Nasty, snarling, ugly: There's a Monster in the back yard

Monster.com kicked off yet another round of whirlwind local tours last month, stopping in city after city to tell employers how foolish it is to use newspaper classifieds. The fact that Monster.com is conducting the seminars is nothing new. But the fact that the seminars have turned vicious toward newspapers is the real news. Monster is now taking dead aim at the bread-and-butter of print employment advertising, blue-collar job postings.

Make no mistake: This will be a bloody boxing match for newspapers over the next two years. Classifieds represent anywhere from 35% to 50% of total ad revenues for newspapers (the smaller the newspaper, the smaller the percentage). Employment listings comprised 40% of all classified spending last year, and the Newspaper Association of America says that category alone was off 34.5%. Nearly $6 billion in employment listings is at stake, and I don't know of any major U.S. newspaper that hasn't assigned someone fulltime or created a task force to look at the crisis. Where were these teams last year? (Correct answer: In denial.)

In one corner is the local newspaper, the Sumo wrestler in the match up. In the other corner(s) are Monster and HotJobs, whom I guess we could call dueling Mike Tysons. Throw a few junkyard dogs in the ring in the form of Brassring, Net-temps and CareerBuilder, and ... well, you get the picture.

Somebody's gonna get hurt.

In fact, the wild swinging and ear nipping has already begun. Monster CEO Jeff Taylor was miffed last month when The Cincinnati Enquirer snatched up the domain names JobMatch.com and Workmatch.com upon learning of Monster's intent to use those names for its blue-collar offering. Hey!, Taylor sniffed at a Suburban Newspaper Association Publisher's Conference in Florida a few weeks ago, we gave them a courtesy call and told them about JobMatch. Why'd they do that?

It's called competition, Jeff.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago several newspapers exchanged information via an e-mail discussion list about the audacity of Monster coming into their local market and pointing out how circulation has declined, rates have gone up, and employers give low rankings to print classifieds. Monster had even hired a 17-year veteran employment expert for the NAA, Ira Gordon, to conduct the seminars.

It's called competition, my newspaper friends. And it's about to get even tougher. After all, we're talking about a company whose CEO gambled half the marketing budget on advertising, and continues to buy million-dollar minutes during the Super Bowl and the Olympics. His next-biggest competitor (outside newspapers) is HotJobs, whose CEO once mortgaged his house to help pay for advertising.

What happens this year will be very interesting. Newspapers can't just sit back and watch Monster and HotJobs consume this category. And they can't continue denying the fact that employment classifieds have grown beyond their level of effectiveness. The Internet has already sapped the executive-level recruiting dollars; the next frontier is blue-collar jobs, which already register in the Top 5 categories on Monster's search engine.

When Monster unveils its flipchart at the front of the room in St. Louis, for instance, and shows a 56,000 drop in Sunday circulation for The Post-Dispatch over the past four years, shouldn't the newspaper respond? When it flashes a slide entitled "Waning Effectiveness of Traditional Recruiting Strategies," that shows newspapers as having the highest percentage of companies using the medium (86.8%) but having the second-lowest percentage of those classifying it as "very effective" (6.4%), isn't it time to fight back?

There are nits to pick in the Monster presentation, but for the most part Monster is right. The Internet HAS become the leading medium for recruitment. It IS more cost-efficient than newspaper advertising. And it DOES deliver a host of capabilities such as resume-filtering and instantaneous contact that newspapers will never be able to match in their print form.

There is strength in numbers, and newspapers ought to learn how to use them to fight back. The fact is, the local newspaper (in most cases) reaches half of the households and a majority of the people in a community. As a traffic driver, it is formidable. Forget the fact that Monster.com will spend $180 million in advertising this year to drive traffic to its site. The newspaper classifieds pages can be their own traffic-driver that hit an extremely targeted audience - job seekers. An ad in the employment classifieds will certainly drive local job-seekers to the local Web site (or advertiser's corporate site). And there are indeed strengths to the paper's local Web site that employers should know. In fact, our own research at Borrell Associates found one local advertiser had this to say during a recent interview: "Monster claimed to have better reach than local newspaper online recruiting sites, but I got more leads with the newspaper sites."

Here's another bullet for the holster: The March 5 Monster seminar in Norfolk, Virginia, for instance, highlighted the fact that an online search for jobs in the Norfolk area returned 649 available positions. When I returned to the office and conducted the same search on the local newspaper's site, I found twice as many!

Monster may be only half-right here. It's correct in the assumption that newspapers are an old, inefficient way of recruitment compared with Internet advertising. But they may NOT be correct assuming that Monster represents the best opportunity.

The Monster indeed has a pink underbelly, but newspapers will need to muster the resolve to fight back. To start that battle, newspapers need only step into the back yard with their own educational (and propaganda) seminars and begin not only telling these advertisers about the print and online packages, but also listening to what these advertisers have to say about their needs.

Links:
Monster
HotJobs
BrassRing
Net-temps
CareerBuilder