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Some random interesting stats from JobAdder for May

by Brett Iredale June 2, 2008

May was a very interesting month in JobAdder as numbers of jobs, users and jobs boards continue to grow strongly across the site.  Here are a few random interesting stats.

74,560 job ads were posted through JobAdder in May

63% of all applications received came from SEEK

Job boards with the highest average number of applications per job were (in order)
1  SEEK
2  JobsJobsJobs
3  MyCareer

The job boards with highest month on month growth in average number of candidate apps per job were:
1  JobsJobsJobs
2  Linkme
3  FinancialPlanningJobs.com.au
4  Gurus.com.au

Best day for ad response : Tuesday

19 % more people applied for jobs on Sunday than on Saturday.

23 % more people applied for a job on the weekend than on a Friday

More people applied for a job between 11am and midday than in any other hour

Between 10am and 10pm the WORST time to list a job is 6pm


Entry filed under: Industry News, Job Board Updates

9 CommentsAdd your own

1. Carey Eaton June 2, 2008 at 5:43pm

Brett, are you realy perpetuating that old myth that the "best" time to post an ad has some sort of correlation with traffic peaks?

On a very simple level, it is true that if there is more traffic at a certain time, then the odds of more people seeing your ad are higher. But that's all it is: odds.

And in calculating those odds, traffic peaks are not the only factor - the decay of your ad down the list of jobs is a greater factor. Not to mention that the peak traffic times vary substantially by industry and location for that matter.

For a very long time the industry (including SEEK until this year) has been pushing the idea that Monday and Tuesday are "good" days to post your ad. The industry has falsely linked days with more activity than other days as the single greatest contributor to ad performance.

SEEK has now comprehensively moved away from the idea that there is a 'good' day for ad performance. It is simply not substantiated by the data.

Ad performance varies very substantially due to a range of factors including traffic volumes, the industry you're posting in, the content of the ad, the attractiveness of the job and the advertiser, the volume of structured content in the ad, any prominence prduct purchasing that supports the ad, the volume of other similar or competing ads, the volume of active versus passive jobseekers per job type and so on.

Perhaps its an old newspaper deadline hangover thing, but the industry really needs to get over gambling the entire ad performance effort on just one of these factors - the time of posting.

Given that almost the entire industry is posting their ads aiming at a mythical 11:26am rush of candidates each Monday, the volume of ads at that time is so large as to practically guarantee your ad has the lowest visibility achievable since it cascades down the list at the fastest rate of knots of any time during the week.

The job board industry should update its messaging to advertisers based on facts, not myths.

Rather than asking customers to gamble on Mondayitis, we should be promoting the facts which are that frequency of advertising (rather than pure volume), volume of structured data for search, well written ad content and the purchase of more visibility are the best way to drive more performance for your advertising dollar on job boards.

2. Brett Iredale June 3, 2008 at 6:57am

Carey, thanks for the passionate response! I have to say I read it a bit like this...
"blah blah blah Seek blah blah blah this seems to have touched a nerve - why??"

I think the level of passion in your response is precisely why recruiters are more interested than ever in understanding their data and the behaviour of their job ads, applicants and job boards. Everyone knows there is no "best day" for ad response on Seek. They are all pretty good or pretty bad depending on how you look at it. People do like to understand the performance of their advertising over a period of time though and advertisers are entitled to analyse that in any way they like.

A few of your assumptions above are incorrect - most notably the assumption that we promote specific facts about best posting days, times etc to our users. In fact we make a point of not doing that for the same reason that SEEK have been erroneously pushing certain days and times for years. What we do instead is provide comrehensive reporting that allows each client to view, slice and dice their OWN DATA, and thereby draw their OWN CONCLUSIONS. The information above is simply a random collection of facts that stand out from our data and we will continue publishing this kind of aggregated information because people care about it.

I think we should continue these conversations though because this is valuable stuff.

3. Declan O June 5, 2008 at 9:24am

Brett, who is getting response from JobsJobsJobs?! Have they got the best growth because the previous applicant per job level was a minus figure?!

Is there any glimmer of truth in the information above - if so i want to hear more!

4. citydude June 11, 2008 at 12:11am

Declan, I can't speak for anyone else but we have had good growth out of many new starters. jobsjobsjobs is just one the many we have tried and so far they have been reasonable performers. However, my network in other industry sectors don't get as good a results as what we do. I guess like anything it is dependent on the industry you are in and the strength the particular board has.

