Online recruitment research will need to reflect the growing use of niche community sites in the future if it is to give an accurate picture of the online recruiting landscape.

The use of RSS feeds and widgets, which enable websites and blogs to post jobs aimed at a specialist group of people is becoming common practice. Major job search engine sites WorkCircle and Simply Hired have been forming partnerships to target vacancies more precisely for some time and last month reward and referral site Zubka gave website owners and bloggers the opportunity to receive its jobs.

Tim Elkington, managing director of Enhance Media, which publishes the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS), told Recruiter that NORAS is already used by niche sites and believes the role of such research will be to prove "the quality of the audience" in the future.

"For instance, many blogs and nano-publishers [small-scale online publishers targeting a niche audience] display job ads for very niche vertical sectors and it would be interesting if we could do more to research on these areas and investigate the value of the long tail of internet users," he said.

NORAS results are now being published every month, which allows job sites to update their ABCe figures when they like. "The immediacy of the internet means it made sense to publish them monthly," said Elkington. "It also gives more opportunity to get new sites involved during the year."

www.enhancemedia.co.uk

www.noras.co.uk