Helping You Evaluate Visitor Traffic Counts When Deciding on Where to Post a Job Vacancy
So you’re evaluating where you should post your next job vacancy. You find yourself looking through marketing materials of all the sites you’re considering. You go to the big general job sites and the number of visitors they report seems quite impressive. You might think ‘Wow, if that many people are looking for jobs on this site, I’m bound to get lots of great applicants for my vacancy’. Not so fast! Lets look a little closer at the numbers. A nationally branded general job site that everyone would know currently boasts over 10,000,000 unique visitors every month. With some browsing of their site, we find that there are approximately 50,000 jobs advertised. If you divide the unique visitors by the number of jobs (10,000,000 / 50,000), you get only 200 unique visitors per job per month. That’s not a huge number, especially when you’ll be paying inflated ad prices to pay the salaries of scores of employees and cover the cost of million dollar marketing campaigns.
This point is emphasized when you are in the market to hire an individual with specialized skills. You can often achieve traffic as good or better by posting on niche job sites where you are marketing your vacancy to a more targeted audience of job seekers. The prices on niche job sites are considerably less than general sites yet can offer a visitor-to-jobs ratio that is often significantly higher. Furthermore, when you post on niche job sites that focus on a particular profession or field, more relevant people will actually view your ad and hopefully apply for your opportunity.
However, the figures above are based on an average number of visitors per job. Actual job ad views are likely to vary depending on the experience level requirements of the individual job opportunity. The higher the level of experience or education required, the fewer ad views you’ll receive, simply because fewer people fit the job description. For example, if you were to post the job title of “Junior Urban Planner”, you would get far more views as compared if you posted one for “Senior Urban Planner”. There are simply more people looking for jobs at the entry level point than at intermediate and senior levels. Keep this in mind when analyzing your results after the ad has run its course.
You should also be careful if you are analyzing results between an ad posted on a niche site compared to the same ad posted on a general job site. When you post on a general job site, you are marketing your vacancy to the masses. Thus, there is a high probability that completely unqualified people will click on your job, especially if your job title is not overly specific. This means that your total ad views on the general site have been artificially inflated by job seekers that are irrelevant to your search. If you posted a job for a ‘Junior Planner’ on a general site, you would get clicks from people hoping that the job was for an urban planner, construction planner, financial planner, event planner and several other types of planners. This would inflate your job view statistics, but only a small fraction of those that viewed would truly be relevant to what it is you are trying to attract.
However, if you posted that same exact ad for a junior planner on a niche site dedicated to financial professionals, you can expect that most if not all of those that clicked your ad understood implicitly that it was for a financial service planner of some kind. When you post on a general job site, there is little way to tell if truly interested and relevant candidates are looking at your posting. When you post to a niche site, you can safely assume that truly interested people are clicking on your ad because they have taken the step to visit a specially focused and specific job site.