SME employers face more than 1,200 job sites... and counting

Research conducted by Whatjobsite.com, a website dedicated to helping SME recruiters with online recruitment advertising, has found that there are now more than 1,200 job sites in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The sheer number of sites is one of the biggest challenges facing SME recruiters who want to move online.

For the study, whatjobsite.com only included those sites which would typically be considered job sites or job boards; that is, sites that carried or would carry advertising from multiple client sources. The study did not include employer websites or recruitment consultancy websites. Nonetheless, the study still found over 1,200 job sites in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Perhaps more worrying is that, in the short term at least, the number of sites looks likely to increase. Since January 2007, an average of one new job site has been launched every week. In the main, new sites tend to be in the niche or specialist area. While competition in any market is welcome, there is, as yet, little evidence to suggest this increasing competition will benefit SME recruiters. Rather, a more segmented audience in an already tight labour market would point to poorer rates of success per job ad.

For those sites included in the survey, the value of a large number of them was questionable. Many niche sites appeared to be little more than ìmirrorî sites or branded ìsub-domainsî of generalist sites with job inventory derived exclusively from the larger generalist site alone. In other words, these niche sites appeared to be nothing more than search results badged with a domain name. The benefits of such sites for SME recruiters is hard to ascertain.

The viability of other sites seemed equally questionable. Many sites carried few jobs or seemed to draw on jobs from a very small number of recruitment consultancies. Often, the only other advertising on many of the sites was provided by Google Adsense. The reliance on Adsense can only raise doubts about the long term sustainability of such sites in this highly competitive market.

ìClearly, SME recruiters face significant challenges when going online,î says Karl Schweppe, Managing Director of whatjobsite.com. ìRecruitment consultants, advertising agencies and large corporates have all invested time and money in researching job sites to find out which ones work. The SME recruiter, however, simply does not have the resources to do such research. Often the only research tool available is a search engine; and being number one in the search results page has less to do with the ability to fill jobs and more to do with investment in search engine optimization.î



There are further challenges for SME recruiters. Unlike recruitment consultancies or large organisations that can rely on a portfolio of job sites to fulfill their recruitment needs, SME's often only post to one or two job sites. In spite of improvements in job posting technology, the physical time spent posting jobs to multiple sites can be a constraint.

Far more significant, however, is the fact that, putting a vacancy on more than a couple of sites can rapidly increase the cost of advertising. The cost of three or four sites could be similar to a recruitment consultant's fee. However, the recruitment consultancy fee, in contrast to job sites' costs, is only payable on success. When advertising on more than a very limited number of sites, the cost savings that are so often spoken about in online recruitment, fail to materialise.

In spite of this, there is no doubt that SME online recruitment will continue to grow. If the market is to develop sustainably, however, SME recruiters will need help in understanding how to evaluate job sites properly and how to plan an effective online recruitment strategy.

But job sites will also need to adapt too. The current metrics and statistics used to evaluate and sell job sites were designed for and by media buyers and marketers. Not only are these statistics opaque, but they also have doubtful value for SME recruiters. ìAn SME recruiter is not interested in click-through rates, unique users, hits, impressions, or the average number of applications per job, says Karl Schweppe. The SME recruiter is only interested in one thing: that his or her vacancy is filled. For an SME recruiter, therefore, there is only one metric that matters: ìplacement.î How job sites embrace this demanding metric will be one of the most interesting developments in the years to come.î