The Job Board renaissance

Job boards have been declared dead for a looooong time. The obituaries were written, the tombstones carved.  The pronouncement was based on two factors:

1. The advertising-based business model was seen as outdated in comparison with performance-based models such as Indeed.
2. The quality of candidates was perceived as lower, especially in comparison to LinkedIn (and to a lesser extent communities such as StackOverflow).

Since then, many job boards have adapted their business models (not only including performance related pricing but offering, for example, shortlisting services, HR Tech components & retargeting).

At the same time, clients often didn’t prove as receptive to pay per click offerings as hoped; cpc campaigns are harder to manage and more awkward to account for. As a consequence, it has spawned some new intermediaries such as Recruitics and Onrecruit who do it for you and has given Recruitment Ad Agencies a second wind. Nevertheless, clients have certainly become better at tracking ROI and using alternative methods (from content marketing to Facebook advertising), which has led to a more focused spend. Job boards have to demonstrate that they can access a unique pool of candidates and/or are the first port of call for candidates.  

Quality of candidates has always been a bone of contention. Even when I was at Jobsite we had people questioning the quality of candidates in general and the quality of the CV Database in particular. The stronger LinkedIn grew, the more entrenched this opinion became. Nothing would change people’s minds.

I believe the impression of dubious quality was linked to recruiters either receiving too many irrelevant applications (and sometimes SME’s hiring directly received none) and not being able to find enough quality CVs in the databases. In short, sourcing from job boards became far too time-consuming, especially if a talent acquisition expert had to search through several databases consecutively, resulting in 50%+ of their time spend searching and not being able to focus on their actual job.

But it didn’t have to do with the quality of the CVs in a job board’s database. I say this (and I am writing this blog post) as even I was blown away by the quality of CVs in some job board databases when using Pocket Recruiter.

How to extract maximum value from a database

Pocket Recruiter, an AI-based search & selection tool, unearths these gems in a super fast and super easy fashion, taking away the time-consuming searching and bringing out the beauty of the job board databases. Have a read of this article by Jon Hull, Head of Resourcing at Carillion, where he describes finding CVs for C-Suite hires. It is pretty impressive.

The beauty is that CVs include contact details. Through tools like Pocket Recruiter, job boards’ CV databases (actually, any databases per se, be they internal or external, social or not) gain a new level of importance and even allow for trialling new pricing models.

Obviously GDPR is looming (but I am sure that the clever people at job boards find a way around it), LinkedIn is still super powerful & very important when it comes to finding candidates, sourcing is just one part of recruiting, but, nevertheless, it fills me with joy to finally be able to show that job boards are being used by relevant, quality candidates.