Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Irish job applications – Quality vs. Quantity

When a sales person from any Irish job site approaches you, you will hear one of the two approaches:

Quantity

Our Irish Job site has the largest number of job hunters in Ireland visiting the job listings every day. We provide comprehensive guidelines to Irish job hunters in various fields like CV preparation, Cover Letter writing, interview preparation, interview dressing code, etc, etc.

We have largest number of jobs in Ireland advertised on a single job site in Ireland. Largest Irish recruiters use our Irish Job site to quickly fill Irish job openings.

Quality

Our Irish niche job site has the largest number of relevant job hunters for your industry (sales, IT, HR, construction, medical, etc). Irish specialist recruiters use our site successfully to cover the niche requirements to fill their jobs in Ireland.

When you have used both of those types of sites you will start understanding what really differs them. What differs them is their position in the Google (or any other search engine) results page for the relevant phrases.

The Quantity site will be in the top 5 search results for any relevant search phrase. That means you will get a lot or responses on your job advertisements. If any of those applications will be even slightly relevant to your advertised jobs is a question you will have to find out for yourself. The more prepared you are for the volume of the applications, the better will you cope with the Quantity, and easier will filter through to the right candidate – that will result in a placement made.

The Quality web site does not have visitors or has very little visitors. Irish job hunter can not find it in Google, or can not find it easily. Their unique selling point is that they will send you relevant applicants, and only relevant applicants. What you are going to learn is that the overall Quality in the most cases is going to be the same as of the high volume Quantity job site. The niche Quality site will do it’s best to advertise strongly in its niche. Specialist magazines and organizations are the best (and only?!) ways to actually advertise. Ireland being the size it is, has a problem with that simply because the niches are very, very small. It requires very special skill-set and patience to do marketing to such small groups. The budgets required are disproportionate to the sizes of the niches. The end result is that a so called Quality web site will give you actually the same Quality as a Quantity web site, but in the much smaller volume. Quantity site plays on the big numbers card, and will send you lots of applicants. It is your responsibility as a recruiter to filter through and find the best that you can.

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