Online Advertising The Way Of The Future

Online Job Advertising The Way Of The Future

Aucklanders travelling to work this morning could well be forgiven for thinking they had stepped back 100 years in time.

Commuters at the Ferry Building and Britomart were greeted by paperboys and girls, dressed in period costume, passing out copies of a fictional 1907 newspaper ‘Stuck In The Times’.

The newspaper, created by the leading online employment site SEEK, contains fictional articles and advertisements and leads with a story headed “Auckland madman predicts thing he calls ‘the Internet’”.

SEEK general manager Ken Leeming says 10,000 copies of the paper were distributed to commuters around Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch this morning as part of a national marketing campaign.

He says the idea behind the innovative campaign is to highlight that online advertising is the way of the future.

“We wanted to do something that was original and a bit of fun - but which also promoted the serious message that online job advertising has grown so rapidly that it is now becoming the preferred option for companies looking for the best talent in the market.

“There are many advantages for the jobseeker in choosing online instead of print as a job search method. Stuck in the Times highlights that at SEEK jobs are fresh and updated hourly. Importantly the jobs are truly recent, why should you have to wait for Saturday’s paper?

“SEEK also has many great tools to help you in your job search, Job Mail for instance will let you know when a new job matching your criteria has arrived, rather than having to read through pages and pages of newsprint,” says Mr Leeming.

He says SEEK’s recent survey into employee satisfaction and motivation shows candidates are clearly choosing the internet, over other mediums, to look for a job.

“86 per cent of our 2960 survey respondents said they expected to find a new job on an internet site – an increase of nine per cent from the year before. Those who expected to find a new job through a newspaper advertisement dropped to 60 per cent from 66 per cent a year ago.”

Mr Leeming says the labour market is the very tight with unemployment at low levels of only 3.8 per cent.

“Companies are really struggling to attract good talent at the moment. If they’re serious about getting the best candidates in the market they simply have to advertise where the candidates are looking – and that’s online.”

He says the number of Kiwis with internet access is high and growing rapidly.

“The 2006 Census showed that over 60 per cent of households in New Zealand now have access to the internet but that figure would be considerably higher among the job seeking population.”

Mr Leeming says SEEK has 56.8 per cent share of New Zealand’s online recruitment market in December*.

“In November last year SEEK had a record traffic month with nearly 300,000 unique browsers to the site. SEEK was shown to be the most popular site where visitors spent longer and returned more often during the month **.

“At any one time, at least 16,000 job vacancies are advertised on SEEK. And the September ANZ Job Vacancies series report found for the first time ever in September 2006 there were more jobs advertised online than in print.”

ENDS

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