Honestly, that is the number of online job boards according to Peter Weddle in this Wall Street Journal article. I had no idea. Some perspective from the article:
About 2,000 new job boards have launched annually since 2000, and there are currently about 50,000, says Peter Weddle, chief executive officer of Weddle’s, a publisher of guides to job boards. Of these, about 30% are general job sites while 70% specialize in a particular niche, he adds.
And the two big boards:
Still, the nation’s largest job boards saw fluctuations in traffic over the past year. For example, Monster.com had 11,317,000 unique visitors last month, about 9% less than for the same month a year earlier, according to comScore Inc., an Internet-research firm. And that’s down more than 7% from 12,219,000 in July 2007. CareerBuilder.com had 24,752,000 unique visitors last month, about 17% more than for the same month the year before. But the site saw a 14% increase from July 2007 when it had 21,723,000 visitors.
That sounds like competitive pressure affecting Monster and CareerBuilder. Lastly, this trend is one we are most supportive of (and involved in):
Once you get from the job ad into the application process, more employers are adding assessments — a form of candidate screening previously reserved for the interview stage, says John Hancock, managing director of recruiting services at Capital H Group, a human-resources consulting firm. The idea is to learn about candidates’ intangible qualities, like leadership skills, work ethic and business acumen, he explains.