Online recruitment survey success prompts new initiatives

Employers and recruiters will be able to find out more about individual job boards when new features are added to the next National Online Recruitment Audience Survey, following the success of this yearís survey.

Enhance Media, who manage NORAS, are considering a number of new initiatives, including adding the number of job applications generated by each recruitment website to the survey data.

The NORAS 2006 survey booklet was downloaded over 1,000 times between March and April and there were over 600 new registrations from employers and recruiters to the website www.noras.co.uk

Richard Grimer, who has joined Enhance Media as research manager, is keen to work with ABC ELECTRONIC to develop an audit of the number of applications generated from individual job boards.

Richard explains: ìIncluding an applications metric in the NORAS results will add an important piece of information for advertisers. Recruitment advertising is all about applications and we know that adding this to the survey will give recruiters even more value from the results.

ìItís a bit like the online shopping site Amazon - itís good to know how many visitors there are but even better to find out how many people actually bought something. Once weíve developed a way of auditing applications with ABC ELECTRONIC, we will be able to pinpoint accurately how many people applied for jobs from particular job boards.î

Richard, who joins Enhance Media from Reed Business Information where he was responsible for research across 10 publications and 15 websites, including Personnel Today and its website, said: ìNORAS provides recruiters with valuable, audited information about the number of unique visitors, as well as detailed demographics on the people using the participating sites. My aim is to develop the survey even further. Other initiatives we are looking at are developing a way to evaluate CV databases, and weighting the NORAS data to the UK online population to make it even more robust.î