Information Week: Embedding recruitment

How and why a jobs service has been integrated across a site.

The Site

Information Week, a widely-read magazine for business technology professionals, has a Careers Center panel displayed prominently on all pages of its complementary website. The panel sits at the top of a right-hand column used for advertising banners and related site links. It has two clickable options, ‘Open’ and ‘Close’; selecting Open expands the panel, pushing other content further down the page to reveal various careers-related topics.

The expanded panel includes a job search (by function, keywords and state), Featured Jobs, Career News headlines and links to Post Your Resume and Blogs & Forums as well as an Employers Area. All links lead to a third-party site, Tech Careers, which is part of the same publishing group (CMP).

The Takeaway

While other types of company may not have Information Week’s direct commercial interest in the jobs market, few are not in the market for job seekers. They in turn look around company sites as part of their searching and researching, and are often the largest visitor group to a site. So it could pay to take a look at how and why Information Week has gone about integrating its recruitment service across its site. Industry and trade journals such as Information Week are prized by readers at least as much for their job postings as their news and features. For the publishers, their jobs service is therefore a critical part of their subscription and revenue models – and one that is under threat from dedicated jobs sites.

Information Week’s Careers Center panel addresses both issues, neatly applying some basic web technology to incorporate it into pages and make its features instantly accessible within the same page. The resulting service has the essential dynamism and functionality of an online jobs site – so is not just a replication of the print content by another means – which allows Information Week to compete in both mediums and protect its brand position.

First published on 08 May, 2007