The Career Mastery 2017 Job Board Database is the result of an extensive study led by Deniz Sasal, a leading career advisor, which surveyed over 3,000 job boards worldwide.  The result is an invaluable free resource that will save job seekers 100s of hours making applications in the least effective platforms. The study aimed to answer the question of what makes a job board valuable for jobseekers, exploring several areas.
-    The  power of the brand name
-    The  availability of jobs from renowned employers
-    Number of applicants visiting the job board

Sasal says, "It was clear to me that the most useful job board is one with a high supply of job posts for which there was low demand. In other words, there are plenty of quality postings with only a few applicants. Naturally, this triggered my curiosity and I decided to conduct a thorough study to find out which job boards actually produce the most effective results."

The final outcome of this 1,000 hour study is The Career Mastery 2017 Job Board Database which includes over 700 job boards across all regions and allows any job seeker to prioritize the list based on criteria known as "Opportunity Score."

Opportunity score is a tool that awards job boards with highest supply of jobs against lowest number of applicants. This gives an applicant a great indication of how competitive the platform is.

In order to get the best return for their time investment, job applicants would only want to apply for jobs that are in low demand from applicants but in high supply of available job posts. These job boards that belong to Quadrant A in the graph above give candidates the highest chances of being hired.   While one might assume that ‘big name’ online job boards would produce the best results for applicants, in reality the study demonstrated that most fall under Quadrant D — the worst place possible.

Developing The Career Mastery 2017 Job Board Database

The first filter used was the demand data. Similar Web’s platform was used to check the web traffic across 3,210 job sites, identifying the job boards that get the most visitors.

This was checked against the number of job posts available for each job board. This was the second filter and gave the supply data, enabling Sasal and his team to measure the number of visitors against the actual number of jobs being posted on the job search websites.

Once they had a good understanding of the supply/demand curve, they eliminated those sites that fit one of the following characteristics, such as:

-    High number of repeated job posts
-    Platforms with job posts that never expire
-    Majority blue collar jobs
-    Scam and low quality sites (Majestic leveraged to run a bulk check)
-    Paid services (only free job boards are featured)
-    Sites that link out job posts to other and bigger platforms
-    Majority of the job posts are Internships or temporary work.

Once this clean-up had been completed, the result was the Job Board Opportunity Score (JBOS).

Sasal concludes "From this curve, we could finally arrive at an imperfect assumption that the higher the JBOS, the more chances a job applicant has for landing a job with that particular job board.  After almost 1,000 hours of research and rigorous analysis, we are extremely happy to present you The Career Mastery 2017 Job Board Index.”

Deniz Sasal
Founder of The Career Mastery
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denizsasal
Twitter: @denizsasal