Best Diversity Candidates! Best Jobs Site!
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 11:08 AM

My phone's been ringing off the hook since 2002 with sales people trying to explain to me why their job site is the best, the biggest, the most worth the money. When I was a young, naive recruiter, hope always flickered in me that perhaps this site was the great one.

I've smartened up in the past few years, and started letting data affirmatively drive my decisions. I no longer try a site and then calculte ROI, unless the sales people are willing to give me a test job for free.

When sales people call and give me their pitch, I ask about their Alexa rankings. Strike one if they can't give me actual traffic data that supports their 'we're the best' claim. Strike two if their 'we are better than xyzsite' isn't supported by data. And woe to the sales person who calls me who doesn't know what Alexa is!

I've been evangelizing about Alexa.com for a while now, and all of my workshops to recruiters and job seekers feature at least a mention of the site and how it can best be used when adverstising or looking for jobs. I'm always worried about pinning all my data on one source (no matter how much I love it). A recent Ann Smarty blogpost on Searchenginejournal.com gives us a few other options when evaluating website traffic, including a new Google feature.

Each of these tools can help recruiters decide where to spend valuable dollars. Is it possible to miss the next hot site by waiting for site data? Absolutely. But if the site is really going to be hot, take a tip from Ben and Jerry's and give free samples. I'm all about try before you buy.