With two million people unemployed in the UK, it’s no surprise that job board reed.co.uk finished 2008 with around two million unique visitors a month — up 25% on the previous year. On Thursday 22 January this year, the site had its busiest day ever, with 81,000 applications. S1jobs, the leading job board in Scotland, meanwhile, has also seen record numbers of visitors since the start of the year, with 50,000 on a single day during January. Others are reporting similar spikes in visitor traffic, and while you won’t hear website owners complaining about such increases, the figures represent a doubleedged sword with the shrinking recruitment advertising market.

Every job board in the land knows it has to fight hard for the recruitment advertising that is out there and, crucially, deliver a return on spend in terms of targeted candidates. As a sign of the times, Tim Elkington, managing director of Enhance Media, said he recently saw a job board offering a £10 House of Fraser voucher for every job posted. It’s already more than apparent that relevance and quality of applicants is more important than ever.

“When times are tough, every penny spent has to be justified and recruiters are quickly learning the importance of tracking the return they receive on their W online advertising spend,” says Mark Rhodes, head of marketing at reed.co.uk, who believes the site’s screening, filtering and back office candidate management tools will be among the features that help it to deliver value to advertisers. “Persuading recruiters to advertise based on applications per job alone will not be enough.”

Mark Smith, managing director of s1jobs, similarly believes the onus is on job boards to deliver quality over quantity and is offering recruitment management tools alongside applicant screening and ranking. Certainly, the reverse of that well-worn phrase — quantity over quality — were words which haunted everyone in the early days of online recruitment and nobody wants to see a return to this situation.

No-one can pretend that it will be easy, though, with supply outstripping demand to such a degree. Geraldine Cole, who has just launched eSift.co.uk, a service which aims to help direct recruiters manage the workload and response from job boards (see page 12), says that an ad she placed for an administrative assistant at 9.30am had received 110 applicants within two hours. And even if the quality of these candidates is good, the sheer volume of response alone brings challenges for both the recruiter and job board. Clearly there is going to be more need for and reliance on website tools, and John Salt, website director of Totaljobs, agrees that to raise the quality bar of applicants, more use of tools such as profiling and psychometric testing will be seen.

Totaljobs will also explore doing more behavioural targeting, he says, which has always been available as an advertising option. “So if someone has a Scottish ISP [internet service provider], for example, we need to ensure they receive content and tools, as well as jobs relevant to Scotland,” he says. But the answer doesn’t solely lie in offering endless features. Salt says it’s also about being “reasonable” in areas such as price, as well as being able to demonstrate some good old-fashioned values. “We’ve got to stand side-by-side the recruiters and offer them the tools and customer service they need,” he says. “If you’re not able to offer the required level of customer service, you can get the wrong reputation in this market.”

It’s fair to say that traditional metrics such as number of registrations and number of applicants will start to lose meaning in the current candidate-rich market. Derek Pilcher, managing director of TheLadders.co.uk, which specialises in management jobs over £50k for executive jobseekers and which has 160,000 registered users, says that cost-per-shortlist and cost-per-interview are likely to become more relevant. Specialist and niche sites such as this will be hoping their targeted approach ensures they can deliver on emerging metrics.

Pilcher also reminds us that, at around 15 years old, online recruitment is still embryonic and believes it doesn’t always allow for the significant differences when recruiting across different levels and sectors. “Online recruitment still operates as a one-size fits all,” he says. “At the top-end level, it’s all about the CV which is why we offer a CV critiquing service to members.” Monster contends though that the high level of personalisation offered to candidates following its major revamp means it can offer a niche service to everyone; and s1jobs redesigned its site at the end of last year to offer a personalised homepage. It is arguable, however, that even with such customisation the generalist and big regional boards can offer the same high-level of targeting that some of the top-notch niche sites offer. Many of the latter, for instance, have put a huge amount of work into engaging with candidates and tapping into topical issues in that sector via Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and social networks.

That said, by giving candidates the tools to be more discerning, discriminatory and generally more in control of their own job search, it should follow that fewer poorly targeted applications and CVs are flying around in the online space. Even if a recession wasn’t underway, job boards need to evolve their feature set in this way and improve the user experience to keep pace with the increasingly savvy web user and jobseeker. Elkington says the latest National Online Recruitment Audience Survey results will tell more when they are released later
this month but typically jobseekers might visit 20-plus job-related sites, made up of, say, 10 employer career sites, five job boards and five
recruitment agency sites.

“People are doing all sorts of complicated tasks online — tax returns, buying insurance, holidays — and any site that doesn’t come up
to this increasingly high standard will struggle,” he says. “Jobseekers are becoming more demanding and sites with online application forms that are too long or that or not userfriendly will not be used.” While there are undoubtedly fewer job ads to go around, this hasn’t stopped new launches and activity in the sector. At the beginning of the year, Trinity Mirror, which already owns a 50% share of Fish4Jobs, relaunched its network of local job sites via a new platform developed by Madgex.

With its regional press network, Trinity Mirror has always been a huge player in the field of recruitment advertising and even though last year saw several regional job site launches, Chris Bunyan, digital director of Trinity Mirror Regionals, believes there is still a lot of “headroom” in the local job board sector. “In London you’ve got a highly competitive market but a lot of recruitment goes on outside London,” he says. As well as the overall platform, www.jobseverywhere.co.uk, regional recruitment sites joining the network include JobsWales.co.uk, Jobs-cheshire.co.uk and Jobsmidlands. co.uk. The network will be complemented by Trinity Mirror’s established regional newspaper network and recruiters benefit from the media group’s ability to cross-sell across different media.

It isn’t just in the world of print and online where recruiters can benefit from media integration, though. A potentially potent mix has been the linking of radio stations with job boards which can use on-air advertising to reach passive, as well as active jobseekers.

Last year saw EMAP Radio, which has since been acquired by Bauer Media, launch a network of job boards attached to its radio stations via the Workmoose online recruitment service. Via sites such as www.key103jobs.co.uk, targeting Greater Manchester, www.radiocityjobs.co.uk focused on Merseyside and www.rockfmjobs.co.uk in Lancashire, it claims to deliver 120,000 jobseekers a month in the North-West. Meanwhile, Global Radio, whose stations include Heart, Galaxy, 95.8 Capital FM, LBC and Classic FM, as well as a raft of regional brands outside of London, has also been active in the online recruitment sector. It is testing the Nottinghamshire marketplace with a job board linked to TrentFM and is investigating the launch of a regional network of job boards attached to its radio stations.

Since the start of the year, in the region of 500 applications have passed through jobs.trentfm.co.uk, says head of recruitment advertising, Rob Edwards. “Yes, at the moment there are more candidates than jobs but it’s the media’s job to generate the response and that’s whatwe can do,” he says. “We have loyal listeners and we know that when we promote the site or jobs on air there is a big increase in traffic to the site.”

It is also looking into service with LBC that will be backed by DJ Nick Ferrari who plans to discuss employment issues on his show and this could then link back to jobs on the LBC website. “Having a figurehead like Nick to raise employment issues in London will bring something completely new to the market, as Nick really wants to become a leading light on these issues,” says Edwards.

The online recruitment landscape is a long way from being fully shaped and formed, but with market conditions forcing website owners to give a targeted return on spend, it might just be the catalyst that helps it reach its next key stage of development.