Monday, December 04, 2006
Guardian Cash Bonanza Under Threat
The Guardian is effectively being subsidised by the government and could go bust if a Tory government introduced a ban on public sector recruitment through newspaper ads. At present, government recruiting is costing the taxpayer in excess of £800 million per year. Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, is promising to change the system to allows jobs to be advertised for free on a new official website. The cost of running the website would be approximately £5 million per year.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Well, unless the Tories know something about IT procurement that Labour don't, that should probably read £50 million if not £500 million.
Still, no price too high, if it bankrupts the Grauniad eh :wink: ?
Procurement is handled elsewhere. Recruitment is handled by Labour's in-house magazine, the Guardian.
I think the previous poster was referring to the £5m website cost, which does sound like an enormous understatement even given the running costs of comparable private sector sites.
John B
5 million quid is more than enough to run a website. It's government job ads not a NASA space programme. And think of the revenue a site like that could generate. It would pay for itself.
No it isn't. This site would need to offer more than a million jobs a year; Monster.com spends about $180m excluding sales and marketing and salaries to offer about 12m jobs.
And the revenue will be generated from whom, exactly? If you're suggesting charging applicants, forget it: it doesn't work and never will. Meanwhile, banner ads for non-recruitment services would strangle private sector online business.
John B
What are you going on about Monster.com for? We're not talking about Monster.com we're talking about a central hub where government jobs will be advertised. So you might as well just accept the fact that the Guardian will go bust when the state funding it currently relies on is taken away. This should be a cause for celebration not pithy comments about Monster.com.
Because monster.com are a best-practice private jobs website, and therefore do the same thing that your pet government jobs database would do.
Do you believe the government will be able to run a job website more efficiently than the private sector market leader? If you do, why aren't you a communist already?
John B
You seem to have misunderstood. The Conservatives aren't talking about competing with anyone. They're talking about allowing government departments and local authorities to advertise their vacancies free of charge. The net result will be massive cost savings for those departments and local authorities which choose to use the service and an anti-British, anti-semitic rag - the Guardian - going into administration. You should be celebrating.
For pestering me.
They sailed on the Sloop John B...
UKDP - you are right. Monster has to market itself to advertisers and clients carefully pitching ads etc. The website we're talking about is a clearing house - little more than a database.
Nevertheless, I'll speak to my friend who works in Monster's international IT department (it's in Prague) to see what he has to say.
Post a Comment