Dot-com makes a profit shocker

NEWS UK recruitment company RexOnline has bucked the dot-com doom and gloom trends by recording a profit. The company runs a number of sites including jobtrack.co.uk and jobmagic.net and today issued financial results which show it made a profit of £216,000 for the year in contrast with losses of £326,000 last year. RexOnline may not have the profile of rival sites Stepstone and Monster - but they also haven't relinquished profits in favour of market profile. Simon Hersh, group chief executive at RexOnline said the company had "used brains where others had used money". Being database-driven and time sensitive makes recruitment perfect for the web. RexOnline has also been able to transfer a very traditional business model to the web and push up profits because candidates are cheaper to acquire on the internet. The heavy marketing strategies applied by the major players may also come back to haunt them as competition in the market place hots up. Dan Stevenson, an analyst at Jupiter MMXI research, said the market is not big enough to support the whole range of players. "There will be more consolidation through acquisition and those that will simply go out of business." And this, he added, could also mean the demise of companies who have spent heavily on developing brands. A study by Forrester's Technographics consumer research unit shows just how taken with online recruitment job-seekers are. It suggests that 56 per cent of job-seekers on the web go straight to job sites and don't even bother to look at specific company sites for vacancies.