50 journalists for every job

Yesterday I sent an email to journalists about our SourceThatJob media jobsite. I guess on reflection it was a bit silly to send a message that said ‘advertise your jobs here’ as much as it said ‘look for jobs here’, given the tranche of editorial redundancies we’ve had in the last few weeks.

So it wasn’t surprising that a few recipients vented their disapproval of my poor judgement – a few Guardian journalists made the point most poignantly on Twitter.

Interestingly, I sent an email to more or less the same people two weeks ago that was purely a ‘recruit here’ message, yet there was no such response. Clearly the world changed in this short space of time.

Anyway – it was a fair cop, I shouldn’t have been soliciting recruitment advertising on such a broad scale so soon after so much bad news in the media.

However – and here’s the big ‘but’ – the whole experience was very educational.

The incident was an excellent example of how Twitter works as a brilliant customer feedback tool. And it was also an example of how stats often only show part of the picture.

On the face of it, the stats show it was a very successful email. Out of about 20,000 emails sent approximately 27 per cent viewed the email, better than the previous email which had a 23 per cent view rate. The click-through rate was even more dramatic – out of those who viewed the email 28 per cent clicked through – compared with 9 per cent on the previous.

But of course these stats did not tell me I’d misjudged the tone of the email – the Twitter media community did that for me. This is the power of Twitter as a customer feedback tool. Thanks tweeps. (Are you on Twitter? Follow me.)

Sadly though, the click-through stats did appear to reflect the real world in one sense. The ‘advertise jobs’ link generated 26 click-throughs, whereas the ‘look for jobs’ link generated 1,275.

So, to stretch the stats a bit (I know I shouldn’t…) for every editorial job there are nearly 50 jobseekers. That’s a crude extrapolation, but it probably isn’t far wrong in the current climate.

Note: These stats are correct at 16:00 on 3 December 2008, people are still clicking on the email

Comments

[Anne]

"it was a bit silly to send a message that said ‘advertise your jobs here’ as much as it said ‘look for jobs here’"

This was particularly silly given you sent it to freelancers.

[Daryl Willcox]

Good point Anne, thanks for your comment.

I had actually tried to remove all the freelancers from my list, but some freelancers remained on the list because they are associated with particular media outlets (for example when someone edits or contributes to a particular title on a freelance basis).

Some freelancers might be interested in SourceThatJob as we sometimes get freelance jobs on the site - these often generate a lot of interest.

I think next time we send an email to journalists we'll pitch it exclusively to jobseekers.

[Anne]

You misunderstand me.

I'm perfectly happy to hear from sites with job vacancies and check STJ sporadically for freelance opps.

But I got an email telling me I could advertise vacancies on STJ. Given you have my details because I'm a freelancer, I was quite flummoxed as to why I'd received it.

And I recall several broadsheet staffers posting on Twitter about how they were annoyed at being spammed by STJ.

Freelance jobs on the site: great. Confusing freelancers with HR bods? Not so much.

[Daryl Willcox]

So, I think I've got this straight now: my mistake was to try to appeal to job advertisers at the same time as jobseekers, when the vast majority of people on my list would have no interest in advertising.

I think that was the crux of the Twitter reaction too.

Therefore future emails should be all about the range of jobs on offer, rather than the opportunity to post jobs. And it would be reasonable to include freelancers for such a message.

[joanne hunter]

Just 50 candidates per job advertised? That's an underestimation. I was in a field of 150 for a news and feature writing role, so a B2B title told me (at the same time rejecting me) and up to 500 applications is not unknown, friends have reported. There's a lot of unhappy unemployed (and nervous employed) people and under-employed journos around, that's for sure.