Job Fairs: Online Advertising That Pays

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2001 by Jane E. Zarem

For industry-specific, niche, association and metro-regional publications, online job fairs are a low-cost way to add substantial revenue to the bottom line.

Consider the case of a 26-year-old IT engineer who was employed by a top software company in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was happy in his job, well paid, and had a promising career path. A good friend, however, was actively looking for a new position in a similar field. The friend had posted his resume online and was getting a pretty good response. Almost as a lark, the IT engineer decided to test the waters. He updated his resume and casually posted it online, using Yahoo Careers. Literally within hours, he received e-mail and telephone responses from four recruiters wanting to set up interviews for him with their clients. Within one week, he had met with two of the companies. Within one month, he had accepted a new job, and his career headed in a brand-new direction. "I felt like a soldier," he says, "safely entrenched on an active battlefield. The minute I poked my head out of the trench, I received a barrage of incoming activity."

Web-savvy younger workers (especially those in technology fields), contract workers and relocating individuals are all recognizing the efficiency and effectiveness of online job searches. They are simply not content to send out resumes and wait around for a response. By a margin of two to one, in fact, Internet users prefer searching for jobs online, as opposed to looking in newspaper classifieds, according to a recent study by Greenfield Online of Wilton, Connecticut.

Recognizing a trend, and tapping into what Forrester Research expects will be an e-recruitment industry worth $7.1 billion within the next five years, more and more magazine publishers are adding online job fairs to their Web sites. In doing so, they are creating new revenue steams for themselves, attractive product offerings for their advertisers, and an appealing tool--one that promotes repeat site visits--for their audiences. Approaches vary; some publishers outsource their job fairs, while others work entirely in-house. Either way, minimal upfront costs and the potential for significant income make online job fairs an attractive option for revenue-hungry publishers.

Low start-up costs, high revenue

About three years ago, McGraw-Hill's ENR (Engineering News-Record) set up a dynamic Career Center on its Web site (www.ENR.com) and invited companies to advertise job openings to its readership of more than 400,000 construction engineers. Participating companies pay ENR $10,000 to $15,000 per job fair, depending on selected enhancements, for four weeks of exposure. "It's a great deal for the money," says Janet Kennedy, ENR's director of inside sales, "especially for companies experiencing a major hiring period. Our site is one of the most highly trafficked sites in the construction industry, so the companies are finding exactly the people they want to reach. They get their own links and can post as many job opportunities as they like, along with a company profile. Job seekers complete an online form, which they submit directly to the company."

ENR's online job fair package includes a three- or four-page mini-site with a searchable directory of all available opportunities, citations of articles about the participating company from ENR's archives, the dynamic job application, and a direct link to the company's own site. In addition, the advertiser gets two or four (again, depending on the buy) 1/6-page display ads in corresponding issues of the print magazine to alert people to the job fair and showcase the company.

ENR incurred a small cost-essentially production-related--to get its online job fair program started. Ongoing expenses are also production-related. "The in-house designers and technical people billed man-hours for developing the template for the mini-sites," she says. "Now it's just a matter of coordination and plugging in all the information for each specific company." Once the order is confirmed, it takes a week to 10 days to gather the material, key in the job listings, post the logo, and activate the job fair, she says.

At nearly any given time since the program's inception, ENR.com has had two or three job fairs posted simultaneously. At this point, Kennedy adds, the site could probably handle up to a half-dozen at the same time. "And if we have 10 companies that want to do it at once," she says, "we'll find a way!"

Reducing the workload

Some publishers are taking an easier path and outsourcing their job fair operations. CMP Media, for example, recently affiliated with New York-based HotJobs.com (www.hotjobs.com), which provides online TechCareer links for Information Week, Internet Week, ED TN, Tech Web and Channel Web.

"We just started using HotJobs," says Rusty Weston, editor of InformationWeek.com, "but we've outsourced an online jobs feature through different vendors for about four years. Employment recruiting is not our core expertise, but workplace and career issues are a big part of our editorial coverage. Our audience of IT professionals, in particular, likes to be constantly aware of the job market, so this is a tool that's available to them on demand. We plan to redesign InformationWeek.com soon, and I expect this will become an even stronger element of the site."