INTERNATIONAL ONLINE JOB BOARDS

HISTORY: I have worked full time in a marketing and analyst capacity at several leading recruitment companies. These companies work in an interesting industry where the P/E ratios are very low relative to other industries meaning that for a given revenue, they can only be sold for a relatively low multiple of yearly earnings. They also have very low physical assets, low entry barriers and high staff turnover.

Being directly tied to the health of the economy and the unemployment rate, a recruiter’s fortunes can fade quickly making quite a few of the larger players look towards developing other markets to stabilize their income.

 

ACTION: All of the above means that many recruiters are after some form of diversification that will stabilize their income and help them through the recruitment troughs. Two common ways that such companies are looking at doing this are to either expand to offices in other Australian states or overseas and to bring in specialist candidates / employees from other countries.

To make this possible, I was requested by a client to provide them with online job board market share information for specific countries.

RESULTS: In Australia people notionally know that Seek is the dominant player, but do you know by how much? By using current visitor statistics to each job site it is possible to create a snapshot of how well each of the top ten job boards are doing. By knowing which job sites are the major players and their advertising costs, one can quickly see where they should be putting their advertising dollar.  

CONCLUSIONS: This is one of those situations where you can rely on finding media data which is summarized in a variety of formats and is often quite old, or you can make an expensive request to sites such as hitwise. Alternatively I can supply a client very cost effectively with ‘real time’ information as well as growth trends of the top online job sites in any country.

Digging a little further to find comparative pay rates and cost of living rates is also very useful if you are a recruiter interested in trying to lure highly skilled professionals over to Australia on a work visa.

Please contact me if you need similar information. 

TOP 10 Australian ONLINE Job sites for August, 2007.

The following information refers to Australian unique visitors to Australian online jobsites

Australia Onine job site market share 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

UK JOB BOARDS –2007 

The UK job sites are dominated by about five major sites with a long tail of second tier sites.True job site UK visitor traffic is calculated by several factors:

  • Total website traffic
  • Total traffic originating within UK
  • % of the site dedicated exclusively to jobs.

 The sites shown in the following graph are those that are ranked top ten in the UK for Total traffic. It is noted that most sites gain approximately 60% to 70% of their traffic from within the UK. Exceptions to this are ‘Guardian’ 29% UK traffic and ‘Careerjet’ 17% UK.Similarly most job sites were dedicated UK job sites except ‘Guardian’ which is mainly a news service and only has 6% of its total visitors reaching its jobsite pages, and ‘Careerjet’ that has 34% dedicated to jobs. The percentage shares indicated on the graph below are calculated by assuming the top ten sites equate to 100%. That is, since the remainder sites are so low in traffic and there is a long tail, the ‘other’ category is ignored for simplicity.

UK online Jobsite 

 

  

  

  

  

 

Advertising Costs & Number of IT Project Manager/ Project Management roles advertised on each site

 While the job sites listed are the major jobsites in the UK, based on traffic, they differ considerably in the number of Project Manager roles they advertise.Each site has a different fee structure and aim for the site – for instance the strategy of ‘cv-library.co.uk’ is based upon accumulating and reviewing CV’s online, with free job postings.The following table summarises the main sites by % of UK job site visitors (with top ten sites summed to 100%). Some sites request email or phone correspondence to negotiate special price packages. Also note that sites usually include an extra set up cost to create a company’s template (add the Adaps logo).While some sites appear to provide a relatively large number of Project Manager/ Project Management listings, the statistics are not always comparable. This is because some ads are lodged for one week or one month, or include general PM’s i.e. those outside of the industry, such as in construction/ medical etc.This table is only a guide and specific rates, Project Manager role types, should be viewed before settling upon using a specific site. Top Ten Contracting Skills 

Rank IT Skill IT Jobs Average Average
Proportion Hourly Rates Daily Rates
1 Developer 23.73% £33.80 £433
2 Analyst 21.40% £21.51 £401
3 Business Analyst 8.54% £35.43 £449
4 Consultant 8.20% £32.41 £436
5 Project Manager 7.48% £37.49 £440
6 .NET Developer 3.79% £32.46 £347
7 Java Developer 3.72% £40.54 £467
8 C# Developer 3.70% £35.35 £456
9 Administrator 3.37% £21.17 £324
10 Architect 3.00% £46.78 £490

 

SINGAPORE JOB BOARD 

It has been found that sg.jobstreet.com has approximately 65% of the Singapore online job market. This value is based on its share of the top ten sites visited by Singapore Jobseekers. The nearest competitors are ‘Monster’ and ‘jobscentral’, each with about 10% share. It is noted that many of the Singapore sites have a large number of visitors from external countries. However, while Monster and jobscentral have 65% and 90% (respectively) traffic from within Singapore, compared to Jobstreet’s 18%, jobstreet has total traffic (from all sources) that is twenty times larger than either of these sites.

Singapore Job Site Market Share 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUMMARY

For a long time my client thought they were interested in advertising overseas for good candidates (back in the day when there was a candidate shortage). After supplying them with reports detailing the job board market shares, advertising costs and expected pay rates did they realise that the Australian market was not likely to provide a decent incentive to lure the workers to Australia. This was when they made further requests to explore the NZ talent pool.

While research does not always turn up the desired answers, it usually does give a client a good indication of where they may need to look next.