Polaris Media | Innovate Local

Torgeir Roness, Business Developer, Polaris Media Advertising

June 4, 2025 Case no. 29

Advertising

How Polaris is rebuilding sales in recruitment focusing on passive job seekers

In the vertical market of open job positions, Polaris Media in Norway has built unique and successful online products that focus on its unique supply of "passive job seekers". Products are widgets such as carousels, premium banners and podcasts. The product portfolio works both for regionals and smaller locals in synergy and competes well with social media.

Presented by Torgeir Roness, Business developer,
Polaris Media Advertising in Trondheim, Norway

By Niklas Jonason

Actionable ideas in short - Job ads at Polaris

Targeting passive candidates: Focus on individuals not actively job-hunting but open to opportunities.
Carousel visibility: Job carousels regionally distributed for repeated exposure in trusted environments.
Premium products: Job Premium and Uka Stilling (Job of the Week) provide guaranteed visibility and brand-safe positioning.
In-house ad platform: JobAdmin keeps all campaign creation, performance and data ownership in one place.
Human-led sales: Emphasis on consulting and personalized packages, rather than self-service or API integrations.
Podcasts for recruitment: "Pod about the job" adds depth and authenticity, lowering the barrier to application.

Article Summary

Polaris Media has crafted a recruitment advertising strategy based on insight, product innovation and a strong regional foundation. Rather than chasing active job seekers, their recruitment portfolio is built around reaching passive candidates — individuals not actively job searching but open to new roles.

Key to this is attention-grabbing placements (like carousels, premium ad slots, and sponsored editorial-style articles) and barrier-lowering formats (such as recruitment podcasts and consulting on content, tone and clarity). The aim is not just visibility, but relevance and motivation.

All products are managed in-house through the JobAdmin platform, giving Polaris full control over delivery and data. A human sales process, involving local knowledge and relationship-building, underpins the offer. Revenue has grown or stabilized across regions despite an overall market decline, demonstrating the effectiveness of this nuanced, local-first approach.

Background of Polaris

Polaris Media is a major Norwegian media group with 65 local and regional newspapers in Norway and Sweden. Structured into six regions, the group emphasizes synergy between large and small titles. Polaris prioritizes scalable innovation, allowing smaller newspapers to benefit from tech and product development at group level. Based in Trondheim, the group include Adresseavisen, Sunnmørsposten and Romsdals Budstikke. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

About the Speaker – Torgeir Roness

Torgeir Roness,*1996, is a business developer at Polaris Media Advertising based in Trondheim, Norway. He has a Master in Economy and Marketing. Despite his young age, he has already worked in startup environments and with B2C retail sales (selling beds and underpants). At Polaris, he is responsible for job advertising, real estate, affiliate marketing, and verticals like obituaries. Torgeir combines strategic thinking with data-driven processes and close sales collaboration.

Positioning compared to market leader

Polaris has been participating in building up the absolute market leader among job web sites i Norway, Finn.no. As a matter of fact they still own a small share of Finn.no next to the majority owner Norwegian publisher Schibsted.
Finn.no is a "must" when recruiting in Norway. Among job seekers 7 of 10 prefer to follow open job positions on Finn.no.

The last few years a rapid decline in recrutiment has affected the players on the market.

So there were two challenges for Polaris and for Torgeir when he joined the company about 18 months ago:

Polaris job ads operated in a vertical with negative growth...
...and in a market dominated by a clear monopolist who already has a guaranteed slice of the budget.

So the question was: How can Polaris claim as much as possible of the remaining share of wallet?

How Polaris defines and reaches passive candidates

A passive job seeker is a person who isn’t actively looking for a new job, but who could be open to switching if the right opportunity comes along. This means colder leads but a larger talent pool.

The decision of the Polaris team was to position itself as the main channel for passive job seekers. Polaris defines passive candidates as individuals not actively looking for work but open to the right opportunity. These individuals represent about 50% of the workforce. To reach them, Polaris leverages local media environments that people trust and interact with daily — unlike job boards, which rely on active search.

