June 7, 2004
Hunting for job hunters | Competition continues to increase in the crowded world of Maine help wanted advertising
By Taylor Smith
After years of watching job seekers and employers migrate toward online job recruiting sites, Blethen Maine Newspapers wanted in on the action. The company, which publishes the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram as well as the Kennebec Journal, the Waterville Morning Sentinel and a number of weekly newspapers in Maine, had merely used its online arm, MaineToday.com, as a dumping ground for its papers' help wanted ads.
All that changed in early May, when Blethen and MaineToday.com launched a co-branded venture called MaineJobs in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and on the Internet. The new MaineJobs product is an effort to simplify for employers the relationship between Blethen's newspapers and the MaineToday.com website, and to streamline the ad-posting process for customers.
Already, MaineJobs is positioned to snare a piece of the state's job recruitment market, largely by dint of the traditionally successful help wanted sections in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. The MaineToday.com site also generates huge volumes of traffic: The site in April recorded 6.1 million page views, 21% of which went to the site's careers section.
Joe Michaud, president of MaineToday.com and a driving force in the new venture, admits that the paper in the 1990s ˆ when it was owned by Portland-based Guy Gannett Communications ˆ was wary about launching an online venture, fearing it would cannibalize the heavy revenues derived from print classified advertising. "I think we went too far down the path and saw that customers weren't following us, but I think we caught it right in time [with MaineJobs]," he says.
That resistance isn't unique to the Blethen papers. The newspaper industry in general has struggled to incorporate the Internet into its business model, perhaps because of the dire forecasts by the technology pundits and prognosticators of the late 1990s, who said the Internet was going to make newspapers a thing of the past. That hasn't exactly happened ˆ but the industry has taken a hit, both in readership and in ad dollars.
Though advertisers in 2003 spent an estimated $15.8 billion in newspaper classified sections, according to the Newspaper Association of America, classified ad sales have fallen nearly 20% since 2000, due in large part to a 54% decline in employment ad revenues. While much of that decline can be attributed to the weak recession-era job market, it's also clear that the rise of Internet firms such as online job recruiter Monster.com have succeeded in drawing dollars away from the newspaper industry's traditional cash cow.
And it's not just the large, national sites that are enticing employers. In recent years, a welter of smaller, regionally focused sites have popped up, based on the premise that, like politics, all job searching is local. For traditional purveyors of help wanted ads like Blethen, the challenge is staying relevant in an increasingly fragmented job recruitment market.
That fragmentation means more work for employers like Jeff Baker, director of human resources at South Casco-based Sabre Yachts. Baker estimates he fills 10-15 positions a year by placing ads in the newspaper and on job recruitment websites. He says he's found success in both areas, and that it's dangerous for an employer to ignore either print or online advertising. "I wouldn't want to miss out on a qualified individual with a strong work ethic because they're looking in a different place," says Baker.
Creating a local monster
Maynard, Mass.-based Monster.com has positioned itself as the reigning champ of the online recruitment market, largely due to its lavish advertising budget. But Monster.com ˆ along with competitors HotJobs and CareerBuilder ˆ focuses almost exclusively on major metropolitan markets, leaving much of the rest of the country for other companies to fight over.
If the number of job postings is an accurate indicator, Westbrook-based JobsInME.com has emerged as the de facto leader of online job recruiters in the state. The JobsInME.com site lists more than 5,500 jobs. (By contrast, Monster.com, HotJobs and CareerBuilder combined offer fewer than 1,000 jobs in Maine, many of which are work-from-home "opportunities" and non-regionally specific "nationwide" positions.) The nearest competitor to JobsInME.com is Blethen's MaineJobs, which during a recent search turned up 827 positions on its website.
But perhaps a better way to gauge the site's success is to ask Peter Weddle, whose Stamford, Conn.-based firm Weddle's tracks the online job recruitment industry. Weddle culls the best of the estimated 40,000 employment-related websites on the Internet through survey results from job seekers and employers, and publishes his findings in an annual guidebook. This year, JobsInME.com won a user's choice award as one of the top 30 employment websites on the Internet. It was the only regional site on a list populated by big-board recruiters such as Monster.com and industry-specific sites like TheBlueLine.com (a job board for law enforcement professionals).
