I have reviewed a considerable amount of job boards, and job search tools in the past months while getting ready to launch our recent findjobsin.com and checking how it fits in the current European market. I have realized that most of them if not all still include the number of jobs available in their home pages, probably following an old trend from the first Internet boom back in the 90's: The war of numbers as the only means of competition. How effective is that in terms of revenue? how appealing is that to jobseekers?
We can analyze data from NORAS report, despite 4 of the top job boards did not participate. If we leave out all the sector specific jobboards to avoid the existing bias, we come out with 12 representative job boards. Here's the correlation between unique visitors and number of available jobs. My statistical analysis concludes that there is no correlation.
So here you are a number of random thoughts and facts from my research:
- Winning the war of numbers doesn't make a job board more appealing to users, and the only figure that is appealing to advertisers is the number of users. So having more jobs doesn't bring in more money (from advertising).
- The new ways of competition is based on specialization and differentiation. Make your site different and you will find your niche of users. Innovation is the key.
- Sector and regional job boards have a better ratio Unique visitors / Available job. They are more efficient.
- Users do not look for volume any more, they look for relevancy and matching expectations results when accessing the Internet.
1 comments:
What is said seems to me mostly true, I think, the only people that will be impressed with numbers are the ones that comes to a job-board for the first time.
But users that have searched and subscribed your web know that those numbres arent really true.
Post a Comment