Job Boards Are Down But Not Out
Ten years ago, Monster and CareerBuilder were the starting point for any respectable job search candidate or recruiting professional. Companies posted ads, job seekers responded, and within a day recruiters had a cache of potential hires to choose from. But over the years, the boards seemed to sabotage their own value proposition by becoming too easy to use. Job seekers flooded companies with applications even if they weren’t remotely qualified for the positions, and recruiters, overwhelmed by the deluge, stopped reviewing them all together. This caused serious seekers to abandon the big boards, turning instead to social media, referrals, and niche recruiting sites for job leads, leaving recruiters with a less and less compelling candidate pool for their job posting dollar.
Still, job boards are far from dead. Their influence is definitely declining, but most experts believe these sites will never disappear.
“Job boards aren’t irrelevant,” says Steve Lowisz, CEO of Qualigence, a recruiting firm in Michigan. “But how recruiters use the technology is changing.”
Lowisz, for example, is more likely to search a job board’s database of resumes for possible candidates than to post an ad. And the more detailed search capabilities a site offers, the better. “We’re not only looking for applicants who posted their own resumes, we want to see who their connected to, and who they reference on their applications,” he says. “Sometimes that data is the most valuable.”
Despite the deflated value proposition, job boards still rank as the number three source of external hires—behind referrals and corporate career sites, according to CareerXRoads 2013 Source of Hire Report. In 2012, roughly one in every six external hire was attributed to a Job Board. That’s down from nearly one in four external hires in 2010. But in 2012, social media accounted for a mere 2.9 percent—or one in every 35 external hires.
Recruiters and job seekers today rely more heavily on job board aggregators, which gather job postings from across the internet in a single place, says Jay Floersch, solutions architect in the recruitment process outsourcing division of Aon Hewitt. And the rise of aggregators like Indeed.com have actually made the need for job boards more pronounced, he says. “Posting ads to job boards and your own career website are the best way to get picked up by those aggregators.” `
Niche boards also are playing an important role in the recruiting space as well, says Chris Gould, head of global talent acquisition for Black and Veatch, a global engineering and construction company. Whether it’s Dice.com for IT, Hcareers.com for hospitality, or Engineerjobs.com for engineers, skilled job seekers turn to these sites first because they know the posts will be more relevant to their skills. “You can still find great talent through well-defined niche boards,” he says.
Job board owners have seen this shift in the recruiting space, and some are responding by building or buying new tools to help employers hone their recruiting efforts and access more qualified candidate pools.
Monster.com is still among the biggest job boards, with more than 70 million stored resumes and over 1 million job postings at any given time. The company acquired Yahoo Hotjobs in 2010 to maintain its leadership position and to further benefit from traffic through the Yahoo brand.
But it’s got a lot of competition. Most notably, CareerBuilder has steadily gained market share over the years, and is has begun broadening its offerings for both employers and job seekers. Last year, for example, the site acquired Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., an economic software and labor market analysis firm, to bolster its workforce analytics capabilities. “Clients today are interested being predictive about how they acquire talent,” says Hope Gurion, CareerBuilder’s chief product officer. “With the EMSI acquisition, we can give employers better perspective on employment trends, skills development, and recruitment strategies.”
They are also helping companies be more proactive about hiring with their Supply and Demand portal, which lets recruiters identify a pipeline of high potential candidates before they need them.
Taking a different tactic, Dice Holdings, owner of the IT job board Dice.com, acquired Geeknet’s online media business in 2012, to increase traffic from hard to source IT professionals. The acquisition includes Slashdot, a user-generated IT news, analysis, and professional insight community, and SourceForge, a destination for developers to create and share open source software. “The SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis,” says Scot Melland, chairman, president and CEO of Dice Holdings.
Dice has also launched Open Web, a social media aggregation tool that mines public information from 50 social sites, including Facebook, GitHub and Stack Overflow, to create rich digital portraits of potential candidates.
“The Open Web tool pulls together valuable pieces of publicly-available information scattered across the Web into a single, searchable profile containing the types of information that recruiters need to source talent,” Melland says. The tool combines professional information including titles, employers, and education, as well as details about their interests, hobbies, and even contact information. “We are making recruiters and hiring managers more efficient so they can spend their time selling their opportunities to top talent, instead of searching many sites just to put together a slate of candidates.”
All of these boards will see a new kind of competition in 2014, when online dating company eHarmony launches its own job search services. The company plans to use methods similar to how it pairs compatible customers for serious romantic relationships, to match job seekers with employers.
This makes perfect sense to Lowisz. “Job boards should be more like dating sites,” he says. “Recruiting is not about numbers, it’s about qualities, and matching the right person to the job.”
Source: Job Boards Are Down But Not Out by Sarah Fister Gale
Excellent article Sarah. Niche job boards have clearly taken market share from the big 2 as have the aggregators. While each is likely to be important for some time to come, it is clear to us that SocialJobWorking TM, the combination of print, digital and social media recruiting is the obvious wave of the future. Traditional ROI methods will not work for social just as traditional analytic’s cannot measure it. The viral nature of the medium likely accounts for a far higher percentage of hires than recent studies suggest. SimplyHired stated at the IAEWS annual Congress that 37% of their candidates use mobile and the #1 use of mobile is social. It’s just a matter of time. Thanks for your insight.
As an owner of a job board, I have a response to Steve Lowisz’ comment that he would rather search the resume databases of Job Boards vs post jobs. The problem with that theory is that most of us get resumes as a result of jobseekers applying to jobs on our sites. If recruiters stop posting jobs, the resume database suffers.
As one of the owners of niche job board, CollegeRecruiter.com, I take with a grain of salt anything said about job boards by third party recruiters and other vendors whose value proposition to their employer clients puts them into a position where they’re competing with general and niche job boards. Much of the “job boards are dead” commentary has been written by those folks whose views are necessarily skewed by their biases and bloggers, journalists, etc. have largely failed to properly vet those opinions or even to disclose those biases. Perhaps that’s because so many of the writers don’t understand the significant differences in motivations between corporate and third party recruiters.
The reality is that general and niche job boards and sites like LinkedIn which many regard as being social media but which generate more recruitment advertising revenue than any job board are crazy good at connecting actively seeking employers with actively seeking candidates. Where third party recruiters like Steve Lowisz add tremendous value is by connecting those employers with candidates who are not actively seeking a new position or who have expressed a willingness to entertain offers (as evidenced by posting a resume to a job board) but who are not aggressively looking for a new opportunity (as seen by candidates who apply to advertised job openings).
Steve clearly recognizes the value that job boards provide to him and his corporate employment clients. I’ve had the good fortune of speaking with him numerous times at conferences and co-leading a session at one conference with him. He’s intelligent, thoughtful, and respected. Yet his perception of job boards — including niche job boards — is different from that of a corporate recruiter who has dozens of entry-level requisitions sitting on her desk. The fastest and least expensive path for her to follow is to post those jobs to niche and general boards and send the hard-to-hire positions to quality third party recruiters such as Steve.