I read their reviews and found that they based their “best in the class” ratings on usability of the site’s software, number of job listings, number of unique visitors, and special features like Monster.com’s Networking.

These are necessary characteristics of any type of successful online business. However, speaking as a military job hunter’s advocate here, these criteria do not address the major concern of any job hunter: how likely will I get hired through this website?

A jobs site’s hiring success rate is the most important criterion of a job hunter. However, jobs sites rarely talk about this important barometer of job hunt success. Rather, jobs sites operators like to discuss the number of unique visitors to their website. So, let’s examine this characteristic and determine if it can be used as a gauge to hiring success.

What Do Unique Visitors Tell a Job Hunter?

Job boards love to talk about the number of unique visitors they receive per month. They often issue press releases to the media when they obtain a record number of unique visitors. (This happens often after the SuperBowl: web traffic hits peak levels because of the tv advertising the websites purchase for the big event.)

But do the number of unique visitors to a website, really help you determine if a particular job board will help YOU get hired?

Not really.

While the numbers do reveal a job board’s popularity, and with that popularity naturally follows a good source of current job listings to choose from, these stats in and off themselves help employers more than job hunters.Since nearly every vet who contacts me for help is interested in a Federal job (good pay, benefits and lots of job security), let’s look at USAJobs.com, the official job site of the U.S. Federal Government. And ask what their hiring success rate is.

Well, they don’t just come out and tell you. But we can calculate the visitors-to-jobs created ratio based upon published data. This ratio will tell us how many unique visitors USAJobs.com gets for every job created in the Government, based upon the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly jobs report.

Big Job Boards: More Hype Than Results

In its June 17, 2005 press release (Note 3), the OPM stated that the USAJobs.com website had received “more than 130 million unique visitors since its re-launch on August 4, 2003.” And Acting OPM Director Dan G. Blair stated in the release: “The results speak for themselves. The USAJOBS website has proven to be a user-friendly resource for today’s federal job seeker. We have paid attention to customer feedback, which has gained for us a high degree of customer satisfaction over the past year. Our customer loyalty is also strong, with 87 percent of users indicating they are likely to recommend the site to others, and 90 percent of users saying they are likely to return to USAJOBS.”

Well, I congratulate Mr. Blair for earning high customer or user satisfaction marks for the USAJobs.com website. But like ConsumerSearch.com’s review of the best job sites, unique visitors and good usability were the criteria his feedback study used as gauges of jobs site success–not results or hiring success rates.

Of the 130 million visitors or 5.6 million unique visitors per month the USAJobs.com website receives (Note 4), how many of these folks actually got hired by the Government?

Needless to say, the OPM is tight-lipped about its hiring success rate. But using the U.S. Department of Labor’s economic summary stats we can determine just how effective the website is in getting people hired.

In its July 8, 2005 economic news release, The U.S. Dept of Labor, BLS (Note 5) stated that in the month of June 2005, employment increased by 146,000 from the previous month, May 2005. Of that aggregate total, 21,754 were Government jobs (Federal, State, City and County)were created in June 2005.If we give USAJobs.com the benefit of the doubt and assume ALL government employment increases in June 2005 were from the USAJobs website, we can easily calculate that for every new government job in the month of June, 257 people visited the USAJobs website (5.6 million/21,754 = 257.)

If only 1 job was filled for every 257 unique visitors, then in June 2005, the USAJobs.com hiring success rate was 0.39 percent.

To frame it in a more tangible way, think of yourself going to your local office products store and purchasing a ream of paper, which is 500 sheets. Go home, open the wrapper and cut the ream in half (250 sheets). That is the number of people you are competing against for that 1 job in June 2005!

Not a very good hiring success rate is it? Well, it is not out of the ordinary.

For example, Monster.com reported in a recent press release (Note 6) that it receives over 4.4 million unique visitors per month.

Going back to the U.S. Department of Labor economy summary for June 2005, it stated that 146,000 jobs (including the Government jobs) were created that month. If we give Monster.com com the benefit of the doubt (as well) and assume all of these jobs were from Monster.com, then we can calculate for the June 2005, that for every job filled, 30 people visited Monster.com (4.4million/146,000 = 30)

If one job was filled for every 30 visitors then in June 2005, Monster’s com’s hiring success rate would be only 3 percent.)

