Home : Newsletters : 2003 : January
The latest wave of NORAS, Winter 2003, was released on January 20th. The research features information on the audiences of 11 of the UK’s top job boards. The results are a valuable tool for recruiters as they can be used to determine which job board is best in terms of audience for your recruitment needs. Advertising on the job board with the most appropriate audience will mean that you will receive a better, more targeted response to your online vacancies.
NORAS is the primary source of independent and credible information on UK job boards. The user demographics used in NORAS were collected on our behalf by the online research company Red Sheriff and all user numbers used in NORAS have been independently audited by Electronic ABC, the UK’s leading independent traffic auditors. All figures produced by Electronic ABC conform to internationally agreed traffic auditing standards.
We feel that the credibility of the data used in NORAS is important. Online recruitment is a relatively new media and because of this site owners within the sector have been able to get away with using unsubstantiated traffic figures and irrelevant statistics – finding it easy to impress potential advertisers with millions of ‘hits’ and similar claims. Basing advertising decisions on these figures has led to some advertisers selecting inappropriate job boards and consequently achieving a poor response to their vacancies. This has not helped online recruitment’s reputation.
The sites participating in NORAS (Fish4Jobs, PeopleBank, PlanetRecruit, Total Jobs, Workthing, Anderselite, AviationJobSearch, HotRecruit, Jobs AC, JobsGoPublic and Prospects) have made a commitment to the online recruitment industry to provide advertisers with comparable and meaningful information to facilitate advertising decisions.
It’s worth asking sites that don’t participate in NORAS why they are not involved. There might be a very good reason for this; they may operate in a very specialist sector or their current customer base may not yet demand the levels of information provided by NORAS. However it may be that sites not involved in NORAS are unwilling to be compared to their competitors or unable to provide user numbers that can be audited by Electronic ABC.
If a site is unwilling to have its audience openly compared to the audiences of its competitors then this is potentially a serious problem. When you buy online recruitment advertisements you are effectively buying access to a pool of candidates. If you are unable to assess whether or not these candidates are the type of candidates that you wish to recruit then you should seriously consider whether or not you want to spend money in order to gain access to them.
If a site is unable to have its user numbers independently audited then you should be sceptical about all of its traffic figures. One of the strengths of online recruitment is that you are able to track how many people have viewed and applied for your vacancy. This information should be invaluable when constructing an ongoing online recruitment strategy. If a site is unable to provide you with one of the most basic pieces of information – how many users it has – how can you trust any figures that they subsequently provide regarding response to your advertisement?
Its possible to consider lots of factors when selecting a job board; testimonials provided by current advertisers, the financial stability of the site, the levels of customer service provided and the suitability of the advertising packages offered, however the availability of meaningful information regarding a site’s audience should be a key factor when choosing a site. Online recruitment’s own industry body, the Association of Online Recruiters recognise this and support NORAS because they feel it makes a valuable contribution towards making meaningful and comparable information easily available to advertisers.
Further details regarding NORAS can be found by clicking here. The NORAS results booklet contains over 30 tables comparing the audiences of the participating sites across key recruitment criteria. You can obtain your free copy of the booklet by emailing noras@enhancemedia.co.uk. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding NORAS or if you have any suggestions as to topics you’d like to see covered in the next wave.