Online recruitment research - part two!

Debate regarding research and statistics is excellent news as which ever source of information you choose to use it's important that you ask questions about how the figures are calculated and the processes behind the research. Without this level of interest it's possible to accept whatever media owners choose to tell you. This can only be a bad thing and could lead to a return to the dark days of online recruitment when sales teams tried to impress advertisers with high, yet meaningless figures, such as hits in order to win business.

If you choose to accept figures unquestioningly this can lead to making the wrong media selection, which in turn can lead to you getting irrelevant responses to your online recruitment advertisements which ultimately will mean you'll spend time wading through irrelevant applications rather than enjoying the benefits that online recruitment has to offer. So although research and statistics might not seem immediately relevant to your business we think they can be useful and can help you get the most out of online recruitment.

After last month's newsletter we spoke to Hitwise who said that we'd only talked about a small element of their offering and that there was much more to Hitwise than competitive ranking. Because Hitwise monitor the records of ISP's they also have information about the terms and phrases internet users use in search engines and the sites that they end up visiting after searching with these terms. This means that they have a real insight into successful and unsuccessful search terms and this insight can have a massive impact on search engine marketing - whether it's search engine optimisation or key word sponsorship.

For example the Hitwise Search Terms reports can show you the search terms that users are using to visit other sites in your sector including your competitor's sites and this information can help you focus on the most successful keywords in your sector and greatly improve the performance of your search engine marketing.

Hitwise have kindly prepared a complimentary report specially for the online recruitment industry. To obtain a copy of the report just email support@hitwise.co.uk with 'Hitwise Recruitment Report' as the subject of your email.

NORAS update

We're currently making preparations for NORAS 2005 and held a series of consultation meetings with HR professioanls, recruitment consultancy professionals, recruitment advertising agencies and job boards in June so that we could incorporate your feedback into our plans for the research. You can download the actions from those meetings as a pdf by clicking here. Approximately 30 sites will be participating in the next wave of NORAS and the results are due for publication in February 2005. Please register if you want to receive your free copy of the NORAS Winter 2005 results booklet as soon as it is available.