is dynamic, searchable and comprehensive.
Where will this trend end? Last year surveys showed that the internet had overtaken newspapers as the primary source of news. Only television was reported to have a greater impact, but since all of the major networks also have extensive online presence it is not a fair comparison. This week an article in the Los Angeles Times reported that there are more smart phone devices in use in the United States than there are Americans. I don’t believe everything I read, but that could be totally true.
Where does that leave us as recruiters and recruitees? Most of us no longer believe that passive recruitment or spray and pray job searching works. Nobody is beating a path to our door from newspapers, job boards or anywhere else. Success will be defined by the truly innovative people who will blaze digital trails into the future. It is a time to apply technology, not as a replacement for personal contact, but as tools to improve our productivity and personal reach.