Vale recruitment advertising

Australian recruiters and employer branding companies like Heywood Innovation were shocked at the news this week that national recruitment advertising firm TMP Worldwide has collapsed into administration with the closure of five offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, despite winning four gongs at Fairfax’s Employment Marketing Awards only a few months ago.

This presents sobering insight to the state of the recruitment sector throughout 2009. Despite a seemingly dramatic pick up for many recruiting firms in the opening months of 2010, the strain of prolonged low advertising activity throughout 2009 proved too much. Previously Monster Inc before its purchase in 2006 and subsequent renaming, TMP Worldwide was a major supplier of recruitment advertising services to governments around Australia.

Most of us will appreciate that if there are only a few job vacancies available there isn’t much call for recruitment advertising. It makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that here in Australia our experience has been that the downturn also caused companies to clamp down on their employer branding activities. This in my estimation has contributed significantly to the rapid turnaround in recruitment activities in these last few months. Employee engagement has fallen off the radar for more than 12 months. Consequently the ‘itchy feet’ syndrome is affecting many employees, causing their employers to start feeling the pain of departing talent. This ‘knock on’ effect with employers is predicted to become one of the key contributors to the SWD ‘Second Wave Downturn’ the doomsayers are preaching will hit us at the end of the year and continue into 2011. We sincerely hope not.

More sobering is the realisation that the future prospects for print media are, like the Australian drought, looking pretty dry. “I’ll have $10 for online media to win, and a cold beer mate”.



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au