Audited statistics on job boards

Many job boards will quote ‘audited’ statistics when you inquire about their website traffic. But what are audited statistics and why are they important for recruiters?

What are audited statistics?

So far in this series of articles we have looked at the statistics most often quoted by job boards. All of the quoted statistics aim to give advertisers a sense of how popular or potentially successful the job board will be. For example, the number of unique users can give an indication of the popularity of a job board, the job applications the likelihood of people applying for your job, registered users the number of potentially active job seekers etc.

But what is to stop a job board making up or inflating these statistics statistics? In truth, there is nothing to stop this happening. And, sadly, it is not an infrequent practice for less reputable job boards.

However, many quality job boards like to offer some ‘proof’ of their website traffic and statistics, and now submit their sites and their traffic to an independent audit. The most common website traffic audit in the UK is the one carried out by ABCE. While there are many contentious issues about how ABCE audits website, it is fair to say that an audit allows recruiters to feel some confidence that statistics quoted are accurate.

What audits are there?

The most commonly quoted audited statistic is the monthly unique users. This is a count of the number of unique users to a site in a month. In recent years there have been a number of additional audits conducted by job boards and recruitment websites including “audited applications” (counting the total number of applications made on a job board) and “CV uploads” (counting the number of CV uploaded to a site in a month).

Whatever audited figure is quoted, recruiters will be able to feel a little more confident in the statistics quoted.

Next step? Read the next article in the series

1. Unique users and visits on job boards
2. Registered users on job boards
3. Job application statistics on job boards
4. Email subscribers on job boards
5. CV database statistics on job boards
6. Page impressions and hits
7. Audited statistics on job boards
8. NEXT>> Using statistics to choose a job board