The global online recruitment industry is growing. Online recruitment has become one of the most successful commercial applications on the Internet. The data from IDC revealed that the market scale of global online recruitment was only USD 2.8 billion in the year of 2001 but that reached USD 7.85 billion by 2004, USD 13.4 billion by 2005 and USD 17.2 billion by 2006. Its annual average growth rate has hit 44.4% in 2000-2006.
Online recruitment has been growing steadily since it appeared in the human resources market of China in 1999. The number of job-search websites has broken through 2000 by the end of 2006 and the click rate reached over 4 billion person-times, and even more, the specialization degree of these websites has also been greatly improved. The market scale of online recruitment of China achieved RMB 4.5 billion in 2005 and RMB 5.03 billion in 2006.
However, traditional recruitment forms still have a large market share and newspaper-based recruitment & job fairs are still the mainstream. The market scale of newspaper-based recruitment keeps growing but its market share shows no remarkable change while the market scales of other traditional forms like job fairs and headhunter have fallen into a decline.
With its attractive future, Chinese online recruitment market has become another new investment hotspot.
The investment of Chinese enterprises in recruitment is currently far beyond enough. For instance, the recruitment cost for senior-junior talents in the US reaches USD 300-400 and its average proportion to annual salary (calculated at USD 50,000 on the average) is 1:150. The corresponding recruitment cost in China, however, is only RMB 20-50 and its proportion to annual salary (calculated at RMB 10,000-12,000) is 1:2500. Therefore, the recruitment market shows huge potential. Moreover, as the sustainable development of China's economy, the recruitment market scale in China will be constantly expanded at a steady growth rate.