The JobsInME.com site was started in 1999 by Alan Hyman, founder of Portland-based software firm I-many. His partner in the venture was Edward McKersie, a veteran in the staffing industry and founder of Portland-based recruitment firm Pro Search Inc. McKersie's research found that more than 90% of job seekers look for employment within a reasonable commute from their own home. As a result, the pair decided to target local job seekers and employers ˆ a formula they're trying to replicate outside Maine.
JobsInME.com now is part of a larger network of sites under the umbrella of JobsInTheUS.com. The Westbrook-based firm, which employs 29 full- and part-time workers, also operates four other regional websites for New Hampshire (JobsInNH.com), Vermont (JobsInVT.com), Rhode Island (JobsInRI.com) and Massachusetts (JobsInMA.com). The company's board of directors is scheduled to meet later this year to discuss further expansion.
The firm's current president and partial owner, Matt Hoffner, joined the company in 2001 and immediately saw the market potential for a relatively small player like JobsInTheUS.com. "There's a fight to the death for dominance in the national job board market, especially in the major metropolitan markets," he says. "And we saw there was a huge section of the market left unserved by the big guys in the industry."
As expected, that huge section of the market has attracted dozens of competitors, including firms like RegionalHelpWanted.com. Using a business model similar to JobsInTheUS.com, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based company operates 279 job boards in the U.S. and Canada, including three sites covering Maine's southern, eastern and central regions.
Jockeying for position
In October 2002, JobsInME.com ˆ which initially offered its services for free ˆ began charging employers to post help wanted ads. "People thought we were killing the golden goose and that charging people would mean the end of the website," says Hoffner. "But after the conversion, more than 70% of the companies agreed to stay on [as paying customers]." The site turned a profit as soon as it began charging customers and has remained profitable to this day, though Hoffner declined to disclose revenue or earnings figures.
One reason for JobsInTheUS.com's success in Maine is likely due to its fee structure for employers, which differs from the typical model in which employers are charged a set fee per job posting. Instead, JobsInTheUS.com uses a subscription-based model that allows employers to post as many job listings as they need during a three-month period. The fees range from $150 to $2,500 depending on the size of the company and the number of premium services it chooses, such as the ability to receive online applications. That's a relative bargain compared with the thousands of dollars one display ad in Sunday's help wanted section might cost.
But Dave Baur, classified development manager for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, notes that an ad in the Maine Sunday Telegram has the ability to reach 150,000 people in the matter of a few hours, offering the kind of massive exposure that many companies are looking for. (Blethen plans to launch MaineJobs in its other daily papers within the next month.) Joe Michaud at MaineToday.com also touts his site's wide variety of content ˆ including news articles and weather ˆ as a way to attract Web surfers who aren't actively looking for a job to the MaineJobs site. That sought-after segment of the job market is known as passive job seekers, and represents a huge potential market for employers.
Still, Hoffner points to JobsInTheUS.com's intense marketing efforts as a driver for the company's success. All the firm's advertising is done on a regional level, including radio and television spots on local channels. But JobsInTheUS.com goes beyond traditional advertising, marketing its sites to state and college career counselors at job fairs and career workshops. That's kept it competitive with firms such as Blethen, which sponsors job fairs through the Portland Press Herald.
Hoffner learned the importance of that diversified marketing approach when the company launched JobsInNH.com in 2002. "We did a lousy job providing customer service and on the day we started charging only about 30% of the employers began paying," he says. The company changed that strategy when it launched the JobsInVT.com site in 2003. "We killed them with customer and sales service and kept 70% of the customers when we began charging," says Hoffner. "Within six months, we were the number-one job board in Vermont."
With its continued expansion all but guaranteed, JobsInTheUS.com made sure to buy up other Internet domain names to cover all 50 states (though not all were available in the JobsInTheUS.com format). But despite the growth of the company, Hoffner doesn't plan on immediately blanketing the country with localized recruitment sites. Instead, he's busy strengthening the company's competitive position in each state. That means marketing on the most local level, including making the rounds to meet with local businesses and plug the company's websites. "That's what you have to do when you're not Monster.com," says Hoffner. "They can buy three or four minutes during the Super Bowl, but they aren't going to attend the chamber of commerce breakfast in Portland."
