Home : Newsletters : 2002 : July
Enhance Media have conducted a benchmarking study on behalf of IQPC Exchange for the second consecutive year. This year’s survey was carried out at the IQPC E-HR Exchange that was held on June 26th and 27th. The study aims to take a snapshot of current levels of online recruitment activity and provides HR professionals with the chance to benchmark their activity against that of their peers. Because the survey has been conducted for two consecutive years it is also possible to identify market trends.
The results of the study show that online recruitment spends have increased in the last 12 months and recruiters are now advertising on more job boards. In 2001 the average amount spent on online recruitment in the last year was £21,000, in 2002 the figure is £26,700. One year ago HR professionals were advertising on an average of 2.5 job boards, this year the average figure is 3.3.
Despite the economic conditions over the last twelve months online recruitment activity has increased, this may be because recruiters are beginning to fully enjoy the benefits of online recruitment and recognise the savings that the medium offers compared to more traditional media.
The distribution of reported online recruitment spends forms a classic ‘U’ shaped graph, with respondents clustered either in low spending or high spending areas. This is interesting as it may suggest that HR professionals have either adopted online recruitment and are spending heavily or they are not spending at all; there seem to be few HR professionals in the ‘mid-spending’ range. This might show that the industry as a whole still has some work to do in order to convince the HR community that using the internet as a recruitment tool is effective and a viable alternative to traditional means.
More positive news came from increased satisfaction with return on investment in online recruitment. 56% of HR professionals said they thought they had received a good return on their online recruitment investment, compared to 24% in 2001. 42% said that their MD or FD thought they had received a good return on their investment in the medium, compared to a figure of 21% in 2001. Online recruitment spend may be more targeted, recruiters may have learned from previous experiences or measurement techniques may have evolved in the last year. 86% of those surveyed also believed that their online recruitment activities would increase in the next 12 months.
50% of HR professionals believed that their corporate websites provided the best source of quality candidates, up from 40% in 2001. This compares to 8% who think generic job boards are the best source of quality candidates and 15% who favour sector specific recruitment sites. Employers prefer to receive completed application forms from their own sites rather than from job boards. Once job seekers are using a corporate recruitment site they are safe from the temptation of looking at competitor’s jobs and employers have the chance to express an unlimited amount of information about their organisation and vacancies.
Employers will always have to drive traffic to their corporate sites and the use of job boards may change to reflect this. However it is unlikely that job boards will be bypassed altogether by employers advertising directly on lifestyle or interest sites in order to attract job seekers. Lifestyle sites are useful for attracting passive job seekers, but the active job seeker should not be neglected and the best place to target active job seekers are job boards. Additionally there are only a handful of employers who have strong enough brands to communicate directly with job seekers without the help of a job board.
Finally the study identified the integration of backend technology as the most important issue facing online recruitment for the second consecutive year. This may be because the use of this sorting and sifting technology is vital if the full benefits of online recruitment are to be enjoyed.
Unlike NORAS, which has a sample size of 7,680, the IQPC Exchange / Enhance Media benchmarking study has a sample size of approximately 40 respondents for most questions. This means that although the data is still reliable, it should only be used as a guide to identifying trends. The results though are particularly interesting as they show that despite adverse economic conditions the use of and confidence in online recruitment is increasing.
A booklet of the IQPC Exchange / Enhance Media Benchmarking Study is available as a pdf - please reply email info@enhancemedia.co.uk with ‘IQPC results please’ as the subject header for your free copy.