100,000 Market Research Job Ads
Today we reach the milestone of 100,000 job ads on MrWeb. It's taken just over fourteen years and 1,806 different advertisers, and in that time we've seen many changes in the way researchers are recruited, and the skills in demand.
Ad no.1 was posted on 29th November 1998 and oddly we don't have any record of what it was, but in the first five we had jobs from UK firms ATP (now Cobalt Sky), BMRB and Resource MR. Then a couple of recruitment consultants came in with batches of ads and things took off from there. One of them even offered to pay, because she thought online recruitment was where it was headed and wanted us to succeed. It's quite appropriate that her own company is kicking off our next 100,000 ads. Meanwhile the advertisers of job no.s 99,999 and 100,000 are both companies who have sent 5,000 or more ads and been with us for ten years plus.
As we're not at all sure we'll ever make it to 1,000,000 (god I hope not - I have read 96,000 of the first 100,000, I estimate, and if I keep up that percentage I'll go mad long before we reach a million), this is likely to be our most significant milestone ever, and it's a good time to reflect on trends in the industry. Therefore, over the next six days I'll be celebrating six figures with six short articles covering different aspects of MR careers, skills and recruitment - with some input from our regular advertisers, who are experts in many aspects I'm not.
In terms of changes in MrWeb itself, 100,000 ads have taken us from being a purely UK-focused site to being truly international with huge numbers of US ads and subscribers, lots in Australia and Asia and a fair number in Europe, Latin America and Africa. We've gone from being pioneers in an untested medium to being the establishment, in MR recruitment terms.
Interestingly, from thinking that most of our ads would come direct from employers, we very quickly found that it was recruitment consultants who formed the backbone of the site and supplied most of the ads - personnel departments in research agencies dragged their feet about using the 'Net to recruit quite extraordinarily ('we're worried that we'll get too few CVs, or that we'll get far too many and won't be able to cope' - yes, in practically the same sentence) and if it hadn't been for the recruiters we would have struggled. Since about 2007, however, we have at last seen big employers start to commit, and we've had record numbers of 'direct' ads on the site in 2011 and 2012.
Back then, our competitors were using paper, and now we're hearing mutterings about competition from LinkedIn and Twitter, while the paper magazine in which we announced the launch of MrWeb looks rather sadly to be ceasing monthly publication. It's a different world indeed - but we hope to be one of the many examples of continuity and be around for job no. 200,000. Although we'll be using new technologies and applications to make job ads more accessible to a wider audience, I hope and trust that the core feature of the index of jobs, hand-coded to save the maximum time for candidates, will remain the same for many years to come. As I'll be arguing on Wednesday, we market researchers are as guilty as any set of analysts and forecasters of overestimating the speed and thoroughness with which new technologies and skill sets wipe out the old.
So as well as looking at what's emerging, I'm also going to focus on continuity. Lots, in my opinion, has not really changed.
...including SRE salaries, but we'll come to that on Thursday when we talk about staff retention.
Tomorrow however I'll talk about levels of recruitment activity, obviously with reference to the economic situation. Here's a taster, starting with some stats on previous milestones:
| Job ad milestones: |  |
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Launch: November 1998 |
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| Job no. | Month: | Time per 25,000: | ||
| 1,000 | c.June 2000 | - | ||
| 10,000 | May 2003 | - | ||
| 25,000 | Oct. 2005 | 83 months | ||
| 50,000 | Jan. 2008 | 27 months | ||
| 75,000 | July 2010 | 30 months | ||
| 100,000 | Feb 2013 | 31 months | ||
Since 2005, we've listed the great majority of UK market research job ads, and since 2008 we've been listing roughly the same number of US ads each day, while the number of Australian, Asian and other ads has slightly increased. You can therefore see the effect of the economic downturn on UK ad numbers in the fact the last 25,000 have not come any quicker - but you can also see, or I can confirm, that it hasn't been devastating. 2007-8 was certainly the high point, and 2009 the low point to date.
Don't forget to look at these three:
UK Managing Director - Quant / FMCG Agency, London, c.£75-85,000 plus bonus & benefits - (posted Feb 11 2013)
Research Director - Social Media Clientside, Central London, £ Excellent, Competitive Package - (posted Feb 11 2013)
Research Manager, Advertising Agency, London, £35-45,000 - (posted Feb 11 2013)
... and to register for emails of relevant ads. A lot of researchers register just to keep an eye out for the perfect job, and you can be as choosy as you like and only get an email if something really ideal comes up.
Nick Thomas