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.”
