In this our first newsletter we are keeping things simple. We throw a spotlight on job sites and online recruitment and what it means, in practical terms, for the smaller employer. We look at one of the key metrics to use when deciding on a job site. We introduce four new featured sites on whatjobsite. And we bring together the latest job site offers.

Please feel free to forward this issue to a colleague, and let us know if there are any topics you'd like to see us cover in upcoming issues. We'd love your feedback.

Editor
Karl Schweppe

Finding the right job site has never been easy, but it's not getting any easier. Research we have conducted has found that there are now over 1,200 job sites in the United Kingdom and Ireland. And that number will undoubtedly increase. Every week new sites covering every imaginable job type, location and industry sector are launched. Finding the right one for your vacancy is getting to be like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks.

What's frustrating for many employers is that when you have finally chosen from among these 1,200 job sites and posted a job, you don't get any good candidates. It's got to be even more frustrating when you then end up paying a recruitment consultant to fill the job and all they seem to have done is to stick the same job on a different job site and wait for the applicants to flood in.

While it might seem unfair that your job ad didn't work and theirs did, there is more to it than simply the whim of the internet god. Making online recruitment work takes effort. You have to do your homework. Recruitment consultants, recruitment advertising agencies and large corporates have all put time and money into researching job sites to find the right ones for their vacancies. That's why it works for them.

Our search engine will help you evaluate job sites to find suitable ones for your vacancy and our Help and Advice area will guide you through the recruitment process. But you'll also have to learn a little bit about choosing a job site and what makes a good one. You'll need to become familiar with user traffic and audits and how to write a job ad so that it works online. Again, our Help and Advice area will cover many of these topics.

But you'll also have to do a little bit of work yourself. To find the best job site you'll need to ring up a few of them, compare and contrast, check statistics, judge the quality of service and decide what are the best advertising options for you.

It's a little bit of work, but it's worth it. Online recruitment can save you thousands in recruitment costs. And it does work! Both for employers and candidates. According to our online poll in April, 79% of users filled a vacancy using a job site. The National Online Recruitment Audience Survey 2007 found that 56% of its surveyed job seekers had obtained a job that they had initially found online. But it only works if you put in the effort.

There are few things that are going to have a bigger impact on your company, for good or ill, than taking on a new member of staff. You want the best person available. The nice thing is that they are out there. And they are looking for a new job. Isn't finding them worth a bit of effort? And wouldn't it be nice to be able to save yourself that recruitment fee after all?

Find out more about job sites and recruiting online in our Help and Advice area.

If there is one bit of online recruitment jargon that it is worth getting a fix on it is "Unique Users." In the land of job sites, unique users are what everybody talks about. But why are unique users important? And, what are they?

According to the IFABC Global Web Standards a Unique User is "a unique and valid identifier. Sites may use (i) IP+User-Agent, (ii) Cookie and/or (iii) Registration ID." Doesn't help much, does it?

Okay, let's try again. Let us suppose that you visit www.whatjobsite.com. Once there, you read some of our wonderful articles and then, suitably edified, you leave the site. You would be counted as 1 unique user. Then another person happens to visit www.whatjobsite.com and is equally enlightened. The unique users have now gone up to 2.

However, a little later in the day, you come back to the site. This time you do a search for some job sites and, finding the right one with our zippy search engine, you leave again. Although you have visited the site twice, you are still only counted a single unique user. So the total unique users remains 2.

But why is this unique user figure important? Well, unique users can show us the popularity of a site. When abcjobs.com says that it has 50,000 unique users (unique users figures are almost always counted over the period of a month) we know that 50,000 users have visited the site. We also know that it wasn't one person visiting the site 50,000 times. What's more, when xyzjobs.com says it has 85,000 unique users, we know that it is a far more popular site than abcjobs.com and, consequently, might be a better place for our job ad.

Be advised, however, that there are many more issues surrounding unique users that will play on your choice of job site, but we'll have to look at them another day. Suffice to say that, for our present purposes, unique users give us a pretty good idea of the popularity of a site and, therefore, whether it is the right site for the job.

This month we welcome four new niche sites from the from the highly-regarded TotalJobs Group. If you are recruiting for positions in their specialities, be sure to take a look at these sites.

• CareerStructure.com: a site for professionals in construction, engineering, architecture and design.
• RetailChoice.com: a site covering the whole gamut of job in the retail sector.
• Salestarget.co.uk: a site dedicated exclusively to sales jobs.
• CWjobs.co.uk: a site dedicated to IT and IT support roles.

Here's our round up of the current offers from our trawl of the job sites:

Salestarget.co.uk is currently offering an online posting price of £165 (normal price of £195); CareerStructure.com offers a similar online deal at £210 (normal price £240); RetailChoice.com is at £297 (normal price of £350); and CWjobs.co.uk at £195 (normal price of £250); Fish4jobs.co.uk is also offering a discounted online posting price of £149 (normal price of £199)