How one newspaper is growing it's employment advertising business.

Unlike many newspapers, classified advertising is not just another part of our business. It is our entire business. Our company, Anuntis, is Spain's largest publisher of classified ads. Every week we send out over 3 million copies of our classified advertising newspapers throughout Spain, using a staff of 525 employees. We publish 39 print papers and operate 7 Internet portals.

Employment advertising is a major part of our business. Every month we advertise close to 20,000 job ads from companies of every size and industry.

Several years ago, we recognized the threat and the opportunity that the Internet has introduced to our business. It was clear to us that over time, more and more job seekers and job advertisers will resort to the web, and that print advertising will lose some of its historical power.

We did not only see a threat to our business but also a major opportunity. We decided to take up the challenge.

We have built a new employment site and within a relatively short period of time, we have accumulated a database of 500,000 registered members and posted job ads from tens of thousands of advertisers. The online advertising service was given at no extra cost to any advertiser who placed an ad in our newspapers.

However, we felt that our online position did not give us the long-term competitive edge that we had in the offline business.

To find out what we had to do in order to become a leader in the E-recruiting business in Spain we did two things: we asked our clients what they were interested in and we looked for new technologies to respond to our clients' needs.

Our clients told us a few interesting things:

They said that they were no longer interested in getting more resumes. In fact, the Internet has created for them a problem because they were getting more unqualified resumes than before. What they wanted was fewer resumes but from candidates that gathered the qualifications required.

They also told us that they wanted to be able to reach not only active job seekers but also qualified candidates who may respond to a job offer if they found it attractive enough.

Many advertisers told us that they wanted to benefit from the Internet by getting access to the many candidates who look for jobs online, and they wanted us to qualify such candidates for them. However, we found out that many of them did not want or did not know how to deal with the technical aspects of using the Internet.

They told us that they wanted to shorten the time-per-hire and reduce the excessive cost-per hire. Some companies told us that they wanted to be able to manage the entire recruiting process online without resorting to using other software applications.

Our challenge was to create a powerful, yet simple enough solution to be used by any novice user while providing power users more advanced features. It was important to us that we would be able to reach profitability with this solution and gain the long-term loyalty of our clients. Our main competitor was a pure online player and we wanted to create a sustainable competitive advantage against him and other players.

In our search for new technology we found Redmatch (www.redmatch.com), a company that focuses on selling e-recruiting solutions to newspapers. We signed an agreement with Redmatch to power our employment site and link the application to our sales and administration infrastructure.

It was important for us to retain all the assets that we have already built in our site like the candidate and client database. The integration with the Redmatch software enabled us to retain these assets and build on them additional value. After a few months of integration we have launched the improved site (www.laboris.net). We are very satisfied with the results.

The new solution has all the traditional job site functionality like job search, but in addition it adds several new features and services:

Advanced matching: sophisticated algorithms enable instant and reciprocal matching between candidates and employers. It provides users with a totally new recruiting experience. The candidate is requested to open an account at our site by entering his profile and preferences and is instantly matched with job requirements entered by employers. The employer gets to see only matched candidates. He can view, manage and communicate with all matched candidates through an online account, or receive qualified candidates' resumes to his e-mail or fax.

Candidates' attraction ñ a key to a successful e-recruiting system is a large, qualified candidate database. The Redmatch solution has several tools that helped us attract many new candidates. One of these tools is a powerful salary survey. When we launched the online survey we were able to accumulate 20,000 new candidate profiles in one month. Many of our registrants are passive job seekers.

Recruiters' management system: We provide to advertisers a single and unified system for sourcing and processing candidates, as part of an advanced recruiting management system. They can use this system at any level from a simple review of matched candidates list to a full corporate recruiting system.

It is important to mention that the new solution required little changes in our sales organization other than some training. Most of the selling is still done by our existing sales force, although the selling of some premium products is done by dedicated, high-level sales people. When we launched the new site we have increased the prices of our ads across the board. Every advertiser is now getting the minimal matching service when he buys a print ad and can buy premium online services. We have enhanced the quality of the service that we provide to our clients and as a result are gaining additional revenues and long-term loyalty from our clients.


Anuntis Spain's largest publisher