It's a case study in evolution.
A little over a decade ago, newspapers were lumbering giants, fat with profits and complacency, when some nimble startup companies in what was then known as "new media" knocked them sideways by stealing away their classified ads. Online job boards like Monster.com and HotJobs.com sprouted up, exploding with listings as Help Wanted ads in print shrivelled away.
Some newspaper companies embraced the wave: In the U.S., a trio of publishers launched CareerBuilder.com, while investors in the largest Canadian job board, Workopolis, included the parent companies of The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star.
Now those job sites are preparing to hold on for a wild ride of their own. (The Globe sold its share of Workopolis in late 2006.) Because even as the labour market goes through its own convulsions in the wake of the recession, those boards are coming under threat from the newest wave in new media. Employers and new hires are meeting on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.
"The original value proposition was to offer a faster, easier, and cheaper solution than newspaper advertising," explained Gabriel Bouchard, the president of Workopolis. "That is obviously not the case any more." In the last two years, he says, social networking sites have gone from a zero share of the job search market to the equivalent of one-quarter of the volume that online job boards handle.
Which is one of the reasons that next week Workopolis will unveil a long-awaited re-branding and re-launch to head off competition and position itself as more than just a clearing house for job listings. Executed by the Toronto ad agency Zulu Alpha Kilo, the campaign aims for an optimistic tone while outlining the new tools Workopolis is rolling out which it says could help every HR department become savvy marketers of their own company.
But first, a review of the particular pleasures of the online job board commercial. If you've watched the Super Bowl over the last decade, you know the genre well: scene after scene of cubicle denizens silently suffering through a series of humiliations in the workplace - often, mysteriously, involving near-naked co-workers.
This year's crop of three Super Bowl commercials for CareerBuilder.com included a spot centring on a woman forced to sit by as a co-worker gleefully takes a lighter to his flatus, and another about a workplace full of pasty-faced people who believe a "Casual Friday" dress code allows them to wear just skivvies.
But to careful observers, changes to the real world landscape could be glimpsed on the same Super Bowl broadcast. In a spot for Monster.com, which previously preferred advertising that focused on hellish job situations, a beaver who plays the fiddle uses the job site to trace a fast path from a swamp to a concert stage. "Get a Monster advantage," reads the tagline, pointing job applicants to the website, where they are urged: "Aim Higher. Reach Farther. Dream Bigger." The emphasis moved from the desire to escape a bad fit to the sense of fulfilment that could come from a good one.
Workopolis's positioning takes that hopefulness a step further. Its previous tagline, the prosaic "Canada's biggest job site," has been dumped in favour of the more aspirational imperative, "Time to shine." Interestingly, the tagline addresses both the employers who are Workopolis's actual customers, as well as the prospective job candidates it needs to deliver to those customers.
In two TV spots launching Monday, Workopolis promises it can help companies open themselves up to the outside, so that candidates can, "see beyond the job posting." In one, a candidate for a regional manager job is quizzed about her baking ability by a pipsqueak-voiced interviewer hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling board that displays a job posting. A grownup shows up to shoo away the scamp, explaining the boy is supposed to be in the onsite daycare. "Oh, you have daycare!" the woman says, pleased.
In the other ad, when an applicant who asks about office culture, an interviewer tells him it's a very tight-knit place, and then (from behind a floor-to-ceiling board) is heard to coo, purr, and ask for a big wet kiss. The big reveal? He's actually talking to one of the employee's dogs, since the workplace is pet-friendly.
The spots will run in May and again in September on an airtime buy that Mr. Bouchard conservatively estimated at $2-million.
"The feeling of the brand, what we wanted to represent, was optimism," explains Zak Mroueh of Zulu Alpha Kilo, noting that the vertical green bars in the Workopolis logo, which used to represent a cityscape, have been tweaked to evoke a rising sun. "One thing that's been lost in advertising in general is the idea of a benefit. Sometimes people just dramatize a problem."
As part of its re-launch, Workopolis is rolling out an online function it says will enable employers to better articulate what makes them unique, be it an admirable work-life balance, funky office culture, impressive location, career advancement opportunities, or a winning benefits package. In other words, Workopolis is touting its Employer Brand Optimizer as a part of its transition from an online job board (tellingly, it has dropped the .com part of its name) to what it describes as, "an online employment marketing company."
That marketing imperative, says Mr. Bouchard, will become even more important in the coming years as the job market becomes tighter for employers targeting qualified talent.
Putting a nice face on a company, "wouldn't be a huge burden for the marketing team, but it's a huge burden for the human resources community," suggests Mr. Bouchard. "They don't have the resources - they're understaffed - and they're not marketing people, so they need help to improve their brand message and their media strategy."
Don't pay attention to what it says on your business cards; these days, we're all in the business of marketing.