Job Boards: An Enduring, Evolving Recruitment Marketing Channel
Just as reports of Mark Twain’s demise were greatly exaggerated, such is the case with job boards. In fact, estimates on the size of the U.S. recruitment advertising market range anywhere from $3-$9 billion per year. Monster Worldwide recently reported taking in 1.2 million new resumes per month. CareerXroads’ 2013 Source of Hire Report found that almost 20% of external hires typically come from traditional job boards. That doesn’t even include the job board-like activity on social sites.
So, why the reports of demise? Because many get stuck on the original job board format without realizing that the job board industry has changed. Yesterday’s job boards offered a place to post static content that would expire after a period of time. Today’s job boards are much more dynamic, leveraging intelligent Internet technology to expand content, create a “push” versus “pull” mechanism for more precise delivery of postings to potential candidates, and even create an interactive experience that draws candidates in. Technology is constantly becoming more robust, and job boards that embrace these new capabilities continue to adapt in order to survive. Job boards aren’t dying—they are evolving.
At the core of this evolution, technological changes have led to a blurring of the definition of what a job board is. Is a company’s career page a job board? Is LinkedIn? Job postings get tweeted; does that make Twitter a job board? The larger question is, does it matter? Employers will always need to convey their job openings, and there are now many more channels to do just that. These new channels do not represent more work or a different paradigm for recruiters. If recruiters are marketers—and the industry consensus says that indeed, they are—then the recruiter’s job is to ask, “Is this a channel where my candidates are?”
There was a time when job boards were considered “new” technology, appealing to recruiters as an alternative to traditional newspaper classified ads. Ironically, job boards are now often knocked as “old” technology. But while some job boards look and function as they did when first launched, those that are thriving are those that have evolved. Today’s search and filtering systems, for example, help distill the quality of postings and, most important, attract more of the right applicants in real time. As Jeff Dickey-Chasins (also known as The Job Board Doctor) recently wrote: “Never before has the industry been presented with so many options for improving and expanding their services. Whether it’s resume parsing, contextual search, ‘talent communities,’ social recruiting, video interviewing and resumes, or AdWord optimization, job boards have access to lots of technology and approaches that promise to improve their ROI for employers.”
Todd Nevins, co-founder of niche board icrunchdata.com, agrees: “The online job space is changing rapidly from the ‘old school’ job board model to a media destination providing a defined audience with jobs, news, education and collaboration media that speaks directly to them and their profession.” Job Search Television Network (JSTN) provides a good illustration of this. JSTN is a multimedia platform that delivers career opportunities, insight into employer culture, and career advice via a mix of job postings and video. The company’s technology enables these videos to be used in the employer’s career site, email campaigns, and across all social networks, mobile devices, and JSTN’s own television network. Their customers typically see a six to 10 percent increase in candidate flow when using video in their job advertising.
Recruitment advertising requires a budget, and budgets must be accounted for. While many advertising channels are quite reasonably priced, some postings can cost up to $1,500 each. That spend is significant and demands results. Therefore, it’s critical that talent acquisition teams find the tools and services to understand how their talent brand and message resonates with specific candidates on specific channels, to determine—and ultimately increase—their recruitment marketing ROI. No other function within an organization is allowed to ask for money without providing a forecast and an accounting—and recruiters should not be an exception.
Therein lies an opportunity for recruiters to leverage Big Data. Behavioral data gleaned from thousands, even millions, of online candidate transactions can be leveraged to provide critical insights, such as how many times a posting has been viewed and how many click-throughs the posting receives. Employers can see where candidates are coming from and how quickly they respond. Data analysis can also forecast candidate volume and how long it will take to receive the majority of responses for a posting on a given board. Andrew Gadomski, chief advisor and founder of Aspen Advisors, says it this way: “Big Data and analysis techniques allow us to focus on metrics like ‘Source of Interviewed Applicants’ that reveal costs of each candidate and help us better understand the effort and resources required to get a slate of candidates together.” More than ever before, recruiters can see predictable trends and make strategic plans regarding talent acquisition—via the data supplied by evolved job boards.
What might job boards offer in the future? One example integrates social media capabilities and predictive analytics. In the past, recruiters faced with stacks of resumes focused on the most recent applicants, leaving older resumes by the wayside. New technology can now predict which “old” resumes will be a good match for an open position now that they would not have been a good match for several years ago. And now, recruiters can use advertising, text, email and social media channels to communicate that opening. Job boards—like any smart business sector—will continue to use all emerging capabilities to find new ways to serve their customers.
The need to attract candidates will never go away. Therefore, the need to advertise job openings to candidates will never go away. While there are many channels that recruiters can tap into, job boards remain an integral part of any recruitment marketing strategy, enabling employers to proactively push relevant job postings to larger and more targeted pools of talent. Successful job boards will continue to evolve to meet the increasingly complex needs of employer and job seeker alike.
Source: Job Boards: An Enduring, Evolving Recruitment Marketing Channel by David Bernstein
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