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Finding facts on the wild, wild web
What do jobseekers actually look for when choosing and using a recruitment website? What do they like and what winds them up? The Appointment conducted another major survey of the preferences of retail professionals to gauge key trends and behaviours.
For all its advances the internet is in many ways reminiscent of the American Old West, a frontier land full of perils and pitfalls that at the same time offers a myriad of fantastic opportunities limited only by the imaginations of the entrepreneurs. Much to the regret of many (though not all) print publishers, gold was found in them thar hills when the internet and the recruitment industry came together. The web now forms a major part of any job search in any industry. All of the voodoo dolls and ritualised incantations attempting to stall its rise have been in vain. Online recruitment is here to stay.
Stretching the metaphor a little farther, this cyber gold rush has spawned its own collection of support industries. But the speed at which the online recruitment market is maturing, and with it levels of jobseeker web-savvy and sophistication, can sometimes leave recruiters struggling to keep up. Recruitment professionals aren't web experts, nor should they ever be expected to be such. Thus they must rely on advice from experts in this burgeoning industry and very often this is where the problem can arise.
There is so much information and there are so many opinions, often overlapping and/or contradictory, as to the best means of optimising an online recruitment campaign that it becomes an incoherent noise. One of the growing ironies of the Information Age is that good information is increasingly difficult to come by. Inevitably among the many companies and individuals purveying genuinely useful services and advice there are also the charlatans and bandits seeking to exploit the gaps in recruiters' knowledge. It's all too easy, particularly, for those with former connections to the recruitment industry to pass themselves off as experts while actually wasting thousands of pounds of clients' budgets thanks to their spurious advice.
The fact is that recruiters are increasingly desperate to be able to understand and utilise jobseekers' online behaviour as it continues to evolve. Trying to get a grasp on some of these fundamentals and to cut through the morass of opinion, The Appointment decided to verify the information at source. We surveyed hundreds of retail professionals on a series of different topics pertaining to how they conduct an online job search. Of course there's no suggestion whatsoever that the survey results will suddenly clear the mists of doubt leaving a clear path to an iron-clad recruitment strategy. What we can say, however, is that the survey's findings do present a meaningful sample of preferences and opinions from the very people recruiters are seeking to attract. As such they certainly represent a legitimate place to start.
OK, so let's start with some real basics - how 'brand loyal' are retail jobseekers, do they tend to scour the market or stick to their favourite site(s)? It's hardly 'News at Ten' material to discover that almost nobody only uses one recruitment website. It's actually quite surprising that as many as 2.7% of respondents said they tended to stick to just one - as illustrated in Table 1 opposite. Indeed, the largest proportion of candidates indicated that they regularly used six or more (34.7%). This is one of those occasions in which the statistics can be interpreted in a manner that supports almost any argument. Arguably, the fact that 46.2% of people only used between one and three websites might indicate that there is a significant degree of brand or site loyalty. Then again, a whopping 81.7% stated they used a minimum of three websites, suggesting that today's retail jobseeker will exhaust as many options as necessary to find their new career. So essentially, we are creatures of habit but we also shop around for jobs.
Table 2 adds further commentary to this, with respondents stating pretty categorically that their job search tends to consist of both niche, industry-specific sites (such as InRetail.co.uk) and large generic sites (such as Jobsite.co.uk). Almost two-thirds of candidates stated they always used both types, while very few (8%) stated they would only use the big multi-industry job sites. It is actually quite a compliment to the retail-specific recruitment sites that such a large chunk (28.5%) of folk never venture beyond the industry's boundaries. When asked to explain this preference for niche sites the overwhelming majority of responses pointed to the faster and more relevant search experience, with range of quality advertisers also cited.
So what are candidates looking for when visiting recruitment websites? Aside from the jobs themselves we were understandably interested in whether retail professionals also looked for careers advice. As can be seen in Table 3 more than half of respondents indicated that they either did or would look for careers advice online. Nevertheless over one third (34.1%) said that they would not - clearly preferring to glean their careers advice from useful magazines...
