The NORAS survey is almost undoubtedly the best independent, objective source of data on job board audiences available. Compiled by our colleagues at enhance media, this month saw the latest release of info, so what's happening with job boards that you should know about...

There are two pieces of data that really caught our attention in this year's report:

The percentage of online job seekers using solely the internet has increased by 50% compared with last year.

This is great news for anyone looking to recruit via the internet. As online recruitment becomes more popular candidates are abandoning the local press altogether in favour of using their computer. Hardly surprising when you consider the vast amount of jobs being advertised online.

The average number of job boards visited by online job seekers continues to fall, down from 7.0 in 2004, 5.3 in 2007 to 4.8 in 2008.

As candidates settle into using online recruitment they tend to narrow the range of job boards they use, this can be due to a number of reasons, from how relevant they find the jobs to how easy to use they find the job board.

But what does this mean for employers?

If you're advertising on just one or two job boards you're going to be missing out on a large part of your potential audience. Our approach has always been to maximise the audience of our clients vacancies, and this looks like continuing to be the most effective way of recruiting online.

The full NORAS results are free to download at www.noras.co.uk