In the face of such aggressive competition, Blethen plans to continue marketing its new MaineJobs offering heavily, including sponsoring a summer concert series in Portland. "Advertisers and readers have a variety of options in the world we live in," says Dave Baur, "We have to earn our position every day."
All that changed in early May, when Blethen and MaineToday.com launched a co-branded venture called MaineJobs in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and on the Internet. The new MaineJobs product is an effort to simplify for employers the relationship between Blethen's newspapers and the MaineToday.com website, and to streamline the ad-posting process for customers.
Already, MaineJobs is positioned to snare a piece of the state's job recruitment market, largely by dint of the traditionally successful help wanted sections in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. The MaineToday.com site also generates huge volumes of traffic: The site in April recorded 6.1 million page views, 21% of which went to the site's careers section.
Joe Michaud, president of MaineToday.com and a driving force in the new venture, admits that the paper in the 1990s ˆ when it was owned by Portland-based Guy Gannett Communications ˆ was wary about launching an online venture, fearing it would cannibalize the heavy revenues derived from print classified advertising. "I think we went too far down the path and saw that customers weren't following us, but I think we caught it right in time [with MaineJobs]," he says.
That resistance isn't unique to the Blethen papers. The newspaper industry in general has struggled to incorporate the Internet into its business model, perhaps because of the dire forecasts by the technology pundits and prognosticators of the late 1990s, who said the Internet was going to make newspapers a thing of the past. That hasn't exactly happened ˆ but the industry has taken a hit, both in readership and in ad dollars.
Though advertisers in 2003 spent an estimated $15.8 billion in newspaper classified sections, according to the Newspaper Association of America, classified ad sales have fallen nearly 20% since 2000, due in large part to a 54% decline in employment ad revenues. While much of that decline can be attributed to the weak recession-era job market, it's also clear that the rise of Internet firms such as online job recruiter Monster.com have succeeded in drawing dollars away from the newspaper industry's traditional cash cow.
And it's not just the large, national sites that are enticing employers. In recent years, a welter of smaller, regionally focused sites have popped up, based on the premise that, like politics, all job searching is local. For traditional purveyors of help wanted ads like Blethen, the challenge is staying relevant in an increasingly fragmented job recruitment market.
That fragmentation means more work for employers like Jeff Baker, director of human resources at South Casco-based Sabre Yachts. Baker estimates he fills 10-15 positions a year by placing ads in the newspaper and on job recruitment websites. He says he's found success in both areas, and that it's dangerous for an employer to ignore either print or online advertising. "I wouldn't want to miss out on a qualified individual with a strong work ethic because they're looking in a different place," says Baker.
Creating a local monster
Maynard, Mass.-based Monster.com has positioned itself as the reigning champ of the online recruitment market, largely due to its lavish advertising budget. But Monster.com ˆ along with competitors HotJobs and CareerBuilder ˆ focuses almost exclusively on major metropolitan markets, leaving much of the rest of the country for other companies to fight over.
If the number of job postings is an accurate indicator, Westbrook-based JobsInME.com has emerged as the de facto leader of online job recruiters in the state. The JobsInME.com site lists more than 5,500 jobs. (By contrast, Monster.com, HotJobs and CareerBuilder combined offer fewer than 1,000 jobs in Maine, many of which are work-from-home "opportunities" and non-regionally specific "nationwide" positions.) The nearest competitor to JobsInME.com is Blethen's MaineJobs, which during a recent search turned up 827 positions on its website.
But perhaps a better way to gauge the site's success is to ask Peter Weddle, whose Stamford, Conn.-based firm Weddle's tracks the online job recruitment industry. Weddle culls the best of the estimated 40,000 employment-related websites on the Internet through survey results from job seekers and employers, and publishes his findings in an annual guidebook. This year, JobsInME.com won a user's choice award as one of the top 30 employment websites on the Internet. It was the only regional site on a list populated by big-board recruiters such as Monster.com and industry-specific sites like TheBlueLine.com (a job board for law enforcement professionals).
The JobsInME.com site was started in 1999 by Alan Hyman, founder of Portland-based software firm I-many. His partner in the venture was Edward McKersie, a veteran in the staffing industry and founder of Portland-based recruitment firm Pro Search Inc. McKersie's research found that more than 90% of job seekers look for employment within a reasonable commute from their own home. As a result, the pair decided to target local job seekers and employers ˆ a formula they're trying to replicate outside Maine.
