As The Scotsman begins a £2 million campaign to promote its recently launched Jobs portal, Scotsman.com/jobs, Stephen Lepitak speaks to Henry Faure Walker, general manager of The Scotsman Publications, about the company's plans for the site.

The Scotsman.com/jobs site has been around for a few months now. Why did the company feel it was time to launch a new jobs portal, especially when it already had one?

We initially launched Scotsman.com/jobs in August of last year, which is the result of a partnership with Jobsite, the technology platform which is owned by The Daily Mail and General Trust. We soft launched that on the same platform as Johnston Press’s jobstoday. We always intended to separate ourselves in terms of the technology to have a dedicated technology platform for Scotsmans/jobs, so we delivered that on a separate platform in January of this year. We’ve been very excited about the traffic growth that it’s experienced as well. We are running at 180,000 monthly unique users which puts us in a very strong position , arguably, in terms of traffic numbers, we’re number two in the marketplace and really now, having launched a good site on a strong technology platform that was getting good traffic numbers on its own without any significant promotion and is now getting good feedback from advertisers and delivering very good response rates to recruitment advertisers, we thought now was the time to give it a push.

Our timing has not been governed by 2010 being the time to present the maximum opportunity to present the site, it was more due to the course of events in forming a strong platform and having the confidence that this was a really good platform and that now, because we were 100% confident in the product, that we should start investing significantly in the marketing and promotion of it. That has driven the rationale in terms of timing and where we are today in terms of the £2 million advertising campaign.

How important is the use of the Scotsman brand as a factor in the initial success of the site?

Obviously historically we were aligned with the jobstoday brand, which was associated with Johnston Press’s overall strategy to have a unified jobstoday brand, which was fine, but what we’re doing with the launch of the Scotsman/jobs brand is to leverage the massive trust that there is in The Scotsman and Scotsman.com and The Scotsman as a recruitment brand. The Scotsman has already got a substantial awareness in Scotland as a trusted, quality media brand. It’s well known in print for its recruitment offer and obviously we’re looking to leverage that even further in the online world.

The fact that we were able, from a standing start, to be catapulted straight in at number two to 180,000 very much reflects the Scotsman brand and it very much reflects the strength of Scotsman.com, which is the largest news website in Scotland. So we’ve able to drive a lot of the traffic from Scotsman.com to Scotsman.com/jobs. That’s a fairly straight forward traffic driver mechanism and we’re greatly assisted by the 45 plus Johnston Press local papers and websites which also use Scotsman.com/jobs as their site, so there’s also traffic coming from those websites. That’s a great asset for us as that presents fantastic reach and fantastic penetration into local markets through out Scotland that you can’t duplicate if you’re only launching a pure play-online brand. The fact that we’ve got local newspapers, whether it’s the Falkirk Herald or The Galloway Gazette, or The Southern Reporter in the Borders; the fact that we’ve got those papers and that they have been in those markets for 150 years means that we’ve got an audience there that trusts them and we’ve able to use those local newspapers to push our online recruitment portal into those markets much faster and better than if we were a purely online player.

Initially you want to focus on Edinburgh and the Lothians. Why is that?

It’s a question of sequence and a question of steps and not trying to run before we can walk. We are in a position now where we are really happy with a fantastic product which is doing what it needs to do in terms of functionality and the most logical place to start our marketing effort, given The Scotsman’s strengths are in Edinburgh and the Lothians. We absolutely perceive ourselves as a pan-Scottish recruitment portal, which can be seen by the traffic we get from across Scotland, but this market is our core heartland from a Scotsman Publications perspective and our next objective on our journey is to secure leadership in online recruitment here, before we build out aggressively to our other marketplaces across Scotland. This is the start of the journey, but by no means are we stopping with Edinburgh and the Lothians. It makes perfect sense for us to consolidate our position as what would be regarded as our core territory before pushing further through out Scotland. That’s not to say that we don’t already, due to the local presence we have through out Scotland, have the ability to drive responses to recruiters in the Borders, recruiters in Glasgow where we have local newspapers, recruiters in the north and the south west, etc.

