Digital Recruiting

The future starts right here and right now

An interesting set of comments are still growing under the post below but I wanted to take the debate in a slightly different direction

I’ve been in the USA for the last week and am actually currently blogging this in San Francisco (hence the time of my post!). While I’ve been here I’ve met with a number of “self styled online recruitment experts” (yes they have them over here as well!) and had a lot of time to ponder what is happening in the US market and how there might be learnings for the UK.

By far the most interesting trend here is the growth of aggregators and vertical search engines such as Simply Hired and Indeed.com. The business model is so simple yet so effective. Gather a critical mass of content (jobs) via various means, mash it up with millions of jobs seekers across numerous affiliate sites and widgets and then target / monetise this content using a Google Adwords model .

Now the key point here is that these sites aren’t some kind of USA only revolution, they are already over here. Simply Hired powers the job search on MySpace globally which already makes is a massive player in the UK and they haven’t even got an office here yet! If you also throw into the mix things like Jobsite’s new Facebook App, it makes the debate we are having about traffic and auditing in the post below totally out of date and totally irrelevant.

In my view measuring and auditing generic traffic figures is already a waste of time but these new trends make it explicitly so. Simply Hired doesn’t care how many people view its home page, Jobsite is using Facebook to deep link candidates to relevant site content thus extending its audience reach in a way an audit can’t quantify and, as Sinead points out in the comments to the post below, technologies such as AJAX are changing the old rules completely. You wouldn’t dream of asking Google for its ABCE audit figure or NORAS stats before using it and we need to think of the emerging “job board” market in the same way.

So what then for us as an industry if press style auditing and traffic measurement is dead, what do we focus are collective energies on?

There has been much talk about the happy day when it will be easy to measure cost per hire and collectively compare job board performance that way. I’ve got some news for you….yes this will absolutely be possible but when it’s the norm for clients to do this the last thing they are going to do is share the data! There is global war for candidates / talent going on out there and all the demographic data shows that it is only going to get worse over the coming years. No client in their right mind is going to want to give up any competitive advantage they have

So what do we do? Well I think the way forward is clear…not easy, not short term, potentially controversial but nevertheless clear. We need to open the debate up to the people who will drive the technology that will make the measurements….the ATS providers, multi posters like Broadbean, the cookie trackers, the ad servers and the potential inventors of future technologies. Between us we need to agree a shared language, techonology and culture of results based measurement. Even though the end stats won’t be shared I’m sure every job board or future “provider of candidates” would be over the moon if they knew their performance was being judged in a consistent and fair way.

So what’s the first step? Well it’s not going to be a short journey, in fact it is going to take years. So despite what you might currently think about UK buyers currently being generally unsophisticated, we need to start this right now. It’s not about new research or new industry bodies at this stage it’s about a culture change in the UK online recruitment industry. We need to talk about measurement at every conference at every networking event and on every blog. I’m sure they will be many rows over format but if we all keep having the proper debate and agree on the shared goal then things will start to emerge that take us forward.

In the last year it has become crystal clear that this industry is changing faster than any us can keep up with. Now is not the time to bury our heads in the audits, surveys and outmoded behaviours of the past!

Job board traffic statements – what price integrity?

So here’s the thing. I recently became aware of how some job boards (well one, but I'm not trawling through every audited traffic statement to check all - at this stage) seek to massage their figures in a manner that is really sticking in my throat. So I’ll ask this question:

When you read about a site’s Unique Users and Page Impressions do you too take that as a face value statement of the overall traffic that comes to the site and has the potential for coming across your job? An indication of the audience that you’re paying for access to?

I did – fool that I am!

Now of course those of us who’ve been dabbling in this world for some time know full well that the UU & PI figures have long since proved any significant value in terms of predicting potential success of a job board and its audience and therefore plays little if any part in online media planning today. The insistence of placing such importance on such a measurement comes from days past when all a media planner had to understand to assist in / justify their planning was ABC & VFD figures. It also panders to the egos of grown men boasting about how big their share is to an, unfortunately, sometimes not very educated / savvy buying audience. But for me this isn’t about how useful the UU and PI figures are – this is about the fact that when any metric is presented, especially when presented in a manner that’s making the most of its independent verification, it needs to have integrity behind it.

So when I discover that a job board is also counting the traffic visiting sites they’ve established that are, in my understanding of it, closed to advertising my vacancies on, then I start to get very annoyed and feel pretty cheated. And, just to clarify further, I'm not talking about a job board with a network of sites which have specialist niche job boards attached that are counted as part of the overall network UU & PI figures - I'm talking about direct recruiting entities for direct recruiting activity (be that client or agency) that I could only appear on were I recruiting within that organisation.

Now I don’t want to get into the game of naming and shaming (been there and scrapped over that one before), and I don’t particularly want anyone else to (but it is a free blogosphere – well kinda). I’d rather see if anyone else has an opinion on how sacrosanct you view the integrity of audited statements and whether you feel at least a little narked that you too may have been taken for a ride by someone hoping you wouldn’t turn to the 'network domains' element of the ABCe audit report either.  Then perhaps if enough people are at least a little miffed by this practise and the people responsible are reading this they’ll get the message and next ABCe audit they’ll do the decent thing (no matter how painful in terms of shedding some reality on their figures) and only count sites that are truly reflective of the audience I, or my clients at least, believe they are buying into when we're quoted their figures.

I know things are seldom absolutely black or white, but am I really being ridiculously naïve? again?! Or perhaps it's just all a misunderstanding and when the mistake is realised there'll be quick moves to correct the over-submission of domains error.

:-]