Job boards Aren't Dying (but a lot of recruiters are doing their best to help kill them off)

(I wrote his for a site called Recruiting Blogs back in 2014, but I still think it is valid)

I sometimes think people are thinking far too hard and becoming much too confused about the whole recruitment process and how to attract applicants.

Job boards to me are the ideal and only place I would look for jobs. Why? Because it is so bloody simple. I register and set up some search terms so that when a job is posted that matches my criteria I get an email alert telling me about it. It's then down to me to see if what the advertiser (recruiter or direct employer, it matters not) has to say woos me or not.

Sadly though, what has happened since online job posting emerged and has since grown into the monster it is today (no pun or promotion intended) is that too many people have focused less on creativity of message and more about how many boards their buck will buy them.

Accordingly, probably 80% of all online job posts are bland, boring affairs with no appeal, no sell and, in many cases, littered with grammatical errors. What's more, the originator of such poor content moans about job boards being on their last legs when they themselves are the architects of that way of thinking because they post rubbish and get a rubbish response.

The solution, to me at least, is simple. Craft a message that will appeal to the reader, then carefully target the boards you need to be seen on rather than fire the message out scattergun style to every board and via every aggregator under the sun. The quality people who inhabit those boards will have set up job alerts. They won’t be spending their days trawling every job board for every vacancy that includes the search terms that are applicable to them. Nor will they be frantically searching through Twitter in the vague hope that there's a job there for then. But, they WILL warm to a job that they have been made aware of that speaks their language and makes their laid back approach to recruitment suddenly a proactive one.

In short, creativity of message and careful targeting is key. It's also something that too many have lost sight of, instead believing that if your badly constructed job ad reaches a billion people, then surely at least a few of them will be interested. Yes, possibly, but not the right quality of people. Recruitment is no different to buying a house or choosing a holiday or car. The person making that decision has to be wooed, has to feel there is some kind of allure in the property/destination/vehicle. Too many job ads these days have become the prefab/caravan park/jalopy of the advertising world - but the only people to blame, are the people who write or cut & paste the ads.

Job boards aren't dying. The art of knowing how to attract people through creativity with words is. Don't believe me? Just look at a typical job board and the dross that's on there. Most of it would never have made it into print as editorial quality control wouldn't have allowed the ad to cheapen the reputation of the publisher. On that point, the job board that introduces quality control in terms of content, ahead of the need to just make money by accepting any old copy, will maybe lose out on quantity, but be streets ahead in terms of quality. I don't expect that to happen anytime soon though.