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FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MARCH 2001)
Going,
going, gone are the good old days of dropping lunchtime
crumbs over the “Positions Open” section in the back
of PW, when you’d gamely search for that next
dream gig. (“Marketing Director, U. of Hawaii Press”?
Hmmm.) Yes, clickability has hit the hiring game, with
Internet job boards humming away 24/7 and recruitment
field leaders HotJobs.com
and Monster.com
awash in resumés fueled in part by dot-com layoffs.
(Monster is currently seeing 30,000 new resumés per
day, up 50% from the end of last year, while HotJobs
saw a 77% leap in January.) Now, such sites are being
joined by job boards exclusively for the media and publishing
industries, making vacancies that much easier to advertise
and — hopefully — to fill.
The new job board section of Publisher’s Lunch,
for example, grew organically out of job listings being
posted unofficially on the site’s message boards, and
within the first month is outdoing PW by 6 to
1. “It’s got off to a stronger start than I would have
dared plan or expect,” says Lunch creator Michael
Cader. Unlike PW, which will post only its
print ads online for a small additional charge, or NYTimes.com,
where you have to search the entire job board by non–industry
specific categories (publisher, marketer, etc.), Cader’s
boards use the same technology as HotJobs and Monster,
which allows jobs to be searched in a variety of ways
including location, industry, and keyword, but only
lists jobs confined to book publishing. “There is an
inherent insularity in this business that means broad-scale
job boards are not effective,” Cader adds. “Publishers
are looking for publishing people, and general job boards
are drawing non-publishing people.”
Internet job boards also have the advantage of speed
— and the relative absence of space constraints. Employers
click on the “post a job” link and can post jobs immediately.
Billing is done by mail, and costs are low, charged
by listing, not by word count. Cader charges $150 per
job per month, comparing to HotJobs’ $195 per 30-day
listing, and Monster’s 60-day posting at $295. By contrast,
the dead-tree posting method will run an absolute minimum
cost of $144 for the NYT Book Review, while for
PW it’s $54 (though you’d get only 15 words for
that).
As for useability, Publisher’s Lunch and partner Media
Bistro (which hosts its own listings of media jobs
at mediabistro.com)
are easy to use and trawl focused user bases. Monster
boasts a slicker interface, international jobs, and
more sophisticated search tools, but is lighter on media
offerings. Meanwhile, HotJobs currently lists the greatest
number of publishing jobs, the majority NYC based, though
with a good spread through the rest of the US. Publisher’s
Lunch, however, does not offer the resumé/job-matching
service that the bigger, more established services do.
(The Lunch job board is at publisherslunch.com.)
Susan
Gordon, president of Lynne Palmer Associates,
the publishing recruitment firm, believes job boards
supplement rather than threaten traditional recruitment
methods. “Job boards are another form of advertising,”
says Gordon. “They are not going to make us disappear.
When people come to a recruiter, they’re looking for
deep industry knowledge. There will always be a lot
of work ferreting through resumés, clearing the pap,
screening candidates, advising. You can get a ton of
information from job boards, but you still need to know
what to do with it.”
But the boards do work. Esther Margolis, president
at Newmarket Press, recently filled a mid-senior
level post via HotJobs. “The professional level of the
people who responded was excellent,” she says. “You
could describe the position in detail, and it was a
third of the price [of The New York Times].”
Would she bother with print ads in the future? “No need
— I was very happy with the response.”
College grads, probably the most Internet comfortable
of job-seekers, have already been flocking to Jobtrak.com,
the college career network serviced by Monster. Prospective
employers are charged per college access ($25 per college
up to $395 for a full national listing) and the listings
are available only to students and alumni (50,000 of
whom access the site daily) via passwords issued by
college career centers. “A couple years ago I think
students would have searched through a variety of means,”
says one recent graduate, “but now my first stop would
be Jobtrak, followed by HotJobs and Monster.” Another
graduate who found her job at Penguin through
HotJobs calls the site “the most useful for entry-level
positions,” though admits that it wasn’t all plain-sailing.
“I was excited when I applied, but no one ever called
me back. I had to get my friend who already worked here
to contact HR for me.” She’d definitely use the service
again, though would not make scanning the boards a lunch-break
habit: “Never! I spent too much time doing that while
I was unemployed.”
©2001
Publishing Trends
