Which job-board is the best IT jobs website in Ireland? What are the most popular IT jobs? What is the best location for IT jobs in Ireland. Read on for answers…
Which jobs website gets the most visitors?
Do you know which jobs website is the most popular in Ireland? Each year, Social Talent, the recruitment training company brings out a list of the top ten most popular job websites in Ireland. The rankings are provided by Alexa.com. Would you have guessed some of the bigger names like Irishjobs or Monster given their advertising volume? The most visited jobs website in Ireland from 2012 to 2014 was actually Jobs.ie . In 2015, Indeed.ie surpassed Jobs.ie to reach number one. Indeed is still relatively new to the Irish marketplace but is huge internationally. One interesting thing to note from these findings, is that even though Indeed.ie is the most popular jobs website, it was still only ranked #88 out of all websites in Ireland. This would indicate that the popularity of job websites is declining.
Focus on the best IT jobs website:
My background has recruiting for the IT sector. So, I decided to focus on the IT sector do some research on IT specific jobs. I went through the most popular websites on a given day and searched for specific IT jobs. My aim was try to figure out which website is better, and what are the main differences between them. I searched for the number of IT jobs, the location, whether it was a real employer or agency, and how many jobs in total existed. Although the data is not completely scientific, I did gain enough information to make some interesting impressions:
Jobs.ie
As Jobs.ie had been number 1 in rankings for a number of years, I started off there. Jobs.ie is quite easy to use, but the main thing I noticed is that the actual number of jobs is relatively small. For this study, I tried to discount recruitment-agency jobs as much as possible and focus on unique employer jobs. When I searched all IT jobs, I had 213 results, but only 119 (56%) of those jobs were from actual employers. Within those 139 jobs, I found that the bulk of the jobs were in software development (25), and technical support (25). Following that, Business Intelligence, IT infrastructure and Sales were the next most popular jobs. Project Management, Business Analyst and QA jobs were a little lower down the list.
Regarding location, Dublin had the most jobs (71), Cork was next (33). It was very difficult to find any other jobs elsewhere with Galway showing only 2 IT jobs.
IrishJobs.ie 
Next I visited IrishJobs.ie. It has consistently been in the top 5 job-boards over the last 5 years. IrishJobs has much more volume than Jobs.ie, with a total IT jobs of 2819. However only 531 (19%) of these jobs were from actual employers, the rest were agency. Of those 531, the most popular jobs are software development (44 jobs). Next on the list was business analyst (24), IT infrastructure (19) and project management (17). Technical support or customer service only amounted to 5 jobs, which was much lower than Jobs.ie.
On location, Dublin was most popular (352), with Cork quite a bit behind (50), with Galway next (23). Numbers generally are low in the rest of the country, but Limerick does have some good employers, with the likes of Hansa, PM Group and Dell. Donegal has United-Health and Pramerica. Glanbia is based in Kilkenny. Sun Life is in Waterford.
Indeed.ie
Indeed.ie overtook Jobs.ie in 2015 to become the most popular job-board in Ireland, The sheer volume of jobs dwarfs all of the other websites out there. For example, searching for developer jobs nationwide, I found 12,000 results. When I filtered this to jobs from employer website only, I still had 6,960 results. This is FAR MORE than any of the other job-board. This is due to the model Indeed uses. It scrapes the careers pages of employers and adds their job postings automatically. Other job-boards charge directly to put up new ads. Software Development was the most popular with 6,960 ads. Next was IT infrastructure with 854, with Technical support at 783. Project Management, Business Intelligence and QA Testing were next most popular ads.
Dublin was the most popular location, followed by Cork, Galway and Limerick.
What about LinkedIn jobs?
LinkedIn was not included on the original rankings . It is not officially classified as a job-board. I did however still take a look at it because it has a job ads section that is growing. I searched all of IT and engineering and got 3420 results, there is no filter to eliminate agency jobs, but I did notice that CPL, Hays and Morgan Mckinley made up 701 of those jobs. It is difficult to compare against the other websites. Development was again the most popular with 2316 results, Infrastructure on 957 and technical support on 532. Most of the jobs were in Dublin, with Cork and Galway next.
A note on Monster.ie:
Monster has been outside the top 4 job-boards in the past 3 years in 5th, 8th and 6th. I did try to search on IT jobs, and while there were over 1000 results, there was no option to filter out recruitment agencies making it very difficult to analyse the numbers. As a sample test, I searched for ‘java developer’ in Dublin, there were 155 results, but going through them only 9 out of the 155 were actually ads from employers, all the rest were agencies. I had to sift through 7 pages of results to find that. So overall, not a very positive experience with Monster, it seems that is mostly an outlet for recruitment agencies to advertise.
Conclusions:
What are the most popular IT jobs?
The most popular IT ads across IT jobs websites were programming and software development. IT infrastructure roles in System/network administration are next. Jobs.ie is quite popular for technical support and customer service roles. IrishJobs has more Business Analyst and Project management positions. Business Intelligence is becoming quite a popular term in job ads.
What are the most popular locations for IT jobs?
Dublin was by far the most popular location, particularly for software development roles. Cork is next with jobs in software development, IT infrastructure and IT support. Galway and Limerick follow. There are not many IT jobs elsewhere in the country, apart from a handful of roles in Waterford and Kilkenny.
Which is the best IT jobs website?
Volume of jobs: Indeed.ie is clearly the best IT jobs website in Ireland regarding volume of jobs. Here is an example: A System Administrator searching for jobs related to ‘IT infrastructure engineer’ or ‘System administrator’ or ‘Network engineer’. The results were 854 matching jobs in Indeed.ie. In comparison, 19 direct ads on Irishjobs. 12 jobs on Jobs.ie. That is a massive difference.
User experience and relevant information: There are some drawbacks to Indeed.ie on user experience. The search engine can give results that are not directly matching your query thus inflating the numbers. It can also be difficult to sift through the amount of results leading to an unpleasant user experience. IrishJobs and Jobs.ie have more user friendly websites, and the fact that employers pay them directly to advertise means the jobs ads are generally fresh, up-to-date. Indeed uses algorithms to scrape company Career pages, so the information may not be perfectly up to date. The user is redirected to many different pages when applying for the job.
Overall: If you are serious about your job search, then it is impossible to ignore Indeed.ie as the best IT jobs website.Its volume alone is so much more than competitors. I is no surprise that it has surpassed other IT job website in visitor numbers. However it does still have some way to go in terms of improving user experience on its search facility. It is also worth noting that the popularity of traditional job-boards is in decline. Only two job-boards made it into the top 100 visited websites in Ireland in 2015, and there has been a steady decline in the visitor numbers since 2013. However, the success career page scraping sites like Indeed.ie show that their is still potential for job websites to grow especially by using a different model. Newer social media platforms like Linked and Twitter are also rapidly growing as an alternative source of IT job websites.
Written by James Byrne, Career Coach at Make It Happen Careers. For personalised advice how to search for jobs, cv writing or interview coaching, call James on 087 2429533 or email james@makeithappen.ie