Top 100 job site niches – 2009 methods and observations

The 2009 Top 100 US Job Board Niches report lists the 100 most searched for job categories. For each of these employment categories it lists the top ranked job boards according to Google but excludes the following:

• general-purpose job boards like monster.com
• subdomain spam from general-purpose job board sites like science.jobs.com (currently dominating the search results)
• sites exclusively powered by job search engines
• sites that are part of a large network of domains
• search engine spam made for AdSense (MFA)
• job sites that require job seekers to register or pay
• job guides and career book sites (many look deceptively like job boards)
• almost defunct boards and sites with only a handful of jobs
• job sites that don’t publish dates on the job postings

This document covers the following topics: 

• the maniac entrepreneur 
• ranking methods
• listing the wrong job boards
• hard-to-find useful niche job boards
• search engine spam
• how many job boards are there really?
• association job boards

Why exclude so many sites? If you want to look at the same
jobs or the same jobseekers that everyone else is looking at, I promise you will find them on your own. But if you are looking for
something less obvious, then look for
a niche job board run by an entrepreneur who knows your industry, who
advertises in niche publications and attends the right tradeshows.

Why exclude job sites that require registration? This is new for 2009 and it is primarily because there is no way for me to know what job board operators will do with your personal data. I suspect that some very well known job boards stay in business by selling job seeker contact information. I don’t want to take any chance of leading job seekers into that trap. This is the worst year for job board operators in the history of the Internet and therefore business practices may vary! Finally, the industry has begun moving away from required registration and I want to contribute to that in my own small way.

It takes a maniac.
The maniac entrepreneur is someone who lives and breathes marketing in
the community you want to connect with — someone who spends all his
time beating the bushes for you. I have heard it said that an
entrepreneur is someone who can endure pain
for a long period of time. The job sites I have excluded, don’t have
someone like that. What they have is good search engine optimization –
it’s not the same. Here’s what I’m talking about:

About the ranking methods. I relied on Google’s search volume
data for the top 100 categories. I have used many other keyword tools
but Google’s data always looks more reliable and credible. This year’s report is more accurate than 2008 because Google is now publishing specific search volume numbers. This allows the niches to be ranked from 1 to 100.

Some duplicates have
been removed, for example, variations on "home jobs" such as "work at
home jobs", "at-home jobs", etc. Also, geographical searches such as
"jobs in Texas" have been removed.

Sometimes it becomes obvious that Google’s search volume data is influenced by SEO rank checking software. however, it is more reliable
at the top of the spectrum and only less reliable when looking at
long tail-terms not included in this report.

You seem to have the wrong job boards listed, why? Google
search engine rankings change everyday. In a very competitive
category with well established websites, the top three websites
generally don’t change often.

Google did make some major changes to its algorithms early this year (Vince update) which stirred the pot quite a bit.  But in niches with a number of relatively weak competitors, rankings always change frequently. For this reason, I made it easy for you to do
your own Google search for each category.  

Why is it hard to find useful niche job boards?
If finding the right job board is frustrating for you, it’s because you
are lost in an endless maze! Search hard and long on Google using
keywords like ‘job boards’, ‘job board reviews’, ‘job board
comparisons’, ‘job board rankings’, etc and you will quickly find
top-ranked sources that:

• operated for six months but were abandoned 18 months ago
• offer no references or dates and are being used for search engine optimization purposes only
• list the ‘top 50 job boards’ and includes websites with less than 10 jobs.

and etc. etc. Even Google’s own directory is corrupt. Google still
uses the notorious Open Directory Project which relies on ‘volunteers’.
If LatPro.com were listed on this page,
it would appear in the top five based on its Google PR rank. The page
is full of diversity job boards but curiously our flagship websites DiversityJobs.com and LatPro.com
are excluded. It’s especially unusual considering that the editor
(dgarciamnz) of the page is Hispanic. So which of our competitors does
he work for?

The one shining exception in all this, is Peter Weddle’s User Choice Awards. it’s no accident that he founded and runs the International Association Of Employment Websites.

A
good starting point for evaluating job boards, is to look at traffic
using a service like compete.com. But, even traffic can be misleading.
First, Compete.com is not accurate — it’s just an estimation and
better for making comparisons than understanding true levels. Second,
it tells you nothing about quality. Years ago, we did a partnership
that doubled our traffic overnight. Before too long, we realized the
quality of this traffic was not at all consistent with our organic
traffic and we terminated the partnership. All job board traffic is not
made equal.

