Online Recruitment - the bigger picture (Tim's blog)

NORAS application levels - follow up post

As promised the other day I've had a dig around the NORAS data and looked at why the results show that less people have applied for a job they found online in 2009 than in 2008.

For NORAS 2008 we asked a series of three questions about applying for a job online - 'have you ever applied for a job', 'if you have applied did you get an interview' and 'if you got an interview did you actually get the job' with respondents answered 'yes' or 'no' to each question. This showed in 2008 that 76% of online job seekers had applied for a job found online.

For NORAS 2009 (in order to accommodate other additional questions) we combined these three separate questions into a single question and asked 'which of the following have you ever done (tick all that apply) - 'applied for a job', 'obtained an interview', 'obtained a job' or 'none of the above'. This showed that in 2009 68% of online job seekers had applied for a job found online.

19 job boards participated in both NORAS 2008 and 2009, so the best way to track any changes in the results between the two years is to just look at these sites. Some interesting results; only two of the 19 sites showed a year on year increase in the percentage of their users who said they had ever applied for a job online, while the other 17 showed a year on year decrease - 10 sites decreased year by less than 10% and 7 decreased year on year by more than 10% (with two sites showing a decrease of 17% year on year). This seems fairly significant.

We've talked it through in the office and have two possible explanations:

1) Changing the way we asked the question has affected the result, this is certainly possible, but it's a reasonably straight forward change.

2) The economic downturn has introduced job seekers to the online market (through redundancy etc) that have never had to apply for a job online before - the fieldwork for NORAS 2009 took place from September - December in 2008, so the effects of the downturn were certainly being keenly felt right through the data collection - maybe this is evidence of how the recession is impacting on job boards? It's a certainly a candidate rich market and maybe a lot of these candidates are relatively inexperienced online job seekers?

NORAS 2009 highlights

The results of NORAS 2009 are just out, this year's results feature more job boards than ever before (31) and use data gathered from more job seekers than ever before (52,667) - this is the last NORAS that I'll be involved in from an Enhance Media perspective, so on a personal level it's pleasing to pass on the NORAS baton in such a healthy state.

The results themselves throw up some interesting findings; firstly the percentage of online job seekers that say they only use the internet to look for jobs has increased to 14% up from 9% in 2008 and 6% in 2007 - this might not seem huge, but I think is significant - two years ago one in twenty job board users said they only used the internet and now that figure is nearer one in seven.

The results also show that one in ten online job seekers have actually used a smart phone or blackberry to look for a job. We changed the question about the use of technology this year, last year we asked 'do you have access to the following technology - desktops, laptops, blackberrys etc' and people quite rightly said - having access to these items is one thing, but do people actually use them to look for jobs? So this year we can definitely say that job seekers are using mobile devices to look for jobs (and not just to download ring tones etc) and whether or not 2009 will be the year for mobile marketing (either recruitment or consumer based), this is our little contribution to the debate.

Another question that we changed year on year was the question relating to whether or not people have applied for jobs, obtained interviews or obtained jobs as a result of an online application and as Julian points out, the figures have slightly decreased year on year - I'll have a more detailed look at this and compare a pool of job boards that participated in both 2008 and 2009 and try to get back with the results of this in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, you can download the NORAS results and use the interactive tool for free by registering at the NORAS website.

As a footnote (and also in the interests of research), I'm now deep into my fourth winter cold.

The rise and rise of netbooks

Netbook sales continue to defy the economic downturn as reported in PCPRO and the Guardian, with predicted global sales of 30 million units in 2009.

Why is this interesting? Well, when we talked about mobile internet use in the past, I always imagined that phones would get bigger and cleverer, but actually PCs are getting smaller and cleverer and that (along with mobile broadband via dongles) is what's driving internet use on the move. I wonder when the boundary between smartphone and netbook will blur, who will produce the killer netbook/smartphone hybrid? As the Guardian observes, it's interesting to note the Apple aren't in the netbook market. Yet.

Daily Mash keeps you sane

There's not much to laugh about these days. Not if you watch the news and read the papers. Unless of course, like me, you've discovered the Daily Mash, if you haven't here's how they've reported the news over the last couple of months (a kind of best of Mash if you like):

The UK banking crisis

BBC reporter Robert Peston

UK energy prices

BBC's stance over the Gaza appeal

Parents on snow day

Met Office advice on winter weather

Chelsea sack Scolari

England's tour of the West Indies

Happy reading.

Don't worry, things will start to get better in 2010

According to WARC, overall ad revenues will fall throughout 2009 and start to pick up with a 0.3% uplift in Q2 of 2010. The good news is that throughout this period online revenues will continue to grow at 9% per quarter (even while everything else decreases). You can read more here and if you're feeling really flush buy WARC's forecasting report here.

Samsung best netbook; HTC Touch best smartphone

If, like me, you've made a poor technology decision in the past, then it pays to read reviews before spending your hard earned money. With this in mind, I took a step into sheer geekdom and bought PC PRO magazine the other day on the promise of the UK's biggest review of netbooks and smartphones.

Unlike a lot of reviews that you'd read in the Sunday papers and stuff, PC PRO conduct their reviews using proper criteria and tests like battery life, processor speed and other serious things. The results are interesting, top of the netbook heap (the 'Lab winner') is the Samsung NC10 which will run for seven and a half hours, includes SD and MMC card readers and a 160 GB hard disk. PC PRO say the Samsung NC10 is "a pleasure to use...a superb netbook for the right price" (about £300).

The best value netbook is the Acer Aspire One which at £215 comes in significantly cheaper than the Samsung, the only downside from my point of view though is that is uses Linux rather than Windows as an operating system (which I'm sure most techies will say is fine, but the familiarity of Windows scores big for me).  PC PRO also recommend the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 through Vodafone which for £25 per month for two years comes with an embedded 3G connection meaning that you can go online where ever you are, even if there isn't a wireless network.

Interestingly, Web User magazine also rates the Samsung NC10 as the best netbook and highlights that the next generation of netbooks will include tablet style functionality that allows you to write notes on the screen with a pointer type thing and save these as text documents - maybe it's worth waiting for these?

The smartphone results are just as interesting with the HTC Touch HD coming out on top and the Apple iPhone not coming in the top three.

PC PRO gives the 18 month cost of an HTC at £685 and say that although it's "not as easy to use as the iPhone it's far more powerful" - for example it has double the iPhone's screen resolution and has a 5mp, rather than a 2mp, camera. For me though it almost looks too clever and could be one of those devices that I only ever use to 10% of it's capability, the result being that you carry something really expensive and clever around for no particular reason.

Other smartphones recommended are the Nokia E71 at £450 for 18 months and the Blackberry Bold 9000 at £630 for 18 months. One phone not recommended is the T-Mobile G1 which despite the Google operating system scores only two out of a possible six stars and is described as "old-fashioned" and having "creaky build quality".

With internet use becoming more and more mobile there's a real boom in handheld browsing devices, both in the form of smartphones and netbooks and although the iPhone is regarded as a killer device by some (including a lot of those that have one) it's interesting to note that when put to the test by some proper IT types, it's not one of the top three recommend phones.

So Samsung NC10 and HTC Touch HD it is then, but what do I listen to my tunes on?