Yes that is true. Also due to Monster’s huge database, the certain “care factor” is forgotten. Although the renewable energy industry is not in it’s budding stage, it commercial exploration has just begun, so many companies are startups themselves, hence, renewable energy companies cannot afford the generic listing huge job database sites like Monster can offer.

This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are unanimous and needs to be appreciated by everyone.

Monster etc may have vast traffic numbers but as they lack any specific focus the percentage that are ‘relevant’ or even interested in jobs within renewable energy is likely to very small. Many of the job seekers using the site are just as likely to be looking for jobs in [insert any random industry sector here].

To a degree this is also a problem for some recruiters using ‘green’ job boards where jobs are displayed across sustainability, renewables, cleantech, CSR, not for profit etc. If you divide job seeker traffic between those sub-sectors again you may end up with less ‘relevant’ traffic for the particular job that you are advertising, if you work across all of those areas then there are clearly plus points to the breadth of their coverage as well as possible downsides. It’s probably less of a problem than with a generalist job board but still something to consider.

Recruitment Agency

I think this has the makings of an interesting debate. Would be good to get the thoughts of company recruiters (”corporate users”) in the mix here.

Sam’s point about the traffic levels being the headline driver is well made. To my mind, the relationship is fairly clear:

Traffic > relevant traffic (in part driven by how focused the job board is) > critical mass of vacancies > critical mass of relevant, quality candidates … = overall effectiveness of the job site.

The two key drivers here, and hence the indicator of site performance for recruiters, are overall traffic levels and the degree of specialisation of the site. From the recruiter’s perspective, marketing return on investment will most likely be directly influenced by these two factors more than any other.

I therefore think Sam’s league table initiative is an excellent start in trying to identify the measurement and selection issues for recruiters posting jobs on line. The more feedback on this from the different categories of users, the more hopefully this can be refined and ultimately turned into a transparent and very useful tool.

Dean Stanton
Director, BrandGreen
Managing Director, GreenVentures

Thank you very much for your thought provoking comment!

I think CleanTechies is a great site by the way and I will certainly take another look at it before we publish the next league table.

I just wanted to come back to you on a couple of the points that you made:

Currently I actually think there is nothing like the available data or level of transparency needed for recruiters to be able to make informed decisions when purchasing marketing, it is after all a recruiters second highest overhead in many cases after staffing costs, but I suppose lack of information and well developed standards are to be expected with any young industry such as the ones we are discussing.

In my opinion a job sites traffic is the foundation the factory is built on…..

What do I mean by that?

Well if you have no traffic to a site then it can neither, be good, or bad ‘quality’ as you simply don’t have job seekers using the site, and job seekers are the life blood of any growing or established ob board.

However I totally agree it’s not only about traffic otherwise Career Builder, Monster, Job Site etc would have the green jobs market all tied up and they don’t!

I don’t like talking about the ‘quality’ of job seekers or traffic, I think ‘relevance’ is a more appropriate term, after all what is one man’s trash is another man’s treasure (or something like that).

By that I mean someone can be wholly inappropriate for one job opportunity (and therefore not relevant) but that same job seeker may be the ideal candidates for another opportunity requiring a different mix of skills and experience (very relevant).

It boils down to how much ‘relevant’ job seeker traffic you have. The more relevant traffic, the more relevant job seeker applications.

The issue of relevance is also relative.

Clearly this is a big problem for recruiters trying to target specialist candidates (think renewables), using generalist job boards. (in my opinion not a good mix).

Monster etc may have vast traffic numbers but as they lack any specific focus the percentage that are ‘relevant’ or even interested in jobs within renewable energy is likely to very small. Many of the job seekers using the site are just as likely to be looking for jobs in [insert any random industry sector here].

To a degree this is also a problem for some recruiters using ‘green’ job boards where jobs are displayed across sustainability, renewables, cleantech, CSR, not for profit etc. If you divide job seeker traffic between those sub-sectors again you may end up with less ‘relevant’ traffic for the particular job that you are advertising, if you work across all of those areas then there are clearly plus points to the breadth of their coverage as well as possible downsides. It’s probably less of a problem than with a generalist job board but still something to consider.

For a highly targeted site like Renewable Energy Jobs or CleanTechies it may be even less of an issue. You can assume that traffic using the Renewable Energy Jobs has a relatively high degree of relevance (providing you are advertising a renewables opportunity).

Job seekers using Renewable Energy Jobs are there for one thing, jobs in renewable energy otherwise they took a wrong turn somewhere.

The sites in the top 10 of the league table are probably generating somewhere between 40,000 – 150,000 unique visitors per month (at a guess) while it is true that some traffic will be recruiters, the percentage is likely to be very small and probably constant across any site.

So yes - the relevance (rather than quality) is of vital importance….

…..but it all starts with traffic! No traffic = no job seekers = no applications = no placements.

Thanks again!

All the best,
Sam

Thanks for putting this together. I agree that there’s a lot of information about green jobs out there, but it’s difficult for both candidates and recruiters to find the site that best fits their needs. While a comparison based on traffic rank can give a quantitative idea of the job board’s activity, it doesn’t tell us whether visitors are job seekers or recruiters. More importantly: It doesn’t say anything about the “quality” of candidates - that is, what their backgrounds are, what kind of skills and experiences they have, and whether they are qualified for the openings. The most valuable job boards for any recruiters are not necessarily those with a lot of traffic - or even job seekers - but those with a lot of qualified candidates. Similarly, it’s not about the number of applications a recruiter gets, but about the quality of these applications.

I’d be happy to continue discussions on this topic and help improve this new and booming job market.

For future comparisons, it would be great if you could include CleanTechies in your table:

CleanTechies
http://CleanTechies.com
Traffic Rank: 293,232 — which places us on 6th place

Thank you for your consideration!

Kind regards,

Ceylan Oney
Co-founder, CleanTechies