In terms of your publications, how will the site be used to attract advertising recruitment in your newspapers?

Whilst this campaign and whilst Scotsman.com/jobs is an online play, we believe that print will continue to play a very effective role in recruitment needs for many years to come. So whilst we have our online only sales effort, we have a team of people who are specifically focused on selling online only recruitment advertising. We also have online and print media teams through out the Johnston Press newspaper portfolio who are looking to operate in both print and online. We believe that the best package that you can offer an advertiser in recruitment is a combination of both print and online. Print is particularly effective at getting the ‘job browser,’ and particularly effective in promoting the employers recruitment brand and that remains an important objective for many recruiters. Print still does that better than online, but if you can combine online, which clear has a significant amount of job seekers, and there are many people who will only look online for jobs, but if you combine those two audiences then you can have the best of both.

You have to go right up against Scotland’s most established jobs site, S1jobs. How big a challenge do you think you face there?

We don’t really feel that there is a question of us and them, we feel that there is room for a number of good quality recruitment websites in the Scottish market and we also don’t believe that success in online recruitment is just about how big your online audience is. The most important factor is the quality of applicants and the quality of response that you as an online recruitment board drive to your advertisers. So it’s not just about half-a-million unique users as compared to 200 thousand unique users. Obviously the bigger the audience then that can help you drive a bigger response. But frankly, at 180,000 users we are driving more than enough quality and response to our recruitment advertisers and that’s the feedback that we’re getting from them. The fact that you have 300,000 more unique users, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a better jobsite, because it’s about quality of response and the quality of applicant that you’re driving, rather than the fact that a lot of people visit your website. There is probably also an argument that you can probably have too much traffic to your website.

What else does the portal off to firms and employers?

I’ll answer that question in two ways. In terms of its functionality, it’s up there with the best in terms of having a good CV matching service, it’s got a good email alert service, in terms of functionality that’s a ticked box and we think it’s pretty slick. It’s similar to other players in the market. In terms of quality where we stand out, which is a unique strength that we have against S1jobs or other competitors, we have a very high number of direct employers and we do believe that this, certainly from a job seeker perspective, is a real asset. That fact that over 70 percent of our jobs come from direct employers, as opposed to recruitment consultancy jobs – and if you look across other platforms, such as S1jobs, less than a quarter come from direct employers. If you’re a job seeker there is an added benefit of knowing exactly who you’re sending your application to. Whilst we have recruitment consultancies on our site, and that number will grow as we actively engage with them, the fact that as we stand today that the majority of our jobs are direct employer jobs so the job seeker knows exactly who they are sending their CV too, rather than an intermediary has a good benefit in terms of building confidence in the job seeking experience. Whilst we’re looking to grow the recruitment consultancy part of our platform, it’s something that we will absolutely keep an eye on and are keen to maintain.

How do you plan on using the £2 million advertising campaign that you’re about to roll out?

The campaign is going to go for a heavy burst from 1 June, where there will be an intense media campaign on radio and outdoor. Initially, given the strategy to consolidate Edinburgh and the Lothians, the majority will play there with significant outdoor sites in Edinburgh as well as radio stations Real Radio, Forth and Galaxy FM. We will also be deploying a significant amount of pay-per-click or search advertising during that period and also making heavy use through out Scotland of the Johnston Press newspaper portfolio and the Johnston Press local websites. Scotsman.com will be a significant part of the campaign too.

The schedule that we are planning is to keep the awareness up through out July and August, but a slightly lighter weight during that time before ramping up the activity in terms of media schedules and media spend from the third week of August, onwards to hit the end of the summer holidays. The back end of August and September is very busy in terms of recruitment. The £2 million is media spend based over the next four months and while a significant amount of that is external media spend, obviously we have significant media in our own portfolio and we will deploy that to make up part of the campaign as well.