Shortlist’s demise is a disaster for the local recruitment industry
On Tuesday morning industry news service Shortlist published a short article informing subscribers of its own demise.
I was surprised, not shocked but incredibly disappointed.
As long-term readers would know, many of my forensic pieces referenced information first published by Shortlist.
The most highly-viewed of those blogs are:
Big bang start-ups: The rise and fall of FutureYou
Another one bites the dust: The rise and fall of HJB
Ignite/Clarius board put on notice by shareholders at AGM (just one of many blogs I wrote about this company)
Rubicor 2018 results: Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck (just one of many blogs I wrote about this company)
If you remove the Shortlist-referenced information from those blogs (and many other similar blogs) they become substantially less evidence-based, engaging, and credible as a result.
Access to quality reporting is just one of the reasons I have been a Shortlist subscriber for as long as I can recall.
Less than $1000 for 48 weeks of eight to 15 stories a week is incredible value, especially for a publication that employs journalists who attend and report on industry events (rather than using AI to lift stories or simply publishing agency or vendor press releases verbatim).
Yet not enough owners and leaders in our industry felt the same way.
Consequently, the world’s seventh-largest global recruitment agency market will not have a single dedicated news source as of tomorrow morning.
To repeat: today is the last day of publishing for the sole journal of record for an industry generating over $25 billion in annual sales.
This is appalling and we only have ourselves to blame.
In an era of vast amounts of free content, paying anything for written content is an affront to many consumers who expect something of substance for free.
As we know from the Facebook business model, anything free is not free at all.
Content platforms provide free access; in return, you give the platform permission to capture, store and use your viewing data for commercial resale.
Your viewing data is gold as it allows the platform to offer advertisers a specific demographic profile to which they can target their wares.
I rarely use Facebook because it’s become overloaded with promotional content that I can’t be bothered scrolling through.
If you pay for subscriber content, it almost always comes with no advertising (although this changes over time, e.g., recently, Amazon Prime started running ads during its programs. You can avoid the ads by paying a higher monthly subscription).
It may have escaped your notice, but Shortlist doesn’t carry advertising – its pages are clean and uncluttered by ads.
Apart from supporting Shortlist I pay annual subscription fees to a range of online content providers, ranging from massive institutions (eg Harvard Business Review), to self-publishing platforms (eg Medium) to global public intellectuals (eg Sam Harris), to local news platforms (eg Crikey) and to niche personal interests (eg Cricket Et Al).
As a content consumer I support content providers I value with the most important kind of support – a paid annual subscription.
In 1998 Michael Burns, with no background in the recruitment industry, took a punt and started ShortList with business partner David Vincent when online paid subscriber publications in Australia could be counted on two hands.
Two years later, he made the smartest professional decision of his life (okay, I am biased) when he hired a fresh Arts graduate from the University of Newcastle who was keen to put her communications major to good use as a journalist. However, like her employer two years previously, she was starting from ground zero in the recruitment industry.
Jo Knox was this hard-working budding journalist who quickly proved her competence and built Shortlist’s credibility with the right balance of objectivity, humour, and skepticism over the next two years (which she has never lost in the subsequent two decades).
In 2002 Michael and David asked Jo to start a workplace safety/workers’ compensation new service, OHS Alert, which quickly took off and is still going strong today.
Jo launched Recruiter Daily in 2006, while still working on OHS Alert, before moving there full-time and using it as a testbed for the launch of HR Daily in 2008. Recruiter Daily closed in 2013 while HR Daily has gone from strength to strength.
In 2007 New Zealander Esther McLaren to joined the Shortlist team who proved to be another competent journalist who quickly became respected by local recruitment agency owners and leaders (and even took it on the chin when I wrote a blog in 2011 criticising Shortlist’s reporting). Esther subsequently became Shortlist’s editor and remained in the company’s employ until early 2014.
Over the years, other Shortlist team members who became familiar with and respected by the Australian recruitment community include Stella Gray, Camille Howard, Teresa Yovela and Prue Moodie.
Jo subsequently became an owner of the business and currently is a director of the larger Specialist News company, since its merger with HR Publications in late 2022.
When I contacted Jo about the decision, she told me the cost of producing articles that Shortlist subscribers will pay for has increased, disproportionately compared to the company’s other titles.
“Overall, we definitely had to work a lot harder for every dollar of profit that Shortlist made, compared to our other news sites, and over the years it's become a much smaller part of the business.
The closure makes perfect business sense; nonetheless it’s incredibly sad to say goodbye to something that’s been a part of the industry and people’s lives for so long.”
Thanks, Jo, Michael, and your varied team members over the years. You have been a welcome and valued part of the local recruitment scene for 27 years, and I am devastated that we did not value your contribution enough.
Related blogs
Vendor Reports: Statistics, damn lies, incompetence and outright BS
Photo (below): with Jo Knox at the Cox Purtell 30th Anniversary party, February 2024
