Recruitment advertising firm TMP Worldwide collapses into administration

Sydney-based recruitment advertising firm TMP Worldwide has collapsed just months after winning four gongs at Fairfax’s Employment Marketing Awards.

It is understood that the company’s five offices in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth have been closed.

A skeleton staff working in the Sydney office met yesterday to discuss how outstanding work would be handled. It is understood that any booked advertising will be transferred to an other media buying agency.

The business is now in the hands of administrators from insolvency firm KordaMentha. Representatives from the firm were not available for comment prior to publication.

The business, which employed around 200 people at its peak, is believed to have struggled for the last 12 months due to the downturn in the recruitment sector caused by the global financial crisis.

One industry source said the company’s staff took a 20% pay cut about 12 months ago in an effort to help the business trade through the downturn.

The company was owned and run by Alex Walker, the former chief financial officer of TMP Worldwide.

He bought the business in 2006 from US based recruitment advertising company Monster Inc, who arrived in Australia 10 years earlier through the purchase of Neville Jeffress Advertising.

The company was a major supplier of recruitment advertising services to governments around Australia. Three of the four awards it won at Fairfax’s Employment Marketing Awards were for government bodies, including best campaign (for Queensland Health), best integrated campaign (for the South Australian Government) and best promotion of regional careers (for Western Australia’s prison department).

The collapse of the firm can also be taken as another sign that the print media’s famed “rivers of gold’ from classified advertising are drying up. Industry sources say TMP was a major buyer of recruitment advertising space in Fairfax and News Corp newspapers.