Most companies dread receiving a visit from an auditor. Not CareersinAudit.com though! That’s exactly who they want visiting their site: professionals in auditing, risk, compliance and cybersecurity. As the leading global job board in the auditing industry, the team prides itself on attracting relevant candidates and on maintaining valuable partnerships with large companies and some of the top banks. In the past, we’ve written about the success of the site but it felt like it was time for an update. To learn more about CareersinAudit.com, we contacted Simon Wright, the director, and discussed the past, the present and the future of the award-winning site.
From headhunting firm to job board
CareersinAudit.com was launched as a pan-European job board in 2005 by two ex-auditors, who decided to start a head-hunting firm after Arthur Andersen closed its doors in 2002, but the move into recruitment didn’t start there. Despite their success in headhunting for Renaix, the pair wanted to attract more candidates. That’s where the idea for a job board came into play, as a database of relevant applicants for their clients. The tool quickly turned into a thriving business of its own. Simon Wright joined the team from the Hotgroup and the Trinity Mirror Group as the job board took on some momentum to help manage and grow the site commercially.
However, running a headhunting firm and running a job board are worlds apart. As the site became more successful, one director shifted focus from the original business plan to invest more time and energy into developing CareersinAudit.com.
Since the firm was focused on the European market, so was the job board. In 2008, just three years after its foundation, the site was launched globally. Today, CareersinAudit.com and its partner websites – CareersinRisk.com, CareersinCompliance, CareersinCyber.com – have been around for 14 years and they attract candidates from over 180 countries. The grand total of candidates adds up to 225 000 candidates, who all have active accounts (to 18 months). The self-cleaning database sends out an e-mail to non-active candidates, after 6 months and again after 12 months to encourage users to update their profile. If they don’t, the account is deleted after 18 months.
The International market
For the past 7 years, the job board has offered its services to companies from all over the world, reaching even the Asian Pacific countries thanks to the CareersinAudit Asia Pacific site (which has a slightly different colour scheme and tailored locally-focused content and career resources for the Asia Pacific market). As the demand has grown, CareersinAudit.com has adapted to each market in which it operates. When more foreign recruiters wanted to use the site, CareersinAudit.com went global. When more and more risk and compliance job offers appeared on the site, the team created additional job boards to cater to a more specific niche and to offer more specialist roles to a wider cross section of the global Governance workforce.
Today, local portals have become a priority. Even if the team is already capable of translating job offers (for German and Dutch recruiters), the goal is to have functional portals for foreign jobseekers and companies very soon. The German, French, Spanish and Dutch markets are the focus for the team with China close behind. It would be a huge step forward for local candidates (who could look for jobs in their own language) and it would ensure the CareersinAudit Group maintains its top ranking internationally. By focusing on a narrow niche, the job site can continue to offer an exceptional service to its clients.
One aspect of the service, which will become more challenging as the job site expands, concerns the specific qualifications for professions. Clearly, different countries have different expectations and standards when it comes to the required skills to become say, a cybersecurity agent. The team has faced these types of challenges in the past and partnerships with international companies can only lead to more expertise. Ultimately, since the CareersinAudit Group does not do any sourcing or recruiting, it is up to the recruiter to do the necessary background checks on candidates. The sites do however offer various filtering tools and options to ensure recruiters only receive the right candidates applying for their jobs on the site, including filter questions and IP location filtering, which automate the process at a site level and save recruiters time when it comes to filtering candidates themselves.
In Cybersecurity, there is more competition, but the CareersinAudit Group continues to excel because it has such a specific niche and strong relationships with recruiters and employers across the world.
More than just a job listing
Over time, CareersinAudit.com has not only built up a database of candidates, but also a loyal database of customers. For this reason, the team is acutely aware of how the recruitment has evolved and what matters to its clients.
For some industries, other newer job boards have created a more competitive market. In Cybersecurity, there are a number of new players, who also offer job posting for the niche industry. That said, the different sites complement each other in many ways. Other sites organize more events and offer more training opportunities. the CareersinAudit Group , on the other hand, invests heavily in exclusive content generation and SEO to improve visibility and to educate the site visitors indirectly.
In fact, the blog (called the Career Advice and Career Resources sections) is an important part of the site. At the moment, between 3 -10 articles are published each month. These articles are written by both freelancers (part time), in-house writers (full time) and well-known industry journalists and commentators, who have real insight and expertise to share with those entering the industry. Some articles target recruiters (interview question suggestions, for example), others focus on companies (the Importance of Risk Management) and others still speak to employee (Preparing for a Promotion or Pay Rise). Among the more popular content, there is the hot spots series, which is published about 2-3 times a year.
The content writers work in the auditing industry, or they have in the past. In fact, one of the writers, Carol McLachlan used to be a Big Four HR Director and has written for the CareersinAudit Group for over 10 years. She is also the site’s Audit Agony Aunt and responds to every candidate question using her industry knowledge and background to provide support to jobseekers if they need it. Carol is currently the President of the Liverpool Society of Chartered Accountants adding further depth and insight to her work for CareersinAudit.com.
The future of CareersinAudit
In addition to expanding their reach to more candidates and companies by translating their sites, the CareersinAudit Group is improving other aspects of their website design. In the future, they hope to reintroduce a blog search engine so that visitors can quickly search and filter the vast information on the sites regarding the industry and to assist with their own job searching.
The Importance of Risk Management article continues to gain attention, which makes the CareersinAudi.comt blog a great source of information. In fact, one of their articles on the topic is viewed around 5 000 times a month. For this reason, the blog will be a major part of the site’s SEO strategy.
The other industry, which is set to revolutionize the workplace concerns data. Currently, any positions involving data are on the CareersinCyber.com website. With Data Analytics being one of the fastest growing job sectors this year, the CareersinAudit Group have plans to expand their current offerings to also cater for these positions.
To ensure they are using the best technology, the team has actually tested different software and platforms and have compared the outcome. Most of their job sites are created by Madgex. CareersinCyber.com was actually launched with Volcanic, to see how that would affect traffic and UX design. After 18 months he team decided to switch back to Madgex for continuity but who knows what the future holds. It shows that the CareersinAudit Group is not afraid to try new things, as long as their clients and candidates remain a priority.
* The CareersinAudit job board cannot be referred to as CIA for legal reasons and the actual CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has requested that the team not use the acronym.
Author: Ali Neill
As the job board tester and blog editor for the Jobboard Finder, Ali works on job boards from all around the world and keeps a close eye on the recruitment trends thanks to a number of sources, including the website’s social media pages.
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