These hiring success percentages are in line with the historical numbers. In a 2002 study by author Richard N. Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute?, he stated the success rate for jobs sites was about 4%.

In 2002, CareerXroads asked employers what percentage of their new hires came from the four leading online career sites. The percentage of hires made through Monster were 1.4%; Hotjobs 0.39%; CareerBuilder: 0.29%; and Headhunter.net: .27%. (Note 7)

But a lot has changed since 2002. Especially how job recruiters use the Internet.

The Rise of The (Human) HeadHunter Again

If the big job boards have low hiring success rates, why is everyone rushing to the Internet to run their job hunts? This is a good question. And the answer is not obvious.

Lots of people are being hired through jobs sites–indirectly. What has happened is the recruiters (headhunters) are combing websites looking for candidates for their clients, which wasn’t occurring that much in 2002 because recruiters were still learning how to use the Internet in their businesses.

Consultant Peter D. Weddle says today recruiters are aggressively using the Internet to source job candidates for their clients in various ways (Note 8).

People are getting hired via the resume banks. Recruiters see a good resume, call the candidate, and traditional, human-based recruiting is what is getting people hired via the Web.

So, it is essential for you to have a good resume posted on websites even though you do not apply for jobs. And that resume should be optimized for the Web. It must be “deep” in keywords so the resume can be “found” by both employers and recruiters.

But the fact is that most military resumes are not optimized for the Web. And this only lengthens military job hunters’ job searches.

Criteria for Choosing Job Boards With Good Hiring Success Rates

Military job hunters can advance their job hunts expeditiously on the Internet with a 2-pronged strategy:

1. Optimized resumes so headhunters can “find” you through searches of resume data banks.

2. Registering your resume on jobs sites that are likely to have good hiring success rates.

The job boards with the best hiring success rates are industry-focused, market niche sites. Why? These sites have three important qualities:

• Industry Experience Breeds Market Focus
  
• A Good Selection of Job Listings
  
• Behind-the-Scenes Customer Service

Job Listing: a job site with decent hiring success has a good selection of jobs. Not too few, not too many. Too few jobs will increase your competition; a problem on the big job boards. Too many jobs suggest that some are old jobs– a red flag.

Behind-the-Scenes Customer Service: This is the most important feature of a job site with a good hiring success rate but it is the least obvious quality. You won’t know it is going on unless you hear about it. Customer Service in this context simply means that the management team tweaks the system to ensure job hunters are getting matched to potential employers. They see themselves as providing an important function for the industry, not just a mega classified ad bank.

A job site with good hiring success should have at least 2 of these 3 criteria.

Examples of Exceptional Job Boards

Here are 3 job boards I believe are exceptional. They have the above criteria and then some. Use these sites as a model for the type of job boards that will get you hired.

LogJobs.com: This website is very clear about what it does: “dedicated exclusively to the logistics industry.” What is impressive is the site’s qualifications and resources sections. This information is valuable to the job seeker and tells the site’s users that this site knows the logistics industry. All its explanatory notes are designed to provide terse info about what they are looking for AND help the job hunter focus his or her job hunt. You know they have an deep industry association and they are playing the job-listing game both for contract and full-time jobs.

ThinkJobs.com: This is an engineering jobs site. What I like about this website is the information posted in its job ads. The info suggests they are not playing around. They have both the job hunter and the employer’s interests in mind. Within the job ads are questions the job hunter will be asked. Typically, they are technical questions that would be asked in an interview. You know by going to this site that they know how to match up employers and job hunters. You get these sense that this is really a “human” headhunter who uses the Web for sourcing purposes. The real job matching is done behind the scenes.

ClearanceJobs.com. Being owned by Dice.com suggests where this website is coming from: tech jobs with a focus and that focus is jobs with security clearances. Since few people have security clearances, the focus acts as a “filter,” separating those candidates with clearances from those who do not. This means the stasis level of qualified job candidates is higher than on other sites. It obviously is a well-designed site and has a good selection of jobs. But what isn’t obvious is that they provide fine-tuning customer service in select cases. I’ve had a few experiences with them in this respect and these experiences have been positive.

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