NAVIGATING JOB BOARD OPTIONS
Today we’re talking about using job boards for recruiting and what posting on a job board is worth.
With so many choices available, there are pros and cons to using job boards and I want to go over some of those here in this post.
If you’re looking to hire talent, there are a lot of options to find potential candidates for open positions within your company.
It may seem overwhelming with so many job board options, artificial intelligence software, recruiters, staffing agencies, and more.
ARE JOB BOARDS WORTH IT?
The question is are companies like Monster, Careerbuilder, Zip Recruiter, Indeed, and other job boards worth spending the money on.
It’s very likely if you are looking to fill open positions at your company that you’re in one of a few different positions.
If you don’t have enough outbound recruiting man power you’re likely trying to find ways to passively attract talent to your company.
Job boards like mentioned above can seem like a good option.
Looking into options, you will notice they can be very expensive and it may be challenging to know which option to choose.
PICKING AND CHOOSING FOR YOUR NEEDS
The most important thing to understand is that job boards are good for certain positions only.
Job boards should be used primarily for low level entry level positions.
Ideally, roles that are administrative or don’t require a lot of specialized education or skills are best for job boards.
Job boards lose their effectiveness the more specialized you get with a position, especially with more senior roles.
Once you start to get to the manager, director, VP or above, job boards are going to become increasingly less effective.
QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
One way or another, with job boards, you’re going to have to allot time to sift through an abundance of resumes.
Using job boards for recruiting will get you a high quantity of resumes, but the quality of those resumes and candidates is going to be very low.
You will likely reject eight or nine out of every 10 resumes that come through for your position.
You or someone on your staff will need to sift through these initial resumes and weed out the ones that are simply junk.
Many job boards today allow candidates to apply to multiple positions at once.
Therefore candidates are not necessarily looking at job descriptions or job requirements.
Often candidates are just blasting their resume out to as many positions as possible hoping that something will stick.
This shotgun affect makes it a headache for anyone who has to sift through hundreds of resumes to find only a few potentials.
For certain roles this can be good, but for many roles it isn’t worth it.
You may not have the staff or the time to go through all these resumes, therefore this may not be a good option for you.
SIFTING THROUGH THE MESS
The other thing to consider is that for the most part, people who are applying on job boards are not currently working.
Candidates without jobs who are actively looking may not be where the best talent tends to lie.
You may want to consider talent that is not actively and aggressively looking for a new position, or maybe not looking at all.
People working effectively for your competition may have the time to find a new position.
With this in mind, you’re likely not going to be tapping into the passive job market.
So you are limiting yourself greatly to the pool of talent that are the active talent.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some good people out there applying on job boards, but they are the exception to the rule.
IS THE COST WORTH THE PAYOFF?
The other tricky aspect with job boards is that you never can know which is the best one for your market.
Unless you are in an extremely specialized field like healthcare, engineering or software development, you won’t know which job board is best.
In these cases, it’s likely you will need memberships with multiple job boards which can get expensive.
The costs for membership and the time to speak to and sift through the high volume of resumes can be costly.
You’re likely better off hiring an internal headhunter or an external headhunting agency like us to do that work on your behalf.
HIRING A RECRUITER
One thing to keep in mind is to never hire a recruiting company that is going to post on job boards on your behalf.
Those are lazy recruiters and if you’re going to hire a recruiter they should be tapping into the passive market mentioned above.
A recruiter is likely going to be slightly more expensive, but you’re going to get much more bang for your buck.
Also your life is going to be a whole lot easier and your experience hiring will be much more streamlined.
IN CONCLUSION
Job boards can work, but they take a lot of work to manage and can end up being very expensive.
I recommend doing a cost-benefit analysis.
You really want to look and see what you’re going to get with a recruiter versus what you would get with the job boards.
You’ll certainly attract better candidates going with the recruiter.
In any case, find and do what works best for you and your business.
Considering building an internal HR team? Here are some things to consider:
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