JobsInME.com now is part of a larger network of sites under the umbrella of JobsInTheUS.com. The Westbrook-based firm, which employs 29 full- and part-time workers, also operates four other regional websites for New Hampshire (JobsInNH.com), Vermont (JobsInVT.com), Rhode Island (JobsInRI.com) and Massachusetts (JobsInMA.com). The company's board of directors is scheduled to meet later this year to discuss further expansion.
The firm's current president and partial owner, Matt Hoffner, joined the company in 2001 and immediately saw the market potential for a relatively small player like JobsInTheUS.com. "There's a fight to the death for dominance in the national job board market, especially in the major metropolitan markets," he says. "And we saw there was a huge section of the market left unserved by the big guys in the industry."
As expected, that huge section of the market has attracted dozens of competitors, including firms like RegionalHelpWanted.com. Using a business model similar to JobsInTheUS.com, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based company operates 279 job boards in the U.S. and Canada, including three sites covering Maine's southern, eastern and central regions.
Jockeying for position
In October 2002, JobsInME.com ˆ which initially offered its services for free ˆ began charging employers to post help wanted ads. "People thought we were killing the golden goose and that charging people would mean the end of the website," says Hoffner. "But after the conversion, more than 70% of the companies agreed to stay on [as paying customers]." The site turned a profit as soon as it began charging customers and has remained profitable to this day, though Hoffner declined to disclose revenue or earnings figures.
One reason for JobsInTheUS.com's success in Maine is likely due to its fee structure for employers, which differs from the typical model in which employers are charged a set fee per job posting. Instead, JobsInTheUS.com uses a subscription-based model that allows employers to post as many job listings as they need during a three-month period. The fees range from $150 to $2,500 depending on the size of the company and the number of premium services it chooses, such as the ability to receive online applications. That's a relative bargain compared with the thousands of dollars one display ad in Sunday's help wanted section might cost.
But Dave Baur, classified development manager for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, notes that an ad in the Maine Sunday Telegram has the ability to reach 150,000 people in the matter of a few hours, offering the kind of massive exposure that many companies are looking for. (Blethen plans to launch MaineJobs in its other daily papers within the next month.) Joe Michaud at MaineToday.com also touts his site's wide variety of content ˆ including news articles and weather ˆ as a way to attract Web surfers who aren't actively looking for a job to the MaineJobs site. That sought-after segment of the job market is known as passive job seekers, and represents a huge potential market for employers.
Still, Hoffner points to JobsInTheUS.com's intense marketing efforts as a driver for the company's success. All the firm's advertising is done on a regional level, including radio and television spots on local channels. But JobsInTheUS.com goes beyond traditional advertising, marketing its sites to state and college career counselors at job fairs and career workshops. That's kept it competitive with firms such as Blethen, which sponsors job fairs through the Portland Press Herald.
Hoffner learned the importance of that diversified marketing approach when the company launched JobsInNH.com in 2002. "We did a lousy job providing customer service and on the day we started charging only about 30% of the employers began paying," he says. The company changed that strategy when it launched the JobsInVT.com site in 2003. "We killed them with customer and sales service and kept 70% of the customers when we began charging," says Hoffner. "Within six months, we were the number-one job board in Vermont."
With its continued expansion all but guaranteed, JobsInTheUS.com made sure to buy up other Internet domain names to cover all 50 states (though not all were available in the JobsInTheUS.com format). But despite the growth of the company, Hoffner doesn't plan on immediately blanketing the country with localized recruitment sites. Instead, he's busy strengthening the company's competitive position in each state. That means marketing on the most local level, including making the rounds to meet with local businesses and plug the company's websites. "That's what you have to do when you're not Monster.com," says Hoffner. "They can buy three or four minutes during the Super Bowl, but they aren't going to attend the chamber of commerce breakfast in Portland."
In the face of such aggressive competition, Blethen plans to continue marketing its new MaineJobs offering heavily, including sponsoring a summer concert series in Portland. "Advertisers and readers have a variety of options in the world we live in," says Dave Baur, "We have to earn our position every day."
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments