Using statistics to choose a job board

You have a fistfull of statistics but what do they mean and how can you use them in choosing a recruitment website?

Comparing apples and oranges

In the previous articles we outlined how unique users, visits, job applications and the other statistics are often quoted by job boards to give an in an indication as to the popularity of a job board. The most users or applications or CV, the logic, the better. But that is not the full story.

Simple popularity isn’t everything. When you compare XYZjobs.com, with its one million unique users, to ABCjobs.com, with its 50,000 unique users, we can see immediately that the former is a far more popular than the latter. But the questions is, “What is it more popular at?”

Let us suppose, for example, that we are trying to fill an engineering job. If the one million unique users using XYZjobs.com are looking for secretarial and administrative jobs, then not one of that one million users is really useful for us — in spite of its being a far more popular site. On the otherhand, ABCjobs.com only has 50,000 unique users, but these users are engineers looking for engineering jobs. Clearly, these users far more relevant users for our purposes. In this case, the smaller ABCjobs.com is the more popular site for engineers.

The same argument applies for registered users, CV databases and audited statistics: comparing sites statistics against each other without any conext is like comparing apples and oranges.

For all the statistics that are used (and abused) in online recruitment and job board advertising, the important thing to find out is relevance. Whether it is relevant unique users, registered users, job applications, CVs, email subscribers or whatever other statistic comes along, a job board is only as good the relevant candidates it brings to your job advertisement.

It is with this criteria that you should approach and evaluate job boards. In most cases, job boards will only provide general statistics. To find out if a job board really has the audience for you, you’ll have to ring them or email them to find out.

Next step? Check out the other 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. Using statistics to choose a job board