Time to rethink Thursdays
The Internet shows that job hunters are looking every day of the week
so why do advertisers flock to Thursdays and Fridays asks Simon Howard.
Early in my career I was carpeted for placing an ad for Civil Engineers
in Monday's Daily Telegraph. My reasoning was simple; it was the first
available day to get an urgent advertisement away (at the time there
was a 12 week waiting list for a Thursday) and anyway, what better day
for candidates to look for a job than when they had just got back from
the weekend and were facing another week of drudgery?
As it happens, there were plenty of disenchanted engineers who applied,
so I had a happy client but a furious agency head who frowned on such
a public display of “naivety” – it wasn't the “done thing” to break that
sort of convention. But 25 years later my point about Monday being a
good day to attract job-seekers is now borne out by statistics from leading
recruitment websites (see chart). In fact it's not just Monday, because
over half of all visits to Internet recruitment sites are made early
in the week between Monday and Wednesday – which in the psychology of
how we all feel about our working week, is pretty understandable.
But this in stark contrast to advertisements in newspapers which peak
on a Thursday in England and Wales and Friday in Scotland and Northern
Ireland – just when the thoughts of all those potential job seekers are
turning towards what they're doing at the weekend. Of course there is
no logic to Thursday and Friday being big “recruitment days” but there
are a couple of theories:
The first is that Thursday was the traditional pay day for millions
of hourly paid workers in England – which meant that the employment week
began on a Friday and departing workers would hand in their week's notice
on a Thursday and so start the replacement cycle. This theory is further
reinforced by the fact that in Scotland, pay day was traditionally Friday.
Of course if you are so young as to have never been paid in cash (or
even weekly), the real significance of pay days may be a little lost
on you, but trust me, from my days as a nightclub bouncer in the seventies
I remember well the tradition of the “big Thursday” night out. While
this theory accounts for much of the tradition for the regional evening
papers, where hourly paid vacancies would typically be advertised, it
doesn't account for a “big Thursday” tradition with national newspapers.
For that we have to turn to the second theory, and go back to the Daily
Telegraph in the sixties. Back then, the Telegraph ‘colour supplement'
would appear with Friday's newspaper, with the result that that edition
became the first choice for readers and advertisers alike.
At that time Fleet Street was run by the unions and newspapers were
printed in archaic conditions on archaic presses with no flexibility
on pagination. The Telegraph management (a loose term by today's standards)
couldn't help but notice this and so offered the large recruitment advertising
agencies an incentive to place their large composite advertisements on
a Thursday. Thus as the big boys migrated then so the minnows followed – and
the Thursday ritual started.
Of course all of this amounts to little more than folklore, and whichever
theory you might subscribe to, it all seems to be a rather odd way to
run an industry. Admittedly there are exceptions – The Guardian most
notably – but as long as I look at all those long faces of the Tube every
Monday morning, I can't help wanting to tell them: “Don't worry there'll
be a jobs supplement along on Thursday” which all seems a bit of a nonsense.
Simon Howard is a founder of work and
writes the weekly Jobfile column for the Sunday Times.
