Peter Griffin: Workers the winners as publishers join jobs push

A billboard in downtown Wellington is carefully positioned to catch the attention of commuters pouring into the city each morning. It reads: "Sick of working for a cow?"

Many of you probably are. You scan the situations vacant adverts each week hoping to spot the job that could get you out from beneath your awful boss.

It's not a bad time to be looking for a job: there are skills shortages all over the place and employee retention is a major problem for companies. It helps that a number of companies are clambering over themselves to show us job advertisements through a convenient medium - the internet.

The new online battleground in this country is in recruiting advertising. The stakes are high as the revenue streams of the country's major media organisations depend on their ability to shift from listing classified job adverts in their newspapers and magazines to drawing people online to view the adverts in electronic format.

Trade Me, which was bought by Australian publisher Fairfax in February, earlier this week made a low-key entry into the online recruitment space with Trade Me Jobs. There you can list a job advertisement on a one-off basis for a monthly fee of $49. Listings are in the low thousands at the moment and recruitment companies have been the first to pile in. But with 1.4 million active Trade Me users, you can expect the number of job adverts to grow quickly as employers seek to target this huge online audience. If Trade Me's successful forays into automobile and real estate listings are anything to go by, the site will be one of the first stops on the internet for people looking for jobs.

Fairfax knows that job adverts published in its publications such as the Dominion Post and the Sunday Star-Times will steadily decline as head hunters and job hunters alike move to the web.

As Trade Me founder Sam Morgan says, the aim of Trade Me Jobs is to "replace the situations vacant sections of the paper".

APN, which publishes the Herald, is faced with the same inevitable outcome and in May launched Search4jobs, pulling together its massive job advertising sections and the assets of Netcheck.co.nz, an online recruitment company it bought last year from sister company The Radio Network. Search4jobs charges $111 for an advert to be displayed on its website for a month.

Squeezing in between the two media giants is Seek, the New Zealand arm of the leading Australian online recruitment company backed by James Packer.

On the face of it, Seek has the most to lose by the march of Fairfax and APN into online recruitment. It has no vast print advertising heritage to draw on. But it is currently the major player in the online jobs space with 17,000 job listings. It's also the most expensive of the major job websites on which to advertise: $168.75 for a casual month-long listing. But Seek claims to attract more qualified graduates. Its job listings tend to be for professional jobs whereas Trade Me is targeting the heart of New Zealand business - small and medium-sized companies. Search4jobs covers the spectrum but is laden with corporate and Government jobs.

The best thing about these competing recruitment websites is that they are all free to access by job seekers. There's nothing to stop you scanning all three regularly even if it's just to stay up to date with what positions are going.

Of the three, Seek offers the most advanced services. It will email you job advertisements according to the profile you set up. You can build a CV online and fill out a form that answers some of the questions of recruiters before you lodge your application.

Search4jobs lets you build and manage your CV, create folders to store adverts of interest and email job adverts to your own account or to a friend.

Trade Me Jobs seems to be keeping things pretty simple at the moment with no email job alerts option or online CV builder.

Ultimately, it will be the quality and volume of job listings that will determine the relative success of these websites.

But as the competition heats up, the online recruitment players are going to have to innovate in the services they offer recruiters and job hunters.

Qjumpers, the company responsible for that cow billboard, targets "career seekers" who are prepared to pay extra to meet assessors and craft their CVs. A Q-Pass CV, which verifies all of your details before the CV goes to a prospective employer costs $238. Businesses pay $224 for a one-off job listing. Whether the market is big enough to support all these players and legions of other recruiters will soon become obvious.

In the meantime, employees yearning for a change of scene can browse online and wait for the perfect job to appear. Just don't get caught doing it at work.