Why NORAS is great for Recruiters

I was chatting to Tim Elkington at Enhance Media this week about their "Online Recruitment 2007 – the year ahead" conference (I’ll have to post about that another time) when we got onto the subject of NORAS.

The NORAS provides independent data on the audiences of job boards.  The point is to allow recruiters to chose the right job board for their specific role.

Enhance started it in 2002 and this year they have the largest number of online recruitment sites taking part.  Probably the biggest criticism I hear about NORAS is that it doesn’t cover every job board in the UK you don’t get a complete picture.  I recon there are around 350 job boards in the UK.  Tim suggests there are just 100 major players. So, with 27 participants taking part in NORAS 2007 they are getting there.  The sites they have on board for the results to be published in January 2007 include Monster, Jobserve, Guardian and Fish4Jobs.  Unfortunately Jobsite aren’t taking part for this coming year but Tim hopes to have them on board for NORAS 2008. 

I won’t go into all the detail of the data that is collected for NORAS.  You can read about it here if you like.  But, basically it looks at the size and profile of each site’s audience.

The job boards pay to take part but the data is made available free of charge to recruiters.  You can download the data in PDF format from the site or sign up (again free of charge) to NORAS interactive.  This allows you to analyse the data in more depth.

Tim gave me some interesting facts about usage from a survey of recruiters who requested the data.

• 91% of companies who use NORAS find it useful
• 48% say it has directly influenced where they place their jobs ads
• 94% say they are more likely to advertise with recruitment websites taking part in NORAS 

Whilst it would be great if every job board participated it is still definitely worth looking at when making decisions about which job boards to use to place your vacancies. Also, just because a job board hasn’t taken part it doesn’t mean you can’t personally integrate them against the same criteria NORAS have.