Go for smaller Job Boards

I was clicking through my e-mail a few weeks back and spotted a message from Monster.ca, a leading online job board. They proudly announced having more than 2,000,000 Canadian resumes in their database. After crunching some numbers I let out a respectful “whew”: that’s one resume for every eight people in our entire workforce.



In fact, it’s even more congested. At any given time maybe 10% of all employees are actively looking to change jobs. Add in the 1.4 million unemployed and what you really have is 3,000,000 or so very serious job-seekers.



Keep in mind that many candidates post more than one version of their resume to each job board they use. Assuming 2 versions per job site, that'd make it 1,000,000 unique resumes from about 3,000,000 job hunters. “Whew” again: a whopping 1/3 of Canadian job-seekers appear to have put their resumes online.



Fooling around with these figures got me thinking about the big job banks these days. I mean, there's no doubt that hunting for work online is a hot ticket. That's because most published ads for jobs have shifted from newspaper classifieds to the Net. Today you absolutely have to use job banks as part of your overall job search.



But what kind of numbers are you actually up against when you visit the big sites? Like when you upload your resume to Workopolis.com and Monster.ca, or search for the perfect position on Working.Canada.com or Hotjobs.ca?



Take Workopolis, for example. According to Susan Hayes, Director of Marketing and Communications at Workopolis, their site has 35,000 jobs posted. Another 6,000 reside on their Workopolis Campus section (for students and entry-level folk). Last month alone the site overall attracted 2.1 million unique visitors. And get this—of those visitors, 82% applied for at least one job. That adds up to nearly 1.7 million people going after 41,000 jobs.



Here's one more way to look at it. Assuming every applicant responded to at least three jobs each over the course of the month (a reasonably conservative figure), the total would be 5 million resumes submitted. That's a pretty daunting pile for some poor HR flunky to dig through.