Slow takeoff for jobs.com
By : Magdalena Wierzchowska
Online job sites may never push traditional brick-and-mortar human resource (HR) companies out of business, but Web sites focusing on job searches could well be among the first Internet companies to make a profit in Poland.
"It's one of the business areas that we believe is very suitable for the Internet," said Juri Kaljundi, board chairman of CV-Online/CV-Europe, a Central European job site that started in Poland last year. "In many countries, online recruitment is one of the few fields among the Internet companies that is actually profitable. Monster.com in the United States is probably one of the most successful Internet companies."
The main reason for the potential profit of online job sites is the way they make money. Unlike most e-commerce sites that depend on advertising, all job sites earn revenue by charging companies that place job ads on their portals. Some, such as jobs.pl or tmp.worldwide, also make money on fees for employing a person. "Revenue from advertising is marginal," said Matthew Krzysztofik, CEO at jobs.pl.
However, although jobs.pl made a small profit in 1999, and a few online sites worldwide showed a profit last year, many analysts question whether online recruitment will start generating large amounts of revenue in Poland. Fierce competition between online job sites makes the HR market increasingly difficult, company representatives said. There are more than 10 job portals on the Internet, said Agnieszka Szwaj, marketing specialist at Jobs & Adverts Polska, which runs jobpilot.pl, an international job site present in Poland. "And each month there is a new site," Szwaj said. Moreover, Gazeta Wyborcza's Monday job supplement dominates the market. Companies are used to placing ads in Gazeta Wyborczaand it has a virtual monopoly, Kaljundi said.
But placing an ad on the Internet is much cheaper. A four-week basic advert costs zl. 200 at jobpilot.pl, much less than at Gazeta Wyborcza, Szwaj said. At Gazeta Wyborcza, the smallest one-time ad costs zl. 24. However, the online job ads are also less effective than their printed counterparts. Marta Makowska, a consultant on e-resourcing technology at the Polish division of tmp.worldwide, said her company was recently looking for employees and placed job ads at major Internet portals as well as in Gazeta Wyborcza. "The Internet failed as a medium of recruitment and we were looking for young IT specialists," Makowska said. Out of a hundred respondents, only 15 came from the Internet, she added.
The main problem for job sites is the low number of Internet users in Poland. In December, 12.5% of the population were Internet users, according to market research company Taylor Nelson Sofres OBOP.
However, although some companies like jobpilot.pl are considering shifting from online recruitment toward providing software applications to companies, others such as CV-Online aren't worried by Internet penetration statistics. "Most of our customer groups, such as big companies, companies in Warsaw and in larger cities, use the Internet," Kaljundi said. "In some Baltic countries we make as much money as the largest traditional recruitment companies or largest weekly newspapers that publish job ads."
