By Phillip Marquart
Are job boards dead? This is the question many recruitment marketing bloggers have been discussing lately due to the emergence of social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter. Not to mention the emergence of Glassdoor as a resource for job seekers and employers alike.
Not surprisingly, Jason Lauritsen writes on Monster.com’s blog that job boards aren’t dead yet, citing the decrease in traffic due to the job climate as opposed to recruitment marketing dollars being shifted elsewhere; however, money talks, and the fact of the matter is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, recruitment marketing dollars are being shifted away from the major job boards like Monster and Careerbuilder.
One major reason the sites are losing buy-in from employers is that the sites are simply too user friendly for job seekers. Sure, that seems counter intuitive. Shouldn’t the goal of a job board be ease of use? Why would a job seeker use a site that is awkward and cumbersome? The answer is found in many recruiters’ reasons for leaving those job boards: they produce too many unqualified leads. They might get the most traffic, but those sites have made it so easy for job seekers to apply for a job that you don’t get the quality of candidates you would get using a more niche site that requires effort and participation from a user.
On a job board you upload your résumé and cover letter and you are mere clicks away from slinging your résumé towards recruiters and hiring managers. Too many job seekers are too lazy to submit a customized résumé and cover letter for the job to which they are applying. Too many cannot be hassled with reading the entire job description to see if they are qualified because they are applying for dozens of jobs over their lunch break without much thought as to which jobs they are applying to. Have you ever called a candidate to schedule a phone screen and had them say “and what job was this about again?” They are the candidates most recruiters can do without but who are enabled by the ease of use on major job boards.
A second reason you see recruitment marketing money moving to social media and more niche sites is the ‘cross pollination’ of job board applicants. How many job seekers use Careerbuilder, but not Monster? If you are getting the same results from both, why post to both? Plus, as Indeed.com (which is compiling a new résumé bank) pulls posts from niche site and directs them to YOUR website to complete YOUR application (already a plus as it requires more buy in from candidates than the typical click and apply method), the job board model that worked for the 90s and 00s is quickly fading. If job boards want to avoid going the way of print newspapers (bankrupt) or the Dodo Bird (extinct), they should adapt quickly.
What role do you see sites like Monster and Careerbuilder playing moving forward? Do you prefer the major job boards, or do you see value in some of the smaller, more interactive sites?