Job Boards in Ireland While there are large employers and recruitment agencies with significant online recruitment activity in areas such as Search Engine Marketing, Social Networks etc., the majority of online recruitment activity in Ireland is delivered via online job boards. So in this article we will focus on this area.

Thankfully, unlike the UK and the US with their multitudes of many hundreds and thousands of job boards, Ireland offers employers a manageable number of job boards to choose from.

The generalist job boards in Ireland.

The Irish job board market is dominated by the Saongroup (owned by mobile telecoms entrepreneur, Denis O'Brien) which operates a portfolio of recruitment websites such as Irishjobs.ie, Jobs.ie, NIjobs.com as well as a plethora of network sites (sites that simply reproduce relevant jobs from the larger sites) such as fitnessjobs.ie, graduatejobs.ie etc.

All of the Saongroup websites run on the same solid if rather uninspiring platform. Still, they offer all the usual job board features and services such as CV uploads, user accounts etc. Whatever thoughts we have about the platform technology, the numbers can't be denied: in January 2008, Irishjobs.ie was ABCE audited at 526,548 unique users a month. (Irishjobs.ie is the only Irish job board that has had its user traffic audited in recent years.)

From our analysis, Jobs.ie would seem to have similar traffic, so between these two sites the Saongroup reaches a significant share of the Irish working population. It should also be noted that when we conducted a Mystery Shopper call to Jobs.ie in 2007 as part of a review of job boards in Ireland, it scored the best of all the sites we reviewed (Click here to visit the 2007 Mystery Shopper Review)

Beyond Saongroup, the global online recruitment brand Monster also has a presence in Ireland with Monster.ie. Traffic is estimated to be around the 100,000 unique users mark, but we haven't been able to confirm this. Ireland also has a number of generalist newspaper-owned/backed job boards. Loadzajobs.ie, owned by Independent News & Media, is a popular job board that benefits from its being promoted in Ireland's largest circulation daily newspaper, the Irish Independent. It offers employers a standard online job advertising product range, but you can also combine it with print recruitment advertising options in the various INM newspapers. The IrishTimes offers a similar offering via its online job board, IrishTimes.com/jobs. 

RecruitIreland.com (owned by Thomas Crosbie Holdings Ltd, publishers of the Irish Examiner) is another popular generalist job boards that has significant presence in the market. It offers an estimated audience of around 170,000 unique users per month and an excellent suite of products and services for employers.

In the graphic below, we show the estimated audience reach for the more popular generalist sites we mention here. The graph is drawn from Alexa.com and we would not suggest that this be taken as a definitive statement of audience reach. However, it does give an indication of traffic trends for the sites.

The Specialist Job Boards

Beyond these generalists, there is the beginnings of a real niche job board sector. This segment is being driven largely by one company Jobs Online Group, which operates a suite of niche sites Salesjobs.ie, Computerjobs.ie and Accountantjobs.ie. However, there are a number of other specialists job boards including retailsjobs365.ie, activelink.ie, Irelandhoteljobs.com for example. Obviously, audiences at the niche job boards will be much smaller than at the generalist, but because niche audiences are targeted they can offer employers a viable online recruitment option.

In addition to the Irish sites, many of the UK niche sites attract significant interest from Irish employers and job seekers alike. In recent times, Ireland has been successful in attracting large US multinationals to set up European HQ's in Dublin. However, Ireland small population simply can't resource all such roles at global companies and the hiring terrain and online recruitment campaigns for many senior management, executive and technical positions at such companies often includes the UK and beyond.

In addition, certain sectors (IT, Accountancy and Finance in particular) are talent short and employers often look to the UK for candidates. As an indication of things to come, perhaps, the UK IT specialist site Cwjobs recently opened a sales office in Dublin.

Buyer Beware 

This is far from the end of the story for job boards in Ireland. There are many many more. For example, FAS.ie (run by the government training agency), gumtree.ie, employireland.com offer other viable options.  But we would have to advise caution in going beyond the job boards we mention in this article or that we include in whatjobsite.com. We have found too many job boards that have little to offer the employer. The sites look old and job numbers are low, which can only lead one to assume that their attractiveness to job seekers is limited.

What's more, often times Irish website legislation isn't being followed: there's little or no contact information, company name and registration number isn't represented etc. So, one can't even be sure about the viability of such websites. And too many of these sites are funded by Google ads. In many ways we'd have to view this as a warning sign: if a job site can't get anybody to pay for job ads, then there is something wrong with it.

Irish employers are in a good position when it comes to online recruitment advertising. The limited number or sites and the undoubted quality of these sites means that vacancy advertising on job boards should be a real and compelling recruitment option for any employer. 

Article updated: September 2008

Photo © Pontus Edenberg | Dreamstime.com

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