To build the product to target passive candidates Polaris Media has divided the business development focus into two key areas:

Attention. You won't get your dream candidate unless you manage to get your job ad in front of them.
Information. Designed to lower the barriers that prevents passive candidates from applying

Qualified candidates is the key phrase here.. You can’t rely solely on active job seekers. The idea is that recrutiters do what they do best and Polaris Media provides:

Media mix assessment
Support in shaping message
Marketing advice

The message to advertisers is therefoe: Have a precense outside traditional job platforms. “Everyone” browses their local newspaper. Only a selected few browses classified ads.

..

Products: Carousels and regional distribution logic

Polaris' carousel format is based on postal-code targeting. Ads are most visible in proximity to the job's location, decreasing outward like a ripple. This allows the ad to reach both local candidates and potential returnees, while respecting commuter distances across tightly clustered regional titles.

JobAdmin and internal product control

All recruitment ads are managed through Polaris’ proprietary platform, JobAdmin. This allows full editorial control, better support for advertisers, campaign data transparency, and better product integration across local titles.

Additional products

Torgeir and his team has added new products in their job ads portfolio:

"Job of the week" with attention as focus: a KISS (Keep It Stipid Simple) solution that is easy to understand. Just as the job carousel it contains short versions of job ads. However it covers all screens on mobile devices with an averaghe daily views per user of minimum 4,4 times! ☝

"Job Premium" also with attention has highest priority: is a job ad that looks like a banner and is integrated in the programmatic ad platform.

"The pod about the Job" with information as the priority: is a podcast-format produced by Polaris for Job Advertiosers. It lowers the treshold for qualified candidates because they get more confident that they actually match the role, In the format of a reverse job interview it takes away the four bigegst barriers to applying for a job which are unclear job ads. The podcast format solves a number of common problems for job applicants:
- Unclear job description
- Lack of clarity around salary and benefits
- Uncertainty about own qualifications
- Unclear work environment and company culture

Results: When the market struggles, we scramble

Torgeir is happy with the developments:

Growth in 4 out of 6 regions, stabilized the other two
Order amount same, order value up.
The focus on information is paying off through better and more motivated candidates, more effective interviews and a broader range of candidates. No customer yet has used the response guarantee.
For the organisation positive synergies combined larger and smaller titles. "You scratch my back — I’ll scratch yours".

Main Challenges and Learnings

Of course Torgeir and his team has challanges:

One of the main challenges is and was getting recruitment into everyone's sales toolbox. So many sales reps have their usual clients, their usual sales style, and changing those habits, especially when selling to HR, is that marketing can be challenging.
When selling, you want to be the smartest person in the room. Torgeir remembers from his time as a bed sales man. "I didn't know every specification for every brand that we sold. So I sold the ones that I knew the best, the ones I was trained on and avoided the ones I didn't fully understand. Right now, not all of our sales reps feel that way when it comes to recruitment. So our response is training and constant learning.

And concerning learnings to consider for companies that want advance in job advertising, Torgeir has some useful advice:

"We're investing really hard in internal competence. Just this morning, we had an ad hour doing sharing some learnings from some people to the others. But if there's some pointers I can give you, it's this."
"When making products and strategies, know all of your targets. So know who you're trying to reach, the candidate and know who you're trying to sell to, the client."
"Listen carefully to your own salespeople. Collect feedback from everyone, from large, from small clients, from top sellers, from new sales reps."
"Refine the insights, share them in the right forums. And lastly, just pick a strategy and be the best at it. If we looked at the revenue for example, job premium, the first couple of months, we would have shut it down. However, since we picked the strategy, we wanted to have it for a year or so just to get the mill going. And right now, it's our top performer, except the job carousel, of course.

