If you’re recruiting for roles in Scotland then you may have noticed that the country’s largest job board, ‘S1 Jobs’ recently launched a new dashboard in their recruiters login area. The new feature which appears as a green tab at the top of the screen allows you to analyse the site’s available data including postings, applications and salary rates.
Having recently celebrated their 10th anniversary it’s hard to argue the dominance of S1 with their job board receiving over 600,000 individual job seekers to the site in January alone; more than double the Scottish traffic of its nearest rival (Hitwise, January 2011).
Anyway, onto the dashboard...
Performance Reports – Are postings really a true measure of our performance?
As you can see upon entering the dashboard you’re given a snapshot of how you’re ‘performing’ compared to the other recruitment agencies. However while you can instantly see how many adverts you’ve posted over the past 14 or 30 days it’s well known that recruiters are always looking to reduce their advertising costs so using the total number of adverts posted as a measurement of performance seems a bit strange.
Who's spending the most on advertising doesn’t seem a competition that many would be keen on winning. That being said the layout of each of the graphs is very well presented and it’s immediately clear with the leader in green and the user’s current position in red underneath.
The performance measurement that many more users are likely to be interested in is the ‘average application rate’, which you can see to the far right of the 4 reports above. You’re also able to personalise each report by location, sector and salary range so you can see the response your adverts are receiving compared to each of your closest competitors who are on the site. The only thing that’s missing is being able to analyse the reports by the type of role i.e. permanent and contract.
Once you’re in the average application report you’re also provided with 5 handy tips which can help you increase the number of applications your adverts receive (although by the looks of it some agencies are getting more than enough).
The only suggestion for improvement here would be to break down the reports by specialism to see which types of roles or adverts are seeing more success. When users are posting an advert they’re required to enter this information anyway so the data should be just as accurate.
Instant Salary Survey that really is instant
You’ll be pleased to know that for the most part the Salary Survey is very straightforward and simple to use. The data is provided really quickly and there’s no need for the page to reload. However whilst you are able to separate your search by Specialism and Contract/Perm it would be handy to be able to separate each by location.
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The only other minor gripe is that when looking at contract roles you’re not able to break down the salary by hourly, daily or weekly rate. This means you get a pretty high and scary annual salary which isn’t that relevant with contractors usually working much shorter periods. If you get the calculator out you’ll see the data is pretty spot on but it could be presented slightly better.
S1 Jobs - Giving something back to the users
Overall the dashboard should be very well received by users because it came from nowhere. S1 could have done without it and saved a great deal of time and money however it’s great to see them placing more of an importance on the experience for their users. With other similar ventures from competing job boards including the Recruitrank from Jobsite which ranks recruitment companies on their candidate feedback now becoming more commonplace it will be very interesting to see how much emphasis S1 place on their latest innovation.
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