Yahoo! HotJobs, Monster lose ground to Careerbuilder, Craigslist.org in online recruitment advertising battle

by Trevor Drewry
Published November 15, 2006

New Office Temps, Ltd., one of Chicago’s leading Recruitment Process Outsourcing firms, announces the results from a six-month data analysis of four leading job boards. In a sample size of 16,078 applicants, New Office tracked the job board referral source for every applicant that applied to each of 356 NewHire™ Online Job Postings.

"We discovered that, on average, Yahoo! HotJobs brought only 1.5 applicants per advertisement," said Chuck Smith, President of New Office Temps, Ltd. "That’s a miserable performance when compared to an average of 69 and 51 from Careerbuilder and Craigslist [respectively]."

The study examined postings on four major job boards: Careerbuilder (www.careerbuilder.com), Craigslist (www.craigslist.org), Monster (www.monster.com) and Yahoo! HotJobs (hotjobs.yahoo.com). Each of the 144 Careerbuilder advertisements brought an average of 69 applicants with Craigslist coming in at an average of 51applicants for each of the 113 advertisements placed there. Monster.com delivered an average of 6.8 applicants for each of the 41 advertisements, and Yahoo! HotJobs finished last with only 1.5 applicants for each of the 58 advertisements posted there. Data tables are available upon email request.

In response to these findings, New Office has discontinued offering Yahoo! HotJobs postings to its customers. “Our clients expect us to be the recruiting experts and to look out for their best interests," said Smith. "We cannot continue to sell our clients advertising that just doesn’t produce results. We’re now advising our clients to start spending their job advertising dollars on a Careerbuilder ad [which is currently $389.00] and to also post on Craigslist, which is actually free for most of the country."

Established in 1985, New Office Temps, Ltd. provides traditional temp and temp-to-hire placements as well as direct hire placements. In 2003, New Office provided services in Illinois only; as of October 2006, New Office is providing services in 20 states. They also provide innovative web-based candidate management software (NewHire™) and professional recruiting, pre-screening, and testing services. More information about New Office is available at www.newoffice.com or www.new-hire.com.