Naturally, however, the key issue in this debate is determining what factors jobseekers actually looked for, and what attracted them, when selecting recruitment websites.
We asked our respondents to rank in order a range of eight different factors, including elements common to most of the prominent websites and their functionality. Ranking an element one deemed it the most important and eight being the least. The results that came back were both very clear and quite opaque. Table 4 above illustrates the number one ranked website element across all candidates.
In this particular battle there are two clear heavyweight contenders: the number of jobs a website has (26.9%) and the quality of a website's advertisers (22.2%). That big numbers would appear to turn jobseekers' heads highlights an interesting conundrum for recruiters. On the one hand, if their prospective employees are attracted to sites with huge numbers of jobs then it would seem to be a good place to advertise their vacancies. But on the other hand their vacancies face far greater competition from all the other advertisers' jobs. There is the risk of being lost in the crowd.
That 'Quality of advertiser' features so highly is only to be expected. Brand names carry with them a lot of weight and if you arrive at a website showing jobs at a range of exciting companies with whom you might like to work you're going to keep coming back to that website. Beyond these two factors, 'Precision of search parameters' and 'Ease of use' are tied as the next number one ranked elements. Both of these highlight common priorities held by most people when using the internet - we want a minimum of fuss and intervening steps between us and the end product we're seeking. In other words we're all impatient buggers when we go online.
Analysis of which recruitment website element was rated number one does not, however, give a full comparative measure of importance. If, for example, a huge majority of candidates had determined that the presence of a CV bank was the second most important benefit, this would arguably make it more important even than 'Number of jobs' and yet would not show up in the data illustrated in Table 4.
To compare the overall relative merits of each factor we should instead refer to Table 5. As we've said, candidates were asked to give each element a ranking from one to eight - one being the most important and eight the least. If a candidate ranked a website feature the third most important, that feature was allocated a rating of 3, if it was seventh most important it would have a rating of 7 and so on. The scores illustrated in the table represent average rating for each benefit. Thus benefits with the lowest average rating were the most important to respondents.
Measuring the different criteria like this sees 'Quality of advertisers' with a rating of 3.8 leapfrog 'Number of jobs' as the overall most important element (3.93). Indeed, 'Number of jobs' comes very close to being beaten into third place by 'Ease of use' which has an overall rating of 3.94. And in terms of the number one rating where 'Precision of search parameters' was neck-and-neck with 'Ease of use', it slips behind speed of use and 'Jobs by email' in terms of overall importance to retail candidates.
Perhaps one explanation of why 'Number of jobs' slips back in terms of importance can be seen in our poll of elements that most put off respondents from using the website. As is illustrated in Table 6, the most frequently cited negative factor by respondents was 'Too many consultancy vacancies'. It's a common enough phenomenon, - those niche websites quoting huge numbers of jobs almost always feature a predominance of jobs from/through recruitment consultancies. These businesses typically post great numbers of jobs each (in some cases in the high hundreds). We've already covered what a positive impact brand names can have and it's not that consultancies are viewed in any way negatively - it's just that people prefer the retailers themselves. What can be a huge bugbear for some applicants is the presence of those vacancies that appear to come direct from the client brands themselves but actually turn out to be being handled by consultancies.
It's a measure of how difficult it can be to predict the preferences of jobseekers that while 'Careers advice' came in eighth out of eight in terms of overall importance, 'Lack of careers content' was the second-highest complaint against recruitment websites (20%).
When every potential factor is brought into consideration internet recruitment is a tremendously complex business...well, getting it right is at least. The elements we've covered here really form just the introduction to a much longer story. Nevertheless they are an important measure of some of the key considerations being weighed by retail jobseekers. Of course it's arguable that the most important factor to consider when determining where to allocate the recruitment budget is past success. Go with what works, with the site(s) that have proven successful in getting the right sort of candidates into your company. And for newcomers to the market...take a good look around and bear in mind what is motivating your target audience.
