Email subscribers on job boards

Email subscribers are one of the most quoted statistics by job boards and other online recruitment websites to support claims of popularity. But what are they and why are they important for your recruitment?

What are email subscribers?

‘Email subscribers’  or ‘Jobs by email’ or ‘job alerts’ subscribers are simply job seekers who who have chosen to sign up for a daily, weekly or monthly email of new jobs from a job board. Most email subscribers will have set up alerts to receive specific jobs. These can be by job role, industry sector, location and salary.

Job boards like to quote this statistic because, like unique users and registered users, it gives a sense of how many people are looking for jobs on the recruitment website. For example, if a site has 40,000 email subscribers you will know that 40,000 have registered to receive job alerts.

Why are email subscribers important?

As email subscribers have signed up to receive jobs, these can be crucial individuals for your recruitment campaign. It must understood, however, that email subscribers are not a single group. That is, because a site has 40,000 email subscribers doesn’t mean that 40,000 people are going to receive your particular job. Because most email subscribers have set up specific job searches, only a fraction of the 40,000 email subscribers will receive your job.

What’s more, we all have lots of email alerts which we don’t look at or which we neglect to close. Therefore, the integrity of the email subscriber statistic depends largely on the integrtiry of the subscriber database. Does the job board ‘cleanse’ its list of subscribers. How many of the email subscribers open the email? How many emails bounce? How many end up in spam without ever being seen?All these things can have impact on how many people actually receive your job.

Again, email subscribers can give another indication of the number of people who are actively looking for jobs on a job board. But, like unique users and registered users, the total number is less important than the number of email subscribers looking for jobs like yours.

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. NEXT>> CV database statistics on job boards
6. Page impressions and hits
7. Audited statistics on job boards
8. Using statistics to choose a job board