Since 2002, Internet job boards—in aggregate—seem to have been the “source of hires” (SOH) less than 10 percent of the time for employers polled. This figure has ranged from about 6.5 percent to 12.4 percent, but a careful review of the latest surveys suggests the success rate of job boards is even lower than 10 percent. In other words, since their inception and in spite of claims that the technology and the algorithms have improved, job boards continue to suck wind. Nothing has changed.
A Decade Of Job Board Data
I encountered the first surveys about online job hunting around 1996, when Electronic Engineering Times asked its readers how they found their jobs. Although engineers were among the earliest adopters, only around 4 percent said they found jobs “online.” What was interesting is that this percentage didn’t change significantly over the next several years.
As the online job board industry ramped up and proliferated, I suspected—and I still contend today—that job boards don’t report their success rates because they’re not worth talking about. In 2003, I reported on the practices of some of the biggest job boards: “Job Board Journalism: Selling Out The American Job Hunter.” When a group of the biggest newspaper chains created CareerBuilder, I described how they failed to do anything really new in the online jobs channel: “CareerBuilder Is For Dopes” (2007).
In 2002, CareerXroads.com, then the publisher of a printed directory of job boards, started surveying employers annually about their source of hires. What caught my eye over the next decade was that the CXR statistics about job boards didn’t change meaningfully.
According to CXR’s surveys, in 2002 about 8.2 percent of all hires came from job boards. Monster accounted for about 3.6 percent, and CareerBuilder for about 1.5 percent.
By 2006, job boards were the SOH 8.4 percent of the time, while Monster and CareerBuilder delivered 2.9 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. Two years later, job boards were the SOH just 7.5 percent of the time.
In 2009, the job boards' success rate dropped to 6.5 percent. Monster was 1.5 percent, and CareerBuilder 5.5 percent. After this survey, it seems CXR started trying to analyze other “influencers” in recruiting, such as social media. The unfortunate result was that the basic statistics CXR had been reporting for a decade started becoming ambiguous and confusing. The survey suddenly suggested that job boards jumped to 12.4 percent as the SOH in 2010, and dropped to 11.9 percent in 2011. In addition, CXR stopped reporting on the overall success rates of specific job boards.
While CXR deserves credit for continuing to gather data for so many years (no one else is doing this, as far as I know), I think its surveys have become bogged down in trying to analyze factors for which data just can’t be gathered reliably, and it shows in the results.
New Data
Now, a new survey run by iCMS, a human resources software-as-a-service provider, seems to reveal that the performance of job boards has, indeed, failed to improve meaningfully in a decade.
In an Aug. 23, 2012 article—“Where Do You Find Your Best Candidates?”—iCMS reported that a job listings aggregator, Indeed.com, “alone accounted for more hires than all other branded sources combined.” iCMS analyzed data from more than 1,200 of its own corporate clients, accounting for 285,299 hires. Indeed.com was the source of external hires 36 percent of the time. Remember that figure while I digress for a moment into definitions.
Thirty-six percent sounds like a huge performance leap for this quasi-job board, until we take apart iCMS’s statistics the same way we’ve taken apart CXR’s statistics every year. Like CXR, iCMS distinguishes between “internal” and “external” sources of hires. The trouble with the internal-external distinction is that it’s a serious bit of confusion in the service of marketing. For example, to iCMS “internal” means “referrals, internal hires, company career sites, and undefined sources.” In other words, those hires could have come from almost anywhere. The way CXR and iCMS draw that very blurry line suggests we’re better off keeping the analysis honest, and instead stick to the percentage of time that job boards are the source of any hires.
New Results: Same As The Old Results
iCMS found that 29 percent of all hires were external, and the rest were internal. In other words, 36 percent of 29 percent, or 10.4 percent, of all hires come from “one” source of hires—Indeed.com.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the aggregator: “The site [Indeed.com] aggregates job listings from thousands of websites, including job boards, newspapers, associations, and company career pages.” Including, we presume, Monster and CareerBuilder.
That means one job listings aggregator, which accounts for all the job boards that CXR reports on plus newspapers and companies’ own Web sites, delivered just 10.4 percent of all hires. That means job boards alone, as represented by Indeed.com, actually delivered less than 10 percent of hires. Having watched the job boards for over a decade, my guess is it's a lot less.
In more than 10 years, nothing has really changed in the job board business but the appearance of “aggregators” that pull listings from “thousands” of other Web sites. (One wonders what would happen to Indeed’s “success rate” if the job boards from which it scrapes jobs go belly up.)
In other words, Internet job boards are still sucking wind.
How do you recruit and hire? Does your HR staff sit in front of a computer and pay job boards to sort through databases? Does anyone actually go out and recruit? Where is your recruiting budget going? Join me on the Discussion Forum.