To wrap things up, Torgeir wanted to leave participants and readers with a little bit of optimism, especially if you're feeling that market is a little bit tough right now. He thinks that the future looks great for Polaris job products. Looking ahead, their goal is to put themselves in the best possible position to take advantage of the growing optimism in the market. The graph below shows the Norwegian business leaders purchasing ambitions this year. Two clear winners stand out. It's marketing and it's recruitment. Torgeir ends "And that's a pure goal for us because we're right in the intersection of those two".☝

Questions and Answers

Question: If we say euros, about where do the products start and what are the extensions? In what range are we?

Torgeir: "The bread and butter products, the job carousel, is about € 790 for one job. This does not include the writing, not the consultinga nd not the media mix. And the job of the week, is about an additional €150. This is for our biggest titles. For the smallest titles, with down to 200 readers a day and 50 views, prices can go down to € 39.☝

Question: How do you solve the classic dilemma in selling to recruiters, that is the challenge that the sales people normally does not talk to the people that actually decides on recruitments, that is middle management in different departments? Maybee they are talking to the "TA, Talent Acquisition" people, or the the "EB, Employer Branding" people. However in most cases they do not actually made decisions in actual recruitments.

Torgeir: "That's a really, really good question. We have contact information for every company we have done deals with in the past, that's often the marketing manager or some kind of CMO. So basically it's using our contact persons already to get a good word, get our foot in the door. We also have big clients such as recruitment agencies that helps us finding new customers. ☝

Question: Can you share the percentage of big versus small employers?

Torgeir: "Around 25% of our clients or revenue is in the public sector. of cities and counties. Recently nwe have been lucky with instructions from public organisations to use less social media for recruitment. We were smiling when we read that statement from the government. Around 20% is recruitment agencies, 10% is big companies and the rest is small to medium sized businesses." ☝

Question: Do you earn most money from consulting services or from products?

Torgeir: "We earn most money from direct sales of products. The biggest packages we sell is with a write-up and maybe with a video podcast or a podcast, as well as consulting hours for Facebook marketing."☝

Question: Do you offer self-service?

Torgeir: "No, we don't. We want to keep the human connection."☝

Question: Do you offer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces to HR-systems such as ATS, Applicants Tracking Systems? We know that your competitor, on some markets, Amedia, does it (please see the presentation from Amedia from webinar last year here)?

Torgeir: "No, we don't. We want to chat with people. Doing APIs and automatic posts don't give us the opportunity to do up sales or cross sales. Only with a human connection can we ask: "hey, but what do you really want with this job?" or "Isn't this a job where you should maybe do some more marketing?".or "It's a CEO job. You should spend more". We want to keep that human touch to know what our customers really want."☝

Question: What about creating new businesses in recritment: arranging physical job expos to match local job seekers and employers, or let subscribers put in their CVs to create a CV-database for job advertisers or even resell other players products such as Indeed or LinkedIn?

Torgeir: "Yes, we sometimes dream about going into the active local job seekers community,. However for now our first priority is getting really, really good data. We are working on collecting more data than than clicks, views and impressions. We want to get data on how far in the job ad did they read so that we can iterate if we see that people fall off 40% through the job ad. We know that 40% of people who read our job ads click apply, for example. ☝

Question: You mentioned that there is a connection between the different verticals, such as real estate and jobs?

Torgeir: "Yes, we can take existing ad formats and existing learnings and just apply them to other verticals. The "job premium product" we have, we also have for real estate, like a property premium for expensive apartments or houses. ☝

Useful links and contact information

The webinar presentation can be downloaded here.
The presenter of the case, Torgeir Roness, business developer at Polaris Media Advertising, can be reached via his email-address.
The web site of Polaris Media is here and of its main newspaper web site Adressa.no.

You are welcome to contact the WAN-IFRA Innovate Local team,
if you have questions or examples of similar cases.
Cecilia Campbell: c.campbell@wan-ifra.org
Niklas Jonason: n.jonason@wan-ifra.org