Do these Monster stats give a better insight into market conditions than recruiters results?

OK, the real basics of any market. Supply and demand. For the best part of 6/7 years we’ve been used to a market where there has been a shortage of good quality candidates at the volume end of the market - junior up to middle management.

Traditionally its been pretty tough to measure just how many people are looking - and on the vacancy side, just how many people are currently recruiting. I don’t recall ever seeing a rush from recruitment firms willing to share their database statistics!

Job boards on the other hand are much more keen to do just that. As much as monster are not everyone’s cup of tea, they do have a big slice of the UK job board market. Over the course of this year, they’ve released some pretty impressive stats on just how many job seekers are using their service. The pace of growth of job seeker accounts is pretty staggering….

Between May and August, monster added an extra million job seeker profiles. That’s a lot of people. You can see details of this, including comments from their UK MD here , here and here.

That’s monster up to 5 million job seekers - based on their numbers and the UK workforce remaining constant that’s around 16% of the total UK workforce. Pretty staggering.

If you throw into the mix just how squeezed big players like monster are when you consider just how many other job boards there and how many people are using networking sites to find a new role, or to source candidates. It does paint a picture of a heck of a lot of people looking either passively or actively. On this passive vs active job search - does the ease with which the internet allows people to be informed of or find jobs make this redundant? If I’m a passive job seeker but I’m signed up to job alerts or I have a monster profile that I react to do - well that doesn’t sound too passive to me…

Ok, so that’s candidate supply on the up. If anyone was in any doubt as to the picture on the demand side of things a quick look at the monster vacancy stats will complete the circle. Job ads are still up on last year but have recorded falls in both June and July. I wonder how the figures would look if all/ any duplicate jobs were removed…

This is impressive reading from a monster perspective. And I like the fact that stats like this are now more open than ever before. Now if all stats were public access I’d love to see:

• How many people are successfully placed as a result of each job board
• How many clients successfully recruit through web 2.0/ networking and referal driven sites. There’s a stack of these now. Would love to see what sort of impact they are having on the market in terms of taking market share.
• How many online applications don’t receive any sort of acknowledgement - I suspect his number is still way too high. In fact, given how easy it is to automate a basic acknowledgement is there any excuse for this?
• How many people look at online job ads on a monthly/ weekly and daily basis - could this be a way to get a better reading of how many so called passive candidates are online?
• How many jobs are duplicate, out of date or just plain spam
• What percentage of candidates on recruitment consultants databases are also on online CV databases

As much as its great that we get more open access to useful market stats like the ones from monster, I suspect we won’t be seeing these stats added to the list anytime soon… No harm having a wish list eh? Any others you’d add?