Like the fabled porridge in Goldilocks, there are three levels of traffic: too little, too much, and just right. More is not always good for everybody. Less is almost always bad. Finding out what "just right" actually means takes experimentation and commitment. If you are talking with a peer in our industry, who desn't have a grasp of their traffic (and we're specifically including HR professionals in this notion), you are talking with someone whose credentials are suspect.

In the employment business, having a website with the right amount of traffic is everything. 

We think that there are essentially five kinds of web operations in our industry:

• Guides: publications and associations that point traffic to relevant places,
• Vendors: like ATS providers and outsourcing shops that offer end users the tools and services required to process traffic and its accompanying data,
• Commodity Providers and Brokers: like the largest job boards that buy traffic in bulk and resell it to end users,
• Niche Providers and Brokers: like staffing firms and niche job boards that focus on acquiring a precise demographic in their traffic, and 
• End Users: like Corporate Recruiting Shops that acquire traffic for further in-house processing.

Each category has a relatively easy to define set of traffic requirements. You can evaluate the relative health of each by understanding their traffic. Although each category contains a variety of models for converting traffic into results, they are meaningless without the right volume of traffic. This is true today and will be increasingly true as Gen Y assumes its ascendancy in the market. (See last week's articles).

Traffic is the brand. Traffic is credibility. Success is a function of how well the traffic is processed for its next use.

Here's an example: