Home : Newsletters : 2006 : July
NORAS 2006 update results
The NORAS 2006 Update results are now available for free from www.noras.co.uk. The results feature new ABC ELECTRONIC audits for five sites - doctorjob.com (79,433 Unique Users), Prospects.ac.uk (520,840), Scotcareers (110,401), tesjobs (383,096) and TipTopJob (157,412). The new Unique User figures have also been fed into NORAS interactive - the online tool that easily allows you to see how many candidates each site has that match your recruitment criteria. NORAS interactive is also free to anyone that registers at www.noras.co.uk. The audits for these sites were all taken from March 2006, which was chosen at random from three possible audit months - March, April and May and it's this 'random auditing' methodology that is one of the major changes we're making for NORAS 2007.
Two ABC ELECTRONIC audits per site for NORAS 2007
For NORAS 2006 sites had one month randomly audited from September, October or November 2005 and then had the opportunity to update this figure with another random audit taken from March, April or May 2006. The theoretical upside of this was that because the sites didn't know which month was going to be audited, they couldn't load a disproportionate amount of marketing spend into one month and achieve an unusually high Unique User figure. However, it also meant that the randomly selected month was good for some sites, average for others, poor for some and impossible for others - as they were unable to audit the chosen month due to technical issues (as was the case for two sites this year). It's also worth noting that while all the sites in NORAS were having to audit months that were randomly selected, sites outside of NORAS were auditing self-selected months and were not being questioned by anyone in the industry as to the credibility of these audits.
Because of this acceptance in the market place of audits conducted during self-selected months and because of a desirability for comparability we've changed the auditing arrangements for NORAS 2007. For the results that we'll publish in January 2007, sites will have to submit an audit taken from any month in the secondhalf of 2006 and for the updated results, to be published in July 2007, sites will have to submit an audit taken from the first half of 2007.This means that all sites have a six month window to complete an audit and that all sites will be able to include a figure that they're happy with - increasing the comparability of the figures (based on the premise that comparing good with good is more useful than comparing good with average, poor and non-existent).
An additional bonus of this approach is that all sites participating in NORAS 2007 will be committing to performing two audits per year (in line with ABC ELECTRONIC guidelines).This will give recruitment advertisers more up to date figures on more sites and help the market evaluate the growth and progress of participating job boards.
Increased sample sizes for NORAS 2007
We're also further increasing the number of completed questionnaires that we collect for each site. Participating job boards will now have a sample size of between 500 and 3,000 depending on their size. The benefit of this will be that everyone will be able to drill down into the results in more detail; this will be especially relevant when assessing audiences within specific regional areas and should mean that recruiters can be confident of the reliability of the data down to the level of most UK postcode areas.
Data on applicants to be included in NORAS 2007
Finally, after considering a range of options, the NORAS participants have decided the best way to indicate response levels generated by each site is to add some additional detail to the questionnaire. This means that as well as determining the percentage of users that have ever applied for a job found online, we'll be able to see the percentage of users that have applied for a job from the site they're on. We'll also be able to apply these percentages to the Unique User figures. For example we should be able to show that Site A has 100,000 Unique Users, 75,000 of which have applied for a job found online and 50,000 that have applied for a job from Site A. We're still working on the exact wording of this question, so please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions about this.
Hopefully all this makes sense - the long and the short of it is that NORAS 2007 will include more ABC ELECTRONIC audits, feature even more robust demographic data and will help recruiters assess the response levels offered by each site. Please let us know if you've got any feedback about this.