Recruitment advertising on the UK’s job boards continued to decline in October, according to the born Job Advertising Index. The index dropped to 84 points, down 3 points, as job boards across a wide array of sectors saw job advertising fall.

However, while many private sector based job boards saw job advertising dip, niche sites serving the public sector, including education and medical careers, enjoyed year-on-year increases.

This could be an indicator that government’s plan to revitalise the economy by injecting cash into the public sector is helping some boards. Certainly we have seen reports that public sector freelancing (in IT at least) has risen.

Overall the picture is less than reassuring; the index has seen no positive movement over the last six months, with the only respite from the downward spiral occurring in May, when the index held level at 94 points. It would appear that the online job advertising market continues to be challenging in the current turbulent times.

© Junaid Khalid | Dreamstime.com

The LegalProspects job board has had a makeover, out goes the old blue and green colour scheme, in comes a more up-to-date and energetic looking site. The old logo, which it is fair to say was showing its age, has been replaced with a more modern design, as shown below.

The press release suggests the redesign also incorporates best practice SEO to achieve better natural search result listings. This is evident when you look at the title tags and meta data of the site’s homepage, which are keyword rich.

The job search now dominates the homepage, together with a witty cartoon. The search results page feels a little ‘top heavy’ to the born team, on a standard display only the top job is visual without scrolling. We also spotted a Marketing Executive role being promoted on the site, which looked oddly out of place.

There were 3,427 jobs on the site when we visited.

Job posting service Broadbean have announced that they have been acquired by DMGT’s digital division (AND), the owners of Jobsite. The company made the announcement on their website and in emails to business partners.

We understand that competing job posting service Conkers, who are also owned by AND, have also emailed business partners. The message from both Broadbean and Conkers at this stage is its “business as usual”.

More analysis and information will be added to this post as we have it, no news on the cost of the purchase as yet.

Correction: The original title of this post was DMGT (Jobsite) Acquires Broadbean. This has been corrected to reflect that DMGT’s digital division (AND) has made the acquisition. To clarify, Jobsite and Broadbean now have a common owner.