For a recent recruitment I needed to post a job advertisement for a vacant position in the Meltwater Research & Development team in Budapest, Hungary. A common way to do this is to post the advertisements on well known job portals, of which there is an abundance on the web and which are all in competition for the most users. These portals are a very good way to reach potential candidates as these sites are becoming a more and more accepted tool, especially in the IT profession. Recent numbers indicate in Germany alone more than 23 Mil. users in the 3rd quarter of 2009! (Reference: TecChannel - Online-Jobsuche nimmt weiter zu)

Even when you are targeting candidates in multiple countries, it is generally possible to go through the big international portals like stepstone.com or monster.com and have them post your advertisements in the region you are interested in. What they will often do is to cooperate with the local job portals and just transfer the posting over to them. Although this might be convenient, especially when you want to put out the same advertisement in multiple countries, this way of doing it comes with two disadvantages:

1. Often you will have less influence on how the subcontracted websites will actually display your advertisement and how they will process the results that come back to you. This can easily result in a higher need for manual applicant filtering on your side.
2. It has a certain price tag, as you will need to pay two providers - one directly and one indirectly.

I wanted to explore the direct cooperation with the Hungarian job portals and therefore decided to put out the advertisement myself. As I thought this might be useful for other people as well who are faced with a similar tasks, I thought I should describe some of my observations.

I will provide an assessment of the pros and cons of the three different job portals that I have used, namely profession.hu, cvonline.hu, and jobline.hu.

Comparison

profession.hu

profession.hu portal

profession.hu posting

profession.hu comes with the cleanest interface. Of the three portals it has the least commercials and a special plus is the presentation of the advertisement itself which is by far the most prominent one of the three portals, as profession.hu presents the advertisement on a dedicated page, without any sidebars, commercials or similar. They provide an English user interface for posting advertisements but they are apparently still in the process of developing this functionality, as I was not able to change the posting again after saving the first draft of it. The customer service was very helpful though and modified the posting according to my specifications in a short time.

cvonline.hu

cvonline.hu portal

cvonline.hu posting

cvonline.hu also has a clean interface and allows to switch the display language between Hungarian and English. It comes with one major minus though, which are the Google Ads, both on the start page as well as on the page of the job advertisement. I consider this to be a fairly unreasonable approach, as their customers are paying for the job postings to be published on the website, so I do not see a need to clutter the view with additional advertisements.

jobline.hu

jobline.hu portal

jobline.hu posting

The interface of of jobline.hu is comparable to the one of cvonline.hu but with less commercials, although they have sporadic Google Ads on the jop posting site itself. Here applies the same criticism as to cvonline.hu.

Conclusion

In an effort to do a fair comparison of the three job portals I put all my above mentioned observations plus some more in a matrix. For every feature each job portal can get between 0-3 points. Obviously that assumes that all features have the same importance but please put your own weighting scheme on top of this if you like.

Although profession.hu only beats jobline.hu by two point, it is clearly my favorite.
Especially when you would neglect the difference in price (which is just about 60 EUR) between this two sites and put an even stronger emphasize on response and advertisement layout, profession would have been an even more dominant winner.

One more general piece of advice: If you are not speaking Hungarian it is better to contact the sales representatives of all three sites directly. Although some of them are offering an English interface, it is not always working properly or offers less features than the Hungarian counterpart. The sales representatives are generally very helpful and (at least in my case) did their best to layout the advertisement according to my requirements.

All the best for your future recruitments. I hope this little comparison of Hungarian job portals helps.

Link List
TecChannel - Online-Jobsuche nimmt weiter zu
stepstone.com
monster.com
profession.hu
cvonline.hu
jobline.hu