Home : Newsletters : 2004 : January/February
Within most advertising based media it’s accepted that it
is a good idea to direct your advertising towards those whom you
want to communicate with. Because of the acceptance of this principle
different media have adopted standard ways of comparing the different
propositions within their sectors. For example the National Readership
Survey (NRS) enables the direct comparison of the readers of different
national newspapers and Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board
(BARB) allows the comparison of the viewers of different television
channels and programmes. Using this data advertisers interested
in these media can make informed advertising decisions that enable
them to more effectively direct their message towards their target
audience and consequently get a better return from their advertising
budget.
There is no reason why this principle of comparing available options
and selecting the proposition with the most appropriate audience
should not equally apply to the online recruitment industry. In
fact there are strong arguments as to why it’s even more important
for our industry to adopt transparent and objective ways of communicating
information with potential customers.
Firstly online recruitment media owners have previously suffered from a poor reputation when it comes to providing advertisers with data; in the past too many job boards have used irrelevant metrics to justify over ambitious claims about their sites. This has led to unrealistic expectations amongst advertisers and frequently a disappointment with the service delivered. This has not encouraged recruitment professionals to persevere with the internet as a recruitment tool.
Secondly as a relatively new industry online recruitment suffers from the lack of an established track record that encourages advertisers to adopt online solutions. Against this background it’s vitally important that sites are able to supply advertisers with credible and objective data in order to encourage advertising decisions.
NORAS is the online recruitment industry’s best way of providing advertisers with the level of data that they need to compare sites and to make an informed advertising decision. NORAS enables recruiters to identify the site that has the right profile of candidates for their specific recruitment needs. Using NORAS to choose your advertising partner should mean that advertisers get a better, more targeted response from those candidates they want to recruit and receive less response from irrelevant applicants. Audience profile isn’t the only factor you should use when choosing which job board to advertise with, other factors are important, such as price, customer service, the range of advertising packages available, brand fit and the ability of the site to provide meaningful post advertising feedback, however getting your message to the right audience should be a fundamental element of the decision making process.
NORAS isn’t perfect yet, some key players such as JobServe, Jobsite and Monster don’t yet participate in the research and we’re learning which data is useful to advertisers and which is less useful all the time. However 17 of the UK’s leading sites do participate in NORAS and the fact that these sites can collaborate effectively in order to provide advertisers with independent and objective data must be regarded as a good thing for the industry.
Next month we’ll have a look at how you can use the NORAS results to get more from the internet as a recruitment tool and if you haven’t done so already I urge to download the NORAS results booklet, it contains more data about more of the UK’s leading sites gathered from more online job seekers than any other piece of research available. And it’s free!
You can download the results of NORAS Winter 2004 as a pdf by clicking here http://www.noras.co.uk/forms/register.html)
Click here for a full list of the 17 sites participating in NORAS. (http://www.noras.co.uk/participants.html)
Click here for a list of questions that we use to gather the demographic data used in NORAS. (http://www.noras.co.uk/questions/index.html)
Click here for more information on the ABC ELECTRONIC audits that
we use to compare the sizes of the site in NORAS. (http://www.abce.org.uk/links/noras)
If you’re a job board and you want to find out more about
getting involved in NORAS then click here (http://www.noras.co.uk/participate.html)