The search engines are chock full of spam. There are old job
boards defunct for years that still have top rankings and made for adsense
websites (MFA) cluttering up the search
results.

Even the defunct websites still say "we are the leading job board
for blah blah blah". Don’t blame the search engines, though — those
categories that are full of spam are categories where no entrepreneur has come forth
to build a great job board. Or in some cases, it may be that the
entrepreneur has come, but has not had enough time yet to rise up.

Sometimes those empty categories are adjacent to categories owned by
successful job boards that might be sucking the air out of the room for
would-be entrepreneurs.

Mostly, it’s still early in the evolution of the Internet and the job board industry. Think of the online recruiting industry as a newborn baby or a toddler… mark my words, you won’t recognize the landscape in five years.

But, I have heard there are more than 40,000 job boards and yet your list is so short, what gives?
My research is by no means exhaustive — it only covers 100 top
mainstream
employment niches in the US and excludes generalist and geographically
focused boards. So, this is not designed by any means to be an
exhaustive list. However, my personal experience in the job board
industry leads me to believe that the number of effective job boards that have attained critical mass is still very small.

I recognize that critical mass is not a fixed number– in
some employment niches critical mass might mean just 1,000 unique
visitors a month. So where does that 40,000 number come from? I would like to know what the definition of a ‘job board’ being used is… if you want to include every blog and association with a jobs page, sure we can get to 40,000 and maybe 1,000,000 in the near future.

I paid for several job postings on the South Florida Interactive
Marketing Association’s webpage a few times which is probably a good
example. It was inexpensive and I did receive a couple of resumes. But
do you want to call that a job board?

I have also known for many years a handful of the principals
behind the job boards that are listed. Lots of these
boards are one, two or three-man bands and not growing. Smaller niches
are even less capable of supporting a viable job board business so it
is not reasonable to expect that as we look at smaller and smaller
niches we should find more and more successful job boards.

When I try to reconcile ‘common wisdom’ with my own experience, here’s what I come up with:

1 — The recruiting industry personalities and training companies that
speak and write about recruiting, don’t necessarily practice
recruiting. They essentially get paid to talk about things that they think about rather than do. They need to be memorable or they are out of business — in other words, they need material.

2 — Fortune 500 companies and many advertising agencies may be more
interested in exhaustive lists of job boards for a variety of reasons.
Their dollars are not counted the way mine are in part because they
lack the ability to track results reliably. Some too are interested in
CYA policies and/or branding which have little to do with traffic and
recruiting effectiveness.

I don’t pay much attention anymore to the experts whether they be
University professors, journalists or venture capitalists because their
ideas have mostly not stood the test of time and my own experience.
Just look at Jobster.com with $56 million invested — for what?  Think about all the press
lavished on it.

Looking at the major categories in this report that lack job boards is
telling.
Using my own personal definition of what a viable job board is and a bit
of generosity, I’d estimate there may be just several hundred useful
job boards in the US. Lots more are on the way and we will get to tens
of thousands eventually — but not today.

In order to compete with job search engines, niche job sites of the future will have to evolve. They will have to find new ways to provide value that cannot be usurped.  Until that happens, you can expect to see the number of job sites with critical mass declining while the number of job pages associated with blogs, social networks and associations multiplying.

What about all the professional association job boards? We have
worked with professional associations for many years — and I can tell
you there is a good reason why their job boards are generally not
showing up in the Google results – no maniac entrepreneur! In fact, I
can remember begging an association for six months just to get the jobs
link moved from the bottom of the home page to the main menu of the
association’s website. Forget about proactive marketing or even minimal
marketing to the association members. And the end result is that most
association job boards will produce a trickle of jobseekers. Yes, there
are a few exceptions some of which are listed.

Is this really surprising? if you have ever had the pleasure of
working deep inside a nonprofit organization the way I have, did you
notice the slowness, the personal politics, the bureaucracy and the
incompetency? I’m sure there are exceptions — but my own personal
experience with nonprofit, educational and volunteer organizations is
thoroughly consistent in this regard.

What about the vertical job search engines, social networking sites and free classifieds? In spite of my deep
belief in niche job boards run by rabid maniac entrepreneurs, I am also
a fan of these alternatives. I have been tracking job search engines,  interviewing their leaders, writing about free classifieds like Craigslist and experimenting with social networking for jobs.

What are your thoughts on niche job sites?

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