Under the impact of online recruitment, paper media recruitment may soon disappear from people's sight. However, online recruitment is facing a new crisis.
As a company that started with paper media recruitment, 51job is currently the last well-known enterprise in China that still retains a paper media recruitment business, but its paper media recruitment has severely contracted. Yesterday, according to an insider at 51job who spoke to The First Financial Daily, the proportion of paper media recruitment business in the company's revenue has dropped to around 10%, while online recruitment has become the company's main business, accounting for more than 80% of revenue.
Despite the flourishing online recruitment services like 51job and Zhaopin, they are now facing the impact of social network recruitment. Recruitment channels are changing along with the trends of the Internet.
Internet industry expert Yu Ming told the reporter that due to the rise of the Internet, the influence of paper media has gradually weakened, and the trend towards more precise recruitment channels has become increasingly evident. The old method of mass submissions has gradually evolved into online classified recruitment, and ultimately into recruitment within social circles, which is well illustrated by the rise of social networking site recruitment.
The Q3 2011 financial report shows that 51job's total revenue for the third quarter reached 340 million yuan, up 26.4% year-on-year, with online recruitment service revenue growing by 49.0% year-on-year to reach 212.7 million yuan.
Data from Analysys Mason also shows that the three major traditional recruitment websites occupy more than 70% of the online recruitment market. However, the glossy data cannot conceal the crisis faced by the traditional online recruitment industry, as investors are stepping back and social network recruitment continues to grow, affecting the prospects of traditional online recruitment.
Public information shows that among the three giants of domestic recruitment websites, only 51job maintains a profitable state. Zhaopin and ChinaHR have been in long-term losses. Moreover, capital markets have reacted coldly to the traditional online recruitment industry over the past three years, and it is now difficult to find venture capitalists (VCs) within the online recruitment industry.
The number of people covered by recruitment websites is showing a decreasing trend. According to statistics from Analysys Mason, except for a significant month-on-month increase in March after the Spring Festival in 2010, the month-on-month growth in other months was very small, with negative month-on-month growth in seven months.
Internet scholar Wang Qisheng believes that high advertising costs are a hard injury for traditional online recruitment, compounded by serious homogenization among recruitment websites and a single profit model, which not only troubles the heads of various online recruitment websites but also scares off investors.
On the other hand, social network recruitment is welcoming the spring of capital. Last year, LinkedIn's successful IPO in the United States and the acquisition of several Chinese social networking sites by venture capitalists sparked a new wave of social network recruitment; emerging Internet applications such as microblogs and Q&A websites are also being integrated into social network recruitment, providing new growth engines for social network recruitment.
CEO of YouShi.com, Lu Hanshen, told reporters: "90% of CEOs indicate that recruiting mid-to-high-end talents in China poses a certain level of difficulty. Social website recruitment services, to a certain extent, address this issue."
Currently, the number of registered users on the well-known American social recruitment website LinkedIn in China has exceeded one million. The "2011/2012 World Work Report" shows that 85% of Chinese employers surveyed believe that social media will become an important means of attracting talent in the future, especially when recruiting professionals such as accountants, businesspeople, IT personnel, etc., who are very active online.
In this situation, if one merely relies on the profit model of "collecting resumes, gathering enterprises, and charging commissions," it will be difficult to make further breakthroughs in the recruitment market share, and even harbors potential crises. Last month, Monster, the world's largest online recruitment service provider, announced global layoffs of 400 people, about 7% of its workforce. This serves as a warning bell for traditional online recruitment.
The three major recruitment websites have also realized that change is imminent. In March 2011, Zhaopin launched a LinkedIn-like website called Jingwei in cooperation with Renren Network; and in recent updates, 51job has introduced a function channel named "Opportunity Knocks" with social characteristics.
However, Wang Qisheng also frankly admitted that in the future, social network recruitment will continue to grow stronger, eating away at part of the market share, but it will not become the dominant force in the short term, serving as a supplement to other professional talent websites. Whether or not these three traditional recruitment websites can seize this opportunity and capture the social network recruitment market may become an important opportunity for them to achieve new growth.