Revolutions are Uncomfortable Things

After hearing that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased operations yesterday to become the 12th major newspaper to shutter its doors I began looking into this momentous change we are experiencing.

On the website “Newspaper Death Watch” (http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/) (yes, I don’t like the name either) an article sums up the situation for newspapers:

The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

The newspaper industry, like the automotive industry and the financial industry, is an institution in the United States.  Even 5 years ago no one would have imagined that we could be facing a time when major cities were “newspaperless”.  So what is happening?

Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks.  Couple this with an amazing amount of debt taken on in the last 10 years as major publishers bought up smaller competitors and viola’ – the death of an industry.  Maybe.

Monster and Careerbuilderbattled over who would run the newspapers’ employment sections and traded the honor witheach other but for what?  It seems that even with big board names behind the employment sections, people were relying on them less and less.  While people were running from classified employment ads, they were running TO Linkedin and other ‘new’ ways to find work.  Revolutions are uncomfortable things.

I believe this is the next “revolution” we’ll see.  At least I’m hopeful that we will.  Just like no one wants newspapers to completely disappear (after all it IS where most of the serious reporting and reporters still reside) I’m not advocating that the big boards  disappear.  But like the newspapers, the days of “post and pray” recruiting would be a desired victim of a job board revolution.  The big boards have their place in an overall strategy but for too many recruiting departments that place takes up too much precious budget money to prove truly valuable.  Remember that a large percentage of Recruiters report getting a LOT of candidates from big boards but less than 20% of all employees actually report finding employment through the big boards.

If Craigslist can automate, facilitate and communicate better than your old classified, is it not too far fetched to imagine that a technology is coming that can do the same to “post and pray” recruiters?

It is all a question of “value” and who can provide the value faster, easier and with less cost.  If the road from consumer (Hiring Manager) to product (candidate) can be streamlined by taking out the middle person who adds little to no value to the process then the “revolution” is for the better.

The only way to reduce the discomfort of revolution is to find a way to add value to a process.  As we are seeing with the newspaper industry, if you are not adding value, you are not going to survive.