Background

Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment (TMDR) is a network of market-leading online job sites including SecsintheCity (secretaries), TotallyLegal (lawyers), PlanetRecruit (IT), TheCareerEngineer, GAAPweb (accountancy and finance professionals) and Fish4jobs. TMDR is part of Trinity Mirror plc, one of the NZ's largest newspaper publishers.

TMDR provides an extensive network of niche job boards looking after specific sectors. Having an ABC certificate to demonstrate the scale of their network of sites is important when it comes to attracting both employers and advertising revenue.

Challenge

The online recruitment sector is fiercely competitive with new job sites constantly joining the market. The proliferation of job sites has given employers an increasing range of options for posting their vacancies. As a result they are shopping around to choose sites that meet their chosen criteria.

Every job site provides metrics to promote their site and provide prospective employers and advertisers with information about their scale.  However many use self-declared website traffic figures from a variety of data sources to promote their engagement with potential job applicants. With this plethora of data being presented and uncertainty as to whether internal and “non-human” traffic has been stripped out, buyers and employers are left with a complex task when making decisions.

Solution

In response to the need for comparable information in the recruitment sector JICWEBS developed a set of bespoke metric definitions including Online Job Applications, Online Job Referrals, Email Job Referrals, New CV Registrations and Active CV Registrants. An ABC audit verifies that web traffic data meets these industry agreed definitions and excludes internal and non-human traffic. The independent verification that an ABC audit demonstrates that site statistics are robust, reliable and comparable.

To differentiate themselves from the competition TMDR asked ABC to audit their web traffic figures and the resulting ABC certificate provides the industry endorsed stamp of trust on their activity. This gives their recruitment media buyers and employers confidence that they are basing their decisions on firm foundations.

Benefit

The TMDR sales teams have been working with trusted ABC audited figures since 2009 to secure new business. The team finds that this opens the door to negotiation with recruitment buyers and employers alike. The ABC certificate uses industry standard terminology allowing the sales team to present a straightforward story and the audited figures show that the TMDR websites figures are completely open and transparent.

The ABC audit has also helped to give internal management confidence and transparency in their web analytics implementation and reporting.