Five Mondays

I’ve counted the number of hits on the three big boards on my three keywords ‘IT Auditor’, ‘CISA’ and ‘Compliance’ for five weeks.  So let’s look at how this has paid off.

I now know a lot more than I did before about the wonders of graphing on Excel and I have the great bar graph shown above.  I’ve run the numbers through bars charts as cones, stacked on top of each other, pie charts, line graphs and scattergrams. 

And what does this show?  As an analysis tool for the big boards - very little.  It may be a bad measure of my analysis skills! 

A couple of comments on this slice and dice on the big three…

• The numbers on each of the boards do not vary much from week to week.  This DOES mean that if you’ve found a keyword that works and gives you a useful number of relevant jobs, you will not have 100 job listings one week and 2 the next. 

• Monster’s new search will expand and contract to give you a more jobs if the numbers are low and lower the numbers if you are bringing in the world in your search.

• Career Builders numbers are consistently lower than the other boards.

What it has done for me is to force me to look at distinctions between the boards systematically and that has produced notes.  Lots of notes.  Notes on job listings, notes on other board options, notes on urls, notes on company websites, notes on what to rule out on a listing….and so on and so on.

One more quick look at the graphs...and then what?