Black December. Bloody December. Bleak December.
Call it whatever you would like, it was the worst month ever for job site rankings. Consumer sites ruled the month with holiday sales traffic, while job sites took a general beating.
Only 12% of job sites were up for the month and a whopping 88% were down. Attached is the latest update of the Alexa ranking spreadsheet, which ranks the top 139 job sites in the world in their respective job site categories.
Of the top 10 sites in the seven categories (General, College, Executive, Niche, Diversity, International-English and International-Non-English), only 7 sites had a ranking increase. Thatís just 7 of the top 70, or 10% of the top ranked sites. Thatís so few, they are worth making note of individually:
General ñ 4jobs.com (#8 in General category)
College ñ CollegeGrad.com (#1 in College category)
Niche ñ Jobscience.com (#5 in Niche category)
Niche ñ HealthcareSource (#6 in Niche category)
Niche ñ JobsInLogistics.com (#7 in Niche category)
Diversity ñ IMDiversity.com (#2 in Diversity category)
International Non-English ñ MojPosao (#6 in International Non-English category)
The only category leader to register a ranking gain was CollegeGrad.com (College category). And two categories (Executive and International-English) both registered with having ZERO of their top ten showing an increase.
Truly a dismal month for job sites in general.
Overall, 17 sites (12%) showed an increase and 122 sites (88%) showed a decrease. The TopJobSites.com Index was down 15.04%, the largest one month drop in the history of the Index.
So is this the beginning of a long downward slide? No, in reality itís the impact of the shopping season with major (and not-so-major) consumer sites registering big gains during the holiday shopping rush. Now that the seasonal impact of other sites has passed, the months ahead will show whether or not Internet Recruiting can grow and prosper in the reawakened Internet economy.
Here are the top three ranked sites in each category, per their Alexa rankings:
General Sites:
#1 - Monster.com
#2 - CareerBuilder
#3 - HotJobs
College Sites:
#1 - CollegeGrad.com
#2 - NACElink
#3 - Experience.com
Executive Sites:
#1 - 6FigureJobs
#2 - CareerJournal.com
#3 - Execunet
Industry/Job Type Niches:
#1 - Dice.com
#2 - jobsinthemoney
#3 - ComputerJobs.com
Diversity Sites:
#1 - LatPro
#2 - IMDiversity.com
#3 - Hire Diversity
International Sites (English):
#1 - Workopolis
#2 - JobStreet.com
#3 - Monster Canada
International Sites (non-English):
#1 - InfoJobs.net
#2 - ANPE
#3 - Arbeitsamt online
The Top 10 in each category have been updated to www.TopJobSites.com, which uses Alexa rankings to rank the top job sites in the world. We have also added additional listings for each niche site that did not make the Top 10, but are the largest in their respective niche area.
Let me know if you have any questions on this information. Feel free to quote from the information in this e-mail or the attached spreadsheet in any articles or releases you may be writing.
P.S. In case you are wondering, there has been no significant impact in the traffic rankings for Monster.com or CareerBuilder since January 1, 2004, when the MSN and AOL deals switched from Monster.com to CareerBuilder. So the much ballyhooed shift of traffic has yet to materialize in real traffic flow.
Updated Alexa rankings of the top job sites for January 2004
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