Job Board Statistics vs. Hard Data

This morning I was getting caught up on my reading over at fellow blogger Justin Thorp’s site and noticed that a couple of days ago he wrote about how for many popular sites like Facebook, ‘The Number of Active Users Is Different Than The Number of Accounts Created’. It reminded me of a thought that I’ve been having about the job board and blog statistics that I’ve been tracking lately. A thought that I just can’t get out of my head when the job board reps call me to ask me to spend $5-12k for access to their resume databases.

My thought has been centered around the numbers game that is used to sell companies on job boards. It is usually either ‘we have the most users so use us’ (Monster), ‘we are partnered with the most papers’ (Careerbuilder), or ‘our users are only here and not there’ (Jobfox).