Avoiding Pitfalls in Cross-Border Recruiting: Job Board Atlas Germany for Jobs in Marketing, Public Relations and Advertising

By Gerhard Kenk, Crosswater Job Guide

Cross-border recruiting in Germany may be difficult at best considering the current booming economy and the constant short-fall of qualified candidates in many expert areas. Recruiting is further impacted by the lack of transparency and job board market intelligence. These conditions offer a significant challenge in media planning and job ad placement to kick-off a local recruiting campaign in Germany.

In the job board segment for marketing, public relations and advertising jobs, only a few of the internationally well-known career portals such as Monster, Stepstone or CareerBuilder are actively and successfully operating in Germany: A large majority of universal and specialist job boards remain more often than not below the radar screen of the international recruiter.

The market transparency is hindered by the relatively large number of job boards as well as their strategy to focus on special market niches and therefore drive the market fragmentation further and further.

A first look at the segment of job boards focusing on the recruiting segments of jobs in marketing, public relations and advertising agencies reveals an underlying mismatch in the perception of the job boards.

Recruiter’s Darling

Recruiters tend to prefer the well-known job boards when placing job adverts – candidate experiences and preferences however indicate a different view. Two job boards – Monster and Stepstone – combine a whopping share of 60.1% of job adverts placed by recruiters in 2011. The specialist job boards WuV Werbung und Verkaufen and HORIZONTjob.net accumulate a combined market share of 2.7% only. In addition, other specialist job boards such as dasauge.de or Newsroom.de operate in this highly specialized segment.

Market share: Job adverts published 2011 (Source: anzeigendaten.de)

Candidate’s Darling

A different but significant perception of job board preference is offered by jobseekers who participated in the job board user survey (www.crosspro-research.com) More than 15.000 jobseekers evaluated job boards as well as job search engines in Germany and offered their opinion on the user’s satisfaction level as well as cross-job board usage.

Here are the candidates darlings:

User satisfaction is measured on a scale of 1 to 4, whereas 1 indicates the highest satisfaction and 4 represents very poor satisfaction. It may be quite a surprise that a job search engine – www.Kimeta.de – is top in the user’s satisfaction ranking – while the government-operated job board www.Arbeitsagentur.de is an “also-run” in the job seekers opinion.

The market intelligence data is gathered as a result of a job board user survey. This survey focusing on the perception, experience and preferences of job seekers, is a joint project operated by Crosswater Job Guide (www.crosswater-job-guide.com) and PROFILO Rating Agentur (www.profilo.de). Both companies offer more than 10 years of experience in recruiting market analysis in Germany. The survey is supported by all major job boards and job search engines in Germany. It started in October 2008 as a permanent poll and has meanwhile accumulated more than 15.000 evaluations of job boards. Survey participants benefit by obtaining exclusive access rights to the results data base and can investigate, how job boards in a given industry segment are rated by their peers – the equivalent of the Facebook-like-button for job seekers. The survey for the German recruiting market is available at http://www.crosspro-research.com/umfrage.html

 

Contact
Gerhard Kenk
Crosswater Web Services Ltd.

www.crosswater-job-guide.com
Mail: info@crosswater-systems.com