NORAS has direct impact on advertising decisions

Ninety-one per cent of companies who use the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS) find it useful and half say it has directly influenced where they place their jobs ads, new figures show.

The poll of recruiters who have registered at www.noras.co.uk also reveals that 50 per cent recruit for more than 250 appointments a year and 94 per cent say they are more likely to advertise with recruitment websites taking part in the annual survey.

Tim Elkington, managing director of Enhance Media which manages NORAS and conducted the customer feedback survey, said: ìOur poll shows half the NORAS users are recruiting for large numbers of vacancies and spending significant amounts on recruitment advertising. Half say NORAS has directly influenced where they advertise. This shows it is providing a valuable service to advertisers, helping them to make the right decisions about where to place their online recruitment ads.î

NORAS collects two sets of data from leading online recruitment sites ñ demographic data detailing the audience profile of each site and unique user numbers showing the size of each siteís audience, audited by ABC ELECTRONIC.

A number of new improvements are being planned for next yearís NORAS to make the results even more accurate and robust. These include:

increasing the sample size for participating job boards, to provide advertisers with more robust data

adding information on applications generated by each job board, to make it easier to evaluate response rates from participating sites

compulsory twice-yearly ABC ELECTRONIC auditing, to ensure that advertisers have as up-to-date data as possible.

Richard Foan, ABC ELECTRONIC managing director, said: ìRecruitment is a sector clearly making the most of online and this is reinforced by the money now being invested in it.

ìWith that increased investment comes increased expectations of trusted accountability. Itís only logical that the sites delivering industry-standard data through NORAS have agreed to underpin it with independent audits from ABC ELECTRONIC twice a year. This will reinforce increased trust in online.î

The new developments with NORAS coincide with the release of the 2006 updated results. The five NORAS participants who have chosen to update their ABC ELECTRONIC audit of unique users are: doctorjob.com - 79,433; Prospects.ac.uk - 520,840; Scotcareers - 110,401; tesjobs - 383,096; and TipTopJob - 157,412.

In addition to appearing in the updated results booklet, these new figures have been uploaded into NORAS interactive ñ the online tool that shows recruiters how many candidates each site provides that match their recruitment criteria.