Fewer job boards, not fewer jobs
The Conference Board's Help Wanted OnLine, released today, was 260,000 job postings slimmer than it was last year.
Not that there are fewer job openings this year than there were last year; just fewer advertised openings in the count. The index, a measure of employment by online job advertisements, calibrated itself this year and dropped thousands of duplicate advertisements from the count. From this month's HWOL report:
The HWOL program collects data on a daily basis from over 1,200 online job board sources. Each year, new sources are added as they emerge while some existing sources may be dropped if it is determined that they primarily aggregate their data from other job board sources. This year a more extensive job board review and analysis was performed for identifying any remaining aggregator job boards; this review has resulted in the elimination of several job boards. In combination with the unduplication improvements, these changes resulted in lowering the series levels by about 260,000 ads per month.
This is a problem the conference board has recognized as far back as 2008 when it closed its Help Wanted Advertising Index of print ads to focus exclusively on Internet job boards. The board's 2009 methodology explains their concern and attempt to meet the challenge:
There is a tremendous amount of ad-scraping within the industry and there are large nationwide job boards that contain only scraped ads... Wanted Technologies [deduplication software] first identifies the job boards which are only aggregators of ads from other job boards and eliminates them from active collection. For the remaining 1200+ boards which are under active weekly collection, Wanted Technologies uses its proprietary software to categorize each ad by a number of key variables including company name, job title/description, and location. Ads are then compared across all boards and duplicates are eliminated from the HWOL published estimates.
That's great for the index, but what about the job seeker, who scrolls through the same job boards to find work. The Conference Board estimates that two thirds of the advertised jobs are duplicates.
The unduplication process reduces the count of overall ads collected from over 13 million ads to over 3 million ads after unduplication - indicating that duplicates represented about 2 out of 3 of the ads prior to unduplication.
Technology and job boards have failed recruiters and job seekers alike. Duplicate listings are a frustrating phenomena for job seekers, and a problem for employers who receive the brunt -- the ill-will felt by job seekers, writes Jeff Dickey-Chasins, the Job Board Doctor.
The job board should care quite a bit about making the job seeker unhappy. After all, quality candidates are the lifeblood of a successful site. But eliminating duplicate postings is tough. If recruiters purchase the right to post jobs, why can't they post a listing that a client has given them?
Another twist - when an aggregator like Indeed or SimplyHired serves up duplicate job postings, what can anyone do? Between cross posting by the job board itself, recruiters, and (occasionally) use of multiple job boards by the company, it's not unusual to see the job listed in search results many times.
This may be a problem that is never resolved - but both companies and job boards should be aware that it creates negative attitudes toward them on the part of the job seeker.
The recruitment advertising business is changing, wrote Toby Dayton on his blog Diggings, as the sites that rely on pay-per-post and aggregators wither away or offer more robust services. A hopeful sign is Facebook's acquisition of Pursuit, a job referral engine, that has seeded speculation that Facebook might build a job matching service superior to the current field.
For now, TalentBuzz's Jason Buss recommends job seekers comb through the aggregators, then find the job at the source: the hiring company.
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