Home : Newsletters : 2004 : April
The NORAS results booklet includes the results tables for all the questions asked of the 12,000 online job seekers who take part in the research.
For example the results booklet shows that on average 32% of the users of the job boards that participate in NORAS live in the Carlton London TV region (this is an average figure for all the participating sites, the figures for the individual participants vary greatly from S1Jobs 1% to London Jobs 71%). The booklet also shows that on average 6% of the users of sites participating in NORAS work for an employer in the retail sector.
However as a static document the booklet can't show you the percentage of users who live in the Carlton London TV region AND who work for an employer in the retail sector. In order to get this information you need to run a query against the 'raw' NORAS data.
To make these queries possible we've built an online data interrogation
tool called NORAS interactive that allows you to drill down into
the NORAS results in more detail and get more from the research.
In the example above it's possible to ascertain that on average
2% of the users of all sites participating in NORAS live in the
Carlton London TV region AND work for an employer in the retail
sector.
The ability to conduct queries of the data behind NORAS enables
you to evaluate which job board has the right audience for you,
whatever your recruitment needs. This evaluation, along with other
criteria, can be vital when determining which job board you should
choose as an advertising partner.
NORAS interactive produces two pieces of information that can be used when comparing job boards - the percentage of each site's users that match the specified criteria and the estimated number of candidates that the site can deliver that match your criteria. The estimated number of candidates is calculated by applying the percentage of matching candidates to the number of users eligible to work in the UK (which in turn is derived from each site's ABC ELECTRONIC audit).
In the original example NORAS interactive shows that London Jobs has the highest percentage of users that live in the Carlton London TV region AND work for a retail employer with 10%. NORAS also shows that Total Jobs has the largest number of candidates that match these criteria with 25,000.
So which piece of information is most useful, should you take into account the percentage of matching users or the estimated number of candidates that each site delivers?
One of the biggest criticisms we hear about online recruitment is that advertising on job boards produces too much irrelevant response. When trying to cut down on the number of irrelevant responses it's important to take into account the percentage of a site's users that match your target audience. In the above example 10% of London Jobs' users match the audience profile specified. This means that if 100 random London Jobs users were to respond to an advertisement requiring London based users working in the retail sector then one in every ten applications would be from relevant candidates (of course in reality responses aren't generated randomly and the actual proportion of relevant candidates would be much higher).
On the other hand if the aim of advertising online is to attract as much response as possible then the number of matching candidates should be taken into account. In the example above Total Jobs delivers the most candidates that match the specified criteria (25,000) even though the site has a lower percentage of matching candidates (3%).
The answer is that both audience profile and candidates numbers are useful metrics when assessing the users of job boards. Although we believe that the audience information generated through NORAS interactive is important when selecting job boards you should still take other factors into account when choosing your advertising partner. Other considerations should include the range of advertising options available to you, the level of customer service offered, testimonials and client feedback, the ability of the site to provide you with post campaign analysis to help you evaluate their performance and of course price!
If you want to know more about the audiences of a selection of the UK's leading job boards and drill down further into the NORAS results then NORAS interactive should be of interest to you. Annual corporate subscriptions to NORAS interactive for multiple users are available now at £750 + VAT.
For a free trial of NORAS interactive please click here for your log in details. This will allow you to log into the basic version of NORAS interactive until Friday 23rd April and should enable you to get a feel for the system. Please call 020 7801 6266 to take out your subscription or if you have any queries regarding using NORAS interactive.
Online recruitment seminar
Our next open online recruitment seminar is on 13th May in Central London - click here for more details.
Our last online recruitment seminar took place in March. Delegate feedback included