WSJ Career Site Inks Cross-Media Deal

Dow Jones & Co.’s CareerJournal.com will be the centerpiece of a new, cross-media advertising deal with executive search firm Lucas Group, an agreement that speaks to offline publishers’ efforts to compete in the online job advertising space.

Financial terms were not disclosed of the arrangement, which will see the Atlanta-based recruiter sponsoring CareerJournal.com’s HR Center and Executive Recruiter sections.

Lucas, which is one of the nation’s largest non-franchised recruiters, also will receive a tab on the site’s front page, online job postings through its JobSeek database, and rights to post content from ContentJournal.com on its own sites, LucasCareers.com and TAOnline.com.

Additionally, Lucas will receive print recruitment advertising in The Wall Street Journal and its European and Asian editions, and direct mail to Journal subscribers.

The deal represents one of the largest advertising agreements with CareerJournal.com playing the starring role since Princeton, N.J.-based Dow Jones’ extensive rebranding and relaunch of the site in 2000. Although the site now concentrates chiefly on executive positions, CareerJournal.com previously had been operated under WSJ.com as a more broadly-focused site, careers.wsj.com.

The repositioning of CareerJournal.com, which continues to be supported with HR trade and consumer advertising campaigns, comes as other major print publishers are looking to online career sites of their own.

This year, The New York Times Co. launched JobMarket.com, and similarly renamed its flagship newspaper’s Sunday help wanted section. Like CareerJournal.com, which also has an offline counterpart in the Journal‘s Tuesday edition, both efforts look to create cross-media deals for recruitment advertisers — built on the premise of capturing job seekers’ attention regardless of where they’re looking.

Such efforts to bring new media into the traditionally staid area of printed job listings come in reaction to the success of online employment advertising plays like TMP Worldwide’s Monster.com and Yahoo’s HotJobs.com. Both sites have shown relative health amid the wider downturn in more traditional forms of advertising.

At the same time, it’s believed that online job sites are eating into newspapers’ listings business, especially for national and executive-level listings. For one thing, Jupiter Media Metrix found that about 40 percent of all U.S. job seekers used online listings last year, and more than half expect to do so this year.

Additionally, newspapers’ offline recruitment businesses face further jeopardy thanks to some new initiatives like Monster’s suite of JobMatch sites. The JobMatch move is designed to create online, local marketplaces for the hourly job listings category — an area of recruitment advertising still dominated by regional papers.

Nevertheless, newspaper publishers shrug off such threats, pointing instead to their new ability to string together on- and offline recruitment ad deals like the Lucas arrangement.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for Lucas Group to communicate the size and scope of its organization globally through the Dow Jones online and print products,” said Tony Lee, editor in chief and general manager of CareerJournal.com. “The partnership is unique because it encompasses so many different facets of marketing communication.”