At the end of the day SEEK still delivers for us, hands down. However when you read comments from SEEK like the one above you have to wonder why they haven't been threatened earlier? Does this Carey feller understand that he has just told the market that we should place more ads more frequently on SEEK, which by chance means more revenue to them? I mean come on. Do you really think we want to pay SEEK more money? Isn't it SEEK's job to deliver us the right number of candidates to our job ads without having to post the same ad time and time again and without having to purchase other online media products which fuel SEEK's revenue even more? I mean every time we get a price hike from SEEK they tell us its because they are delivering more value to the advertisers. Well if this is the case why do we need to be thinking about purchasing more ads, more online media?

5. Carey Eaton June 11, 2008 at 8:35am

Hey CityDude,

I'm afraid you've misunderstood my motives here. Its not at all in SEEK's interest to extract a whole load of revenue from the market but undermine our product over the longer term for both jobseekers and advertisers in the process.

Perhaps explaining the maths of what I'm saying will help you out here.

Let's say on SEEK there are 10 people visiting the site on a Monday and Tuesday, and 9 people visiting the site on Weds, Thurs and Fri.

Let's also say you have a $1,000 budget and are paying $100 per ad - you've got 10 ads to post during the week.

Whether you spend $200 or all of your $1,000 on a Monday, the maximum number of people you can possibly reach is always going to be 10. Neither time nor spend will increase the traffic.

On the other hand, if you spend $200 a day for the 5 days, the maximum number of people you can possibly reach is 47. By thinking about advertising frequency for the same spend, rather than big volume dumps based on time (which has minor relevance as explained above), there is a 470% performance difference for the same spend.

If you were to spend an additional $20 on a StandOut Ad and reduce your ad volume by not advertising one of the days you could expect an increase in performance also by the hundreds of percent compared to the same spend by dumping all your ads in a single day.

An even smarter option is simply to buy a Premium Listing for either $220 or $500 depending on the category and get visibility for the whole week and weekend to an even greater volume of people for a fraction of the original spend.

If the entire industry ceased dumping huge volumes in single episodes, that would make the marketplace more efficient for everyone, massively reducing the feeling that people need to refresh their ads all the time.

6. Declan O June 13, 2008 at 2:02pm

Carey where do you get 470% from?

Why do you always try and push these premium listings etc at the massive prices they are. If they are so good, give me a free trial, the results should speak for themselves shouldnt they?

7. Brad D June 18, 2008 at 5:05pm

Hi Carey,

Just quoting you here...

"Let's say on SEEK there are 10 people visiting the site on a Monday and Tuesday, and 9 people visiting the site on Weds, Thurs and Fri.

Let's also say you have a $1,000 budget and are paying $100 per ad - you've got 10 ads to post during the week.

Whether you spend $200 or all of your $1,000 on a Monday, the maximum number of people you can possibly reach is always going to be 10. Neither time nor spend will increase the traffic."

What you are basically saying by your comment is that an advertisement on SEEK is only good for 1 day? Meaning regardless of the fact that the job ad will stay "Active" for a month, you should continually spend at least the $1000 in this case, on the same job per week?

Hmm... Sounds great!

I would also like to add. In my opinion recruiters have “No Option” but to use SEEK. They have everyone by the short and curlies and continue to dominate the market and drive applicants, both good and poor… im not a fan of SEEK but they do offer a better ROI than mycareer who tried to sell me on the fact that they have “Better Quality of applicants” LOL

Venting. Brad.

8. Craig June 20, 2008 at 9:21am

"What you are basically saying by your comment is that an advertisement on SEEK is only good for 1 day? Meaning regardless of the fact that the job ad will stay "Active" for a month, you should continually spend at least the $1000 in this case, on the same job per week?".

This is why niche job boards can work. Because of the hundreds of jobs seek gets every day for each category, after 2 or 3 days your job can suddenly be on page 20 of the search results rather than page 1 with obvious consequences to the number of views it get. You then have to upgrade to a premium listing or readvertise to get it back up to page 1 again. But on a niche job board because there are not as many advertisers they job could stay on page 1 for a week. So while the traffic may be significantly less on niche boards this is offset by the much increased visibility every particular job gets, and throw in the higher quality of ads on niche boards (thats another story) and you have a winner.

9. Carey Eaton June 25, 2008 at 4:00pm

Hi Brad D,

Interesting interpretation of the maths but I'm not saying that at all :-)

What I am saying is that if you spend your entire budget on a Monday, you're going to get limited results compared to spreading that same budget over more than one day.

I'm interested to hear more about your 'no option' remark, and that you're not a fan despite SEEK delivering the best ROI for you. There's probably not a lot I can help you with in the 'no option' department but what would you suggest would turn you into more of a fan? Happy to have the conversation online here, or offline if that makes it easier on 03 8517 4100

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