2nd Best Site for Active Job Search – JobCentral

JobCentral proves that a job board shouldn’t be judged by its ‘buzz’ – they have none.  Example – search Google for ‘CareerBuilder’ and you’ll find 28 million results, search for ‘SimplyHired’ and you’ll receive 3 million results, but search for ‘JobCentral’ and you’ll find only 100 thousand results.  Yet here is JobCentral, the 2nd best site for active job search, with a great coverage score of 86%. Impressive!

The secret to JobCentral’s success in this comparison (see the initial post in the series for background) is their recent partnership with SimplyHired (see SimplyHired Announces Partnership with JobCentral).  Through this partnership JobCentral adds roughly 4 million additional job ads to the native content they’ve been receiving from their member employers.  The resulting hybrid (native plus indexed content) jumps to the head of the list in terms of coverage.

I’m reasonably sure SimplyHired didn’t envision JobCentral passing them in coverage as a result of the partnership; and in fact, it shouldn’t have happened.  As part of the partnership agreement, JobCentral announced that their jobs would be included in SimplyHired. In theory then, both sites should have identical coverage scores.  As it turned out, SimplyHired had some, but not all, of the JobCentral jobs included in the evaluation sample.  Why?  That’s a mystery.

JobCentral certainly needs good news.  In JobCentral – Searching for Relevance, I concluded that JobCentral would get an immediate bump in traffic from the news of their partnership with SimplyHired; but unless they found a niche, or invested heavily, they’d remain irrelevant.  That’s still my belief.

The Alexa chart shows a steady two-year decline for DirectEmployers and JobCentral (DirectEmployers launched the JobCentral brand in 2005, and most of their traffic moved to this new site).  In January, with the announcement of the partnership with SimplyHired, JobCentral’s traffic rank jumped, as expected, but they’re still below the level of two years ago, and far below more recent entrants Indeed and SimplyHired.

For active job seekers, coverage is king, and JobCentral delivers – this will get jobseekers in the door. To retain these jobseekers, and thus regain their relevance, JobCentral will need to improve the accuracy and flexibility of their search engine, and they’ll need to convince jobseekers that it is OK to list job ads from JobCentral member employers ahead of non-member ads, even if the non-member ads are a better fit.  A tough sell to be sure.

Challenges aside, JobCentral made a wise move in partnering with SimplyHired, and the result is an impressive 2nd place finish for active job search.

Comments

[Ricky]

hey Bob, i was wondering if you could explain what you mean by coverage. JobCentral limits searches to 500 jobs so i was wondering how you are getting your data/results for them.

[Bob Wilson]

In the post 10th Best Site for Active Job Search – Monster (http://rmwilsonconsulting.typepad.com/job_search_engine_guide/2006/02/10th_best_site_.html I explained the methodology – here’s an excerpt (you can read the rational in the full post):

“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.”

So ‘coverage’ in this case is the percentage of the 50 jobs in the sample that can be found on each job site. A site covering 100% of the market would, by definition, include all 50 jobs. By selecting a fairly small sample, and by controlling the geography, the 500-job limit never comes into play on JobCentral. And honestly, the number of people who would scan through more than 500 jobs is incredibly small – users are much more likely to add keywords or reduce their geography.

If you are wondering why my post in December said SimplyHired Finds the Most Jobs (http://rmwilsonconsulting.typepad.com/job_search_engine_guide/2005/12/simplyhired_fin.html and now I’m saying JobCentral had higher coverage, here’s an excerpt from that post:

“In a test of seven job search engines, for five job titles (white-, gray-, and blue-collar), throughout five states (east, central and west), the vertical job search engine SimplyHired returned the most jobs meeting the test criteria. Keep in mind that having the most jobs is not the same as having the best jobs – that’s a separate question, perhaps for a future study. Also keep in mind that some sites do a better job of eliminating duplicate job listings. For the purpose of this study, all displayed jobs were counted.”

In the most recent analysis no duplicates or closed job ads were allowed; so quality played a more important role.

Bob