Tracking job board advertising data

Julian Stopps (who I recently mentioned for his born podcasts) has created "The born Job Advertising Index".  It's an independent metric which measures and tracks the volume of job advertising on job sites in the UK market.  At present you can track data from 24 job boards (see below) although the plan is that some boards may be removed, and more will be added, to make the index more representative of the UK market.  Apparently a unique aspect of the index is that its methodology has been formulated with this in mind, the accuracy of the index should be maintained even when boards are added or removed. 

The Job Boards Currently Included In The Index (Aug 2007)
Blue Line Careers -- Brand Republic Jobs -- Career Builder UK -- Changeboard -- eFinancialCareers -- eTeach -- Fish4jobs -- GAAPweb -- Guardian Jobs -- InPharm -- Jobs Wales -- Jobs.ac.uk -- JobServe -- Jobsite -- Mad.co.uk -- Monster UK -- S1jobs -- ScotCareers -- SecsInTheCity -- The Career Engineer -- The Grocer Jobs -- The Lawyer.com -- The Times Online -- TotalJobs

The idea is that you can use the data created by the index to identify seasonal trends in online job advertising, compare job board advertising volumes and identify advertising patterns.  You can view figures for individual job sites or, at present, up to three sites.

As well as just creating and viewing the graphs on the Born website they have made a selection of widgets available for use by "the blogger and journalistic communities".  When I get five minutes I'll be creating one to pop on here.  Once they've got a few more sites on board I'd ideally like one which compares data between the generalist and niche sites.   Anyway, I will post again about this once I've created my widget.

Comments

[Steve Butler]

It is great to see this sort of index getting off the ground. There has been a need for a number of years to get some objective measure of recruitment activity. My company tried a number of years ago to get this off the ground, but ran in to a number of issues with the main job boards. One threatened legal action if we used a spider to trawl their sites. The early research showed up a lot of very interesting results such as jobs being deliberately duplicated by a job board, presumably to boost their posting statistics. There were also many jobs being posted across multiple job boards and another special was the same adverts reappearing regularly for 6 months or more, obviously "Recruitment Honey Pot" type adverts fishing for candidates with fictitious type jobs.

European law and the general climate have changed since then, but is great to see this sort of index get going! Good luck to them.

Steve