10th Best Site for Active Job Search – Monster

If you’re a job seeker selecting a single site with broad national coverage to conduct an active job search, which site do you choose?  You have 30,000 to 40,000 sites to choose from, but most are niche, low-volume sites.  When it comes to high-volume sites with broad occupational and geographical coverage, the club becomes very exclusive – 10 sites make my cut.   

For an active job search the most important criterion is coverage of the job market – an ideal site, if one exists, would cover 100% of the jobs advertised online for a selected geography.  Other features, including resume banks for passive search, career information, and referral services can add tremendous value; yet for the active job seeker, the battle cry remains “show me the jobs.”

Evaluating coverage is a challenge.  Vertical search sites (e.g. Indeed, Jobster and SimplyHired) try to find all of the available job ads; yet, these sites vary significantly in the number of ads they report for a common geography.  Variances in search algorithms, meta-data assignment, and handling of duplicate records all complicate the comparison process.  And the rate of change in technology behind the sites is so rapid that the best site today may not be the best site tomorrow.  So any methodology used to compare coverage between sites must constrain the scope of the study to allow rapid turnaround.

For this comparison, Eugene, Oregon is home to a hypothetical job seeker.  With a population of roughly 150,000, Eugene is large enough to have its own Craigslist site, isolated enough from other cities to minimize the effects of variances in geographical classification, and small enough to provide a manageable number of online job ads for comparison between sites.

Each of the 10 job sites in this comparison contributed 5 job ads from the Eugene area to a test sample of 50 jobs; no duplicate ads were allowed in the sample.  Each job site was then searched for all 50 jobs, and a ‘coverage score’ was calculated.  The minimum possible coverage score is 10% since each site contributed 5 of the 50 job ads in the test sample. 

The hypothetical job seeker in this test is looking for the site containing all 50 jobs (100% coverage).  So which site, in this exclusive club of 10 sites providing broad national coverage, comes closest?

For this test, Monster is the 10th best choice. 

How is this possible given that in Monster Having the Last Laugh and in Monster – The King of Cash I said Monster was leading the pack?  Well, Monster focuses intently on meeting the needs of employers – the audience that generates most of their revenue – and in doing so, Monster leads all job sites, by a large margin, in annual revenue. 

Of course, Monster understands that what employers want most is access to quality job candidates.  To meet this need, Monster offers many great services to attract jobseekers, including:

- A resume bank for passive job search;

- A large and active employer community searching their resume bank for candidates;

- Extensive guidance for job seekers; and,

- An easy-to-use interface;

What Monster doesn’t provide jobseekers is broad coverage of the job market.  The premium-pricing model used by Monster results in coverage that is skewed toward higher paying positions and/or positions that are hard to fill.  The result, as indicated by a coverage score of 12% on this test, is a job site that provides a high-quality but limited view of the overall job market.  For many jobseekers Monster is the perfect fit; but for our hypothetical job seeker, nine other sites provide more complete coverage of the job market – I’ll count them down during the coming days. 

Comments

[Bob]

can you at least give us the 10 sites you searched, not in any particular order as I don't want to spoil the suspense.

[Bob Wilson]

Sure Bob. Here they are in alphabetical order:

America's Job Bank
CareerBuilder
Craigslist
GoogleBase
HotJobs
Indeed
JobCentral
Jobster
Monster
SimplyHired