It is estimated that these days, an ordinary person will change jobs an average of seven times in a typical 30-40 year working lifespan. People revolve in a circle whose defining points are employment, job shifts, and unemployment. So long as people want to find work or change their jobs, the human resources industry has a future. And the rise of Internet technology has brought a revolution to this market which had changed so little for so long.
Take this job and....
The largest human resources company in Taiwan is the 104 Job Bank. The firm's name comes from the Taiwan number for directory assistance, and suggests that "To look for a job should be as easy as getting a phone number from the operator." The company currently has more than 55,000 jobs and 65,000 job-seekers on file. 104 vice president Steven Su says that there are no reliable statistics for the value of the human resources market, because newspapers refuse to disclose their revenues from classified ads. But, based on the spaces used and prices charged, it could reach as high as NT$10 billion, and even a conservative estimate would be NT$3-4 billion, of which NT$1 billion would be in the Internet employment services market.
An indicator of how good this market looks comes from the actions of the United Daily News group. The UDN is one of the investors behind a new employment magazine called Biung, which is designed in the pattern of Japanese employment magazines, and hit the market in October of 2000. And last year the UDN group also opened a website called "udnjob." Why does this venerable media giant look so favorably on the human resources market?
Johnson Lee, vice-president of UDN-Biung, the company that publishes Biung, who has many years of experience in publishing, says that there is a limit to how many people are reached by classified advertising. Based on a survey conducted by AC Nielsen, only about 3% of individuals buy newspapers to read the classified ads. Moreover, from a firm's point of view, Lee confesses, classified ads are "in fact rather expensive." It costs over NT$10,000 for an ad of about five centimeters square. From the newspaper's point of view, classified ads aren't such a hot property either, since most of the profit goes to the middlemen who take the ads. These limitations to the traditional job hunting formula are unlikely to be resolved in the short term, says Lee.
Lee explains: "Looking at the Japanese experience, the Asahi Shimbun has a daily circulation of about 10 million, but only one page of classified advertising. Those looking for new jobs rely more on employment magazines." The attraction for similar magazines in Taiwan is being helped along by the current fad for things Japanese, and also by changes in how publications are being sold, with convenience stores getting publications on to the shelves much faster than traditional bookstores ever could. "With changes in the larger environment and the maturing of the market, this is the time to jump in."
"The economy is in a downturn, but the human resources market always goes against the current," says Lee. In Japan, where the "bubble economy" phenomenon has been the worst, there are hundreds of human resources firms competing. The leading company had an after-tax income last year of US$90 million. Though there have been suggestions that the Internet is already becoming the main way to find employment, Lee contends that "the obstacles to entry are still great" for the ordinary person: You have to have a computer and be online, and you have to know how
@List.jpg?w=522&h=410&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)
