Catching up on my reading lately I've been amazed by the increasing number of pseudo scientific claims for the relative value of one job board over another so I thought I would make my own.

Q: How much better are Employee Referrals than Job Boards?

A: So much better that the Job Board isn't relevant.

Proof:
Analyzing actual data (as opposed to guesses) from 24 specific firms who filled 188,000 positions during 2005 showed that 32% of the 188,000 were filled with internal movement and promotion. Of the remainder, the folks who were hired externally, 27.1% were filled by Employee Referrals. (source: CXR Annual Source of Hire Survey)

In a second study of employee referrals. More than 50 firms reported that the ratio of the number of hires to the total number of referrals during 2005 produced a yield ranging from 1 hire for every 10 employee referrals to 1 hire for every 2 employee referrals (with 1 hire for every 4 or .25 being the average). (source: CXR Colloquium Benchmark on Referral Practices)

If all companies hired the same percentage of employee referrals (they do not) and, if the average yield for referrals were true for all companies large and small (they are not) then a typical job seeker (there are none) has .271 X .25 chance of being hired if they get a employee to refer them - or about a 6.5% chance of getting hired if they simply focus on getting an employee in a targeted company to refer them.

The Source of Hire study previously mentioned also found that job boards represented an average of 12% of all external hires (that’s all niche sites as well as the big three job boards). There was a flaw with this statistic. Companies continue to report their website as a significant source of hire (and I believe this penchant for attributing hires to a destination rather than a source seriously dilutes the data from other sources- especially job boards) so we’ll double the number of hires attributed to job boards to 24% of all external hires for this calcualtion. We believe this is very generous.

But now the question is – just how likely is it that a submitted resume will end up becoming a hire? I’ll be conservative and estimate that the average # of resumes submitted for a single job is 200. (We have several sources and anecdotal evidence that the number is much higher.)

So, our typical job seeker can expect that the probability of their resume being selected and eventually being hired for one of the 24% of openings attributed to job boards is (1/200) or .005 x .24 =.12% .

Conclusion:
Therefore, we logically claim that Employee Referrals are 6.5/.12 or 54 times more likely to result in a hire than all job boards put together.

In this context if one job board is twice as good as another - who cares?

Postscript:
I can think of several mitigating factors. For example, job seekers do not use one source. They are likely to target a company because they've noticed on jobboards that the company is hiring. Attributing a hire to an employee referral could oclude the fact that the original lead was spotted on a job board.

On the other hand, I've never seen a job board actually work with a client to ascertain the number of hires that can truly be attributed to it- in full or, in part.

My best advice to job seekeres remains- "Never, for the rest of your life, ever again apply for a job without first getting an employee in the company you target to refer you- even reccomend you if possible."