CareerHub Central Blog

I just noticed that CareerHub Central is listed as the 14th most popular website in Australia, according to Web Ranking Australia. Not only that, we're listed as number 1 for employment in Australia, above Seek. Impressive!

So are we really more popular than Seek for employment? As much as I'd like to believe it, we know that this is not the case. I'm not sure why Web Ranking's statistics seem skewed in our favour, but other traffic analysis websites like Hitwise and Alexa barely register our traffic (at the moment Alexa ranks us 11,669 in Australia).

That's ok though. We wouldn't expect to have the huge number of hits as the big job sites, because the job seekers that see CareerHub Central job ads don't view them on www.careerhub.com.au, they view them at their own university websites; so the traffic is all distributed across each institution in the CareerHub network. We're very happy with our statistics although our distributed setup makes it very difficult for us to show off impressive ranking statistics. We focus on quality rather than quantity. And because every person that accesses jobs via CareerHub is authenticated directly by their university, the stats we have are 100% accurate and not based on 'general public' or social networking visits.

Interestingly Alexa also ranks sub-sites within a domain, which helps indicate the popularity of CareerHub within universities. For example, at Monash University their CareerHub site is the 6th most popular Monash site, even higher than most faculty sites.

As I write this article I can see that over the last month we have an average of about 7,500 students logging in each day across the network: they are reading about 17,000 jobs ads, and there are about 430,000 students/ graduates registered overall, with about 45,000 of them actively searching within the last month.

We think this is pretty impressive given that we know for certain that are stats are not skewed by the general public accessing the site or other web-crawlers ranking with unknown ranking logic. CareerHub is definitely the largest graduate recruitment network in Australia! Will keep you posted on a new exciting initiative that will take these figures significantly higher again into next year - watch this space :)

More students than ever are seeking employment through their university's careers service. Last month (September 2009) there were almost 50,000 university students* actively monitoring CareerHub job websites, compared to around 10,000 at the same time last year.

The increase is partly because 3 new universities have joined the Australian CareerHub network in the last year (bringing the total number to 28) - these unis contributed 6-7,000 extra active job seekers last month. But there's still a large, steady increase in job seekers unaccounted for.

The level of interest is roughly the same as during the the busy recruitment period in March, suggesting that next year's graduate recruitment season will attract an unprecedented level of interest from students. If you want to make sure your graduate opportunities are seen by this audience, CareerHub Central offers a quick and cost-effective way to get your advertisements "inside" the universities.

Interestingly, the number of jobs available across all universities in the Central network seems to be about the same as this time last year, at around 4,500. I'd expect this higher demand for a limited pool of jobs means the competition is heating up for students.

*These numbers are taken from daily statistics from each of the 28 Australian universities in the CareerHub distribution network. Specifically, I used the number of students who had logged in at least once in the last month to determine the number of "active" students.

Hello and welcome to the new blog for CareerHub Central.

We're aiming to build up a resource of interesting and useful information for employers - specifically information related to student employment and graduate recruitment. We'll also be blogging about product news and offerings for Central, but the last thing we want is for this to become just another self-promoting business blog.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, we'd love to get a comment from you on the blog. Or if you prefer you can email us at central@careerhub.com.au. Any ideas, suggestions or criticism will be appreciated.

With that introduction out of the way, I thought for this first post it might be interesting to give a brief overview of the history of CareerHub Central.

How CareerHub Central came to be

Long before CareerHub Central existed, CareerHub was created as a tool to help universities run their careers services. While working at Griffith University, Dee Hughes came up with the idea of a web site where university staff could manage jobs and careers-related resources for their students. He created a website for Griffith called CareerBoard which did just that (Griffith still use the name 'CareerBoard' although the underlying software is now CareerHub).

After realising the potential for this new application, Dee left Griffith to concentrate on the development of CareerHub. He hired a couple of people to help out, and I was one of them. Back then it was just 4 of us, working in a small, hot office room in Brisbane. I remember working one Australia Day alongside Dee so that we could get the first version finished in time for our first presentation. Dee had been invited to present to NSW careers service staff, alongside 'Monster' who were also competing for the university market at the time.

A screenshot of the first version of CareerHub

The first commercial installation of CareerHub followed in 2001, at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Shortly after that CareerHub was installed at Australian National University and then the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. In the next few years we continued to grow and CareerHub won the ANU Vice Chancellors award for "Best use of Technology" in 2004. We were extremely pleased with our progress.

By March 2007, there were 20 universities in Australia using CareerHub which was now in it's second version. Monster had withdrawn from the Australian market and CareerHub was now the most widely-used service of it's kind in Australia and New Zealand. The problem for employers was they now had to visit each university's Careerhub web site individually to list their jobs. After an initial successful implementation in New Zealand (NZUniCareerHub), CareerHub Central was launched in Australia as a way for employers to advertise jobs at all these uni's in one central location. And it's been performing that function for the last couple of years.