In the light of the recent NORAS report and predictable “We’re Number One!” press releases, I thought it would interesting to put down a few thoughts about research and stats in our market.
First of all, although I’ve never been a fan of NORAS, Alistair and Tim deserve a lot of credit for their tenacity in keeping it running regularly for this long. It’s also always interesting to see some new top line stats on online recruitment. However it is absolute not the utopian credible measurement and planning tool the sites who take part seem to be determined to persuade me it is
The longest running debate in online recruitment has always been about consistent independent measurement of job sites and how any resulting stats might be used to select the “correct” job board. Conferences have been run, meetings have been held, lunches have been expensed, and drinks have been consumed. What should we measure? How do we compare apples with apples? Who should pay for it?
The more I think about and the more I talk to my clients, the more I realise that the whole thing is a waste of time and brain power………in short a big red herring. Let me explain why
Once upon a time there was thing called “Old Media” and it consisted of things made of paper and analogue signals flying through the air into other things called radios and TVs. There were also people called advertisers who were interested in whether they were getting any kind of return on investment. No one really knew because it couldn’t be measured and that really wasn’t very good. So in order to keep everyone happy lots of lovely statistics started to appear and things like ABC and NRS and lots of other collections of letters were born
One day though something called Digital Media arrived. It could be measured, it could tell its advertisers exactly what they were getting for their money and go into such minute detail they could change the way they advertised on an hour by hour basis and thus really drive their return on investment. Unfortunately though a lot of people missed the point and argued for years about how generalisations and umbrella statistics should be applied to this new arrival.
Hopefully you can see the point I’m making.
This is usually the moment that someone says to me something like “Well that’s all very well Matt but lots of clients still aren’t using online recruitment. We need things like NORAS to get them started and show all the beginners how to choose which job boards to use”
At this point let’s look to the world of digital advertising in the product arena. A parallel debate is raging there about introducing some kind of planning currency that is similar to TV advertising. Again a waste of time but the only reason it is being pursued is to convince massive brand advertisers like P & G to move money from TV to online. This kind of reasoning does not hold up in the online recruitment space though.
The biggest recruitment advertising spenders in the market all already mostly all over the job boards. Granted they might not be doing things in the right way or spending as much as they should but that is to do with strategic understanding and isn’t something umbrella stats can address. The big spending laggards in our market are elements of the public sector and believe me when I say that this is not an issue that statistics and surveys are going to solve! If it was we would have reached the tipping point already.
I also don’t think auditing job board applications is the answer either. Firstly with so many different technology platforms in place I would be amazed if everyone could ever agree on a standard definition of an application. Secondly the only metric worth knowing is applications driven by job boards through corporate web sites and none of the clients savvy enough to measure this are going to, or indeed should, give away their competitive advantage by publishing it!!
Finally it would be a bit one sided to rant on about things that are, after all, attempts to grow our market, without offering an alternative.
Rather than focusing on numbers of things and generalisations why don’t we focus on users, experiences and behaviour? I don’t want to know so much about what jobseekers do and how many of them do it, I want to know about their thinking, motivation, influences and reasons why. Its only by doing this that I believe we can make our market fulfil its significant future potential
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