Fishing with Dynamite

by jamieleonard

As unemployment hits a 12 year high of 27.3%, and a brand new set of school leavers about to make an assault on the UK job market, can companies afford to advertise to the masses?

They say recruiting in a recession is like shooting fish in a barrel.  I’d liken it more to casting your rod into the ocean to catch a Blue Fin Tuna, with the smallest of worms on your hook, and being attacked by killer sharks and eaten alive.  The ocean is the job market, the Blue Fin Tuna is your ideal candidate, the worm is your recruitment advert, the sharks are the unwanted candidates, you are your over worked and ever shrinking HR department and the rod…well that’s just a rod.  One agency friend told me recently that a client had spent £250 on a local site and the client had to spend £2500 to deal with the response.  Ouch!

On Sunday, I counted 8 actual adverts in The Sunday Times.  Ok, I’ll admit its mid August, but even for this time of year, that’s pretty low.  That’s the thing with newspapers, when they’re not doing great, it’s pretty easy to see, because, well, there are no adverts in them.

A client I recently spoke to told me her company was pulling all their jobs, online and offline, because they could no longer coupe with the levels of response.  She also said that peoples “job radar” had increased massively, with candidates now happy to apply for jobs with much lower salaries but also much higher salaries than before. Not so much aspiration, more desperation.

It seems companies can ill afford to advertise to the masses anymore, for response = cost.  We all remember the cost per response equation; total £ of the advert divided by the number of responses it generated.  Wrong.  The cost of response is now how more about how many man hours, temp costs etc receiving, filtering, selecting and replying to that level of response will cost your company

As more companies move from broadcasting to narrowcasting in an attempt to reduce the money wasted on handling these overwhelming levels of response, it makes you wonder what the future holds media of mass exposure?  Perhaps it’s time to stop fishing where the sharks feed, and start fishing where the Blue Fin Tuna swim.