80:20 Rule in Job Advertising Budget does not work!

80:20 Rule in Job Advertising Budget does not work!

Remember the old 80:20 rule that says that 20% of your staff does 80% of the job, and all other similar ‘connotations’?

Well if you apply the same to your Jobs Advertising Budget and split it between online and offline advertising, it simply will not return the expected inverted result.

The fact is that most of the large recruiters spend far more than a half of their Jobs Advertising Budget in offline advertisement, and a failrly small chunk online. There is an obvious reason for such a distribution since there is a fairly limited vendors that could bite into a Job Advertising Budget providing any kind of services. We are talking about a handful job boards only, and Google AdWords, that again with GeoTargeting to Ireland applied can not consume any significant amount of your Job Advertising Budget. So the majority of it gets spent offline. The larger the recruitment agency or consultancy gets, the larger the offline chunk is. The largest agencies spend more than 80% from our ‘Rule’

And here comes the funny part!

The percentage of CVs attracted from offline advertising is always far more than 20%. The single digit figures of the % are the reality!

What does this mean? It means that +80% of the Jobs Advertising Budget attracts less than 20% of the applicants. Talking about money wasting? The same is also true from the opposite perspective: less than 20% of your budget brings in more than 80% of your applicants.

Update jobs, Clone Jobs, Duplicate jobs...

An interesting fact jut came up today in a discussion with a recruiter in Ireland. The fact that a job published on almost any job site in Ireland, quickly disappears in thousands of jobs advertised. The larger the job board is – the more jobs it has the fact that a job gets ‘lost’ is more true. We looked at Irish Jobs and have saved a snapshot of a search results for the keyword ‘Manager’ in all locations. We have dome the same every 10 minutes during a 2 hour period. The test was run on Monday during a lunch time (a 2 hour lunch?! J). The results are outstanding! The saved web pages – that are the same web page actually just displaying the status of it in 10 minute intervals, did not contain a single same job. Meaning that no job have ‘survived’ fro 10 minutes on the front page of IrishJobs in the results for the word ‘Manager’.

So the reality is, if someone is looking for your jobs, you have 10 minute interval from publishing it, until being gone from the first page!!!


So this obviously makes you think! Should I:

1. 
   Update Jobs – does that Update All button do anything???
   
2. Clone Jobs – a new job is a new job! Let’s see what their terms and conditions actually say….
   
3. Duplicate Jobs – How about advertising the same jobs 5 times? At least it will get there in front of the visitors 5 times more than a single one!
   

The worst part in the whole story is that each job board is different. One really needs to spend a lot of time analyzing each one to understand how to (ab)use it to it’s full potential. And even worse are the constant changes of Terms and Conditions, and new job boards popping up that you have to understand.

Doesn’t it always seam that your jobs are on the bottom of any list on the job boards?