First National Online Recruitment Audience Survey

Enhance Media has this week released the results of the first wave of the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS). This is thought to represent the UK's largest piece of online recruitment research, drawing on over 8,000 questionnaires from Internet users.

NORAS has been designed to provide advertisers with demographic profiles and audited unique user numbers of eight of the UK's leading online recruitment sites. These are Fish4Jobs, GoJobsite, PeopleBank, Top Jobs, Total Jobs, Workthing, Anderselite and Jobs AC. The data itself has been gathered across the sites over a common time period and using a common methodology, to ensure comparability. The demographics were collected via pop-up technology, administered by Virtual Surveys. Audited unique user numbers have been provided by ABC Electronic.

In addition to providing details of the sites' audiences, NORAS gives an insight into the characteristics of online job seekers. It shows that the average job-hunter is aged 32.2 years and has had 10.5 years of work experience since leaving full time education. They typically last started a job for a new employer 3.9 years ago, and will visit an average of 4.7 online recruitment sites when looking for a job online.

The survey organisers are keen to point out that the research is supported by the Association of Online Recruiters (AOLR), the industry body for online recruitment. The AOLR seeks to advance online recruitment in the UK, and to promote the highest ethical standards amongst its members. It has stated that the provision of meaningful data to online advertisers is an important step in achieving its mission.

Enhance Media managing director Tim Elkington commented, 'We believe that NORAS is a highly valuable piece of work and will enable recruiters to make informed advertising decisions, based on credible and independent data. The eight sites that participated in the first wave all recognise that it is important to provide advertisers with information about their users and I would encourage more sites to participate in the next wave, which is scheduled for October 2002.'

Tim added, 'We would like to expand the second wave of NORAS to include metrics that would help recruiters gauge the likely response levels from participants, possibly by including audited numbers of online applications that each site generates. We've established a working party, including recruitment sites, advertising agencies and HR professionals to investigate this idea'.

MrWeb's MD Nick Thomas says of the results 'It's interesting to see these stats, largely because they are so different from what comes out of our own research and feedback. The 8 job sites taking part are very large and 6 of them are generalist rather than sector-specific. The behaviour of people using more specialist sites like MrWeb is very different. Our users are much more senior, on average, with more than 10 per cent at Director level compared to 2 per cent in the NORAS survey; they have generally been with their current employer for less than 3 years, as opposed to an average of 3.9 in the NORAS results, and are quite likely to be looking at no more than 2 job sites in total - many of them just the one.'

'Obviously, specialist job sites for other industries are on the rise but MrWeb is one of the oldest and most comprehensive in coverage and our profile is probably quite unusual in that respect - other professionals are having to shop around more to find an equivalent number of relevant vacancies. In this context, it will be very interesting to see if NORAS can cover the specialist site angle in future surveys, especially as other indicators suggest it's a growing part of the total picture.'

For further information, visit www.enhancemedia.co.uk

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.