Register early and save on ERE Expo 2010 Spring in San Diego from March 15-17.

Blog Network

Employers to go jobboard-free? follow this blog post

posted by on Nov. 25, 2009

An HR blogger said something interesting in a recent job boards-are-dying type post: "We will be job board free in 2 years." In a follow-up post to explain how this would occur, this anonymous blogger says (problem areas in red):

"When you need something, you go to Google, so why not use it to find a job? Simply enter your criteria, say sales jobs Chicago, and what you’ll get is a myriad of jobs. Some will be on the boards (they pay an inordinate amount of dough to get their results listed high on Google), some will be on aggregators, some will be on free sites, and some will be from company sites. The point is, they are all in one place! No longer do you have to search Monster, and then Hotjobs, and then craigslist. They are all indexed in one convenient place, your Google search results.

The huge shift that is occurring now is that companies are optimizing their own job boards so that their results will show ahead of the job boards on search. This means unless there is a huge, fundamental shift on how they do business, the job boards will continue to bleed revenues on job postings."


Now I just can't resist pointing out the flaws here, one at a time:

"We will be job board free in 2 years."

First, if your company is not jobboard-free today in the middle of the deepest recession in memory, chances are you're going to be relying on them more heavily two years from now. It's hard to remember what recruiting was like three years ago when everyone with a pulse had a job. This same lack of imagination is why sellers pay to stage expensive homes for sale, filling them with furniture, hanging paintings etc. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to live in a home, when you're standing in an empty house. It's even harder to imagine employers falling all over themselves to hire back the talent they just fired... but it's coming.

I will go out on a limb and say many companies should not even want to be jobboard-free. Let's say for example that your corporate core competencies are in structural engineering and your company specializes in road construction projects. When business is booming, will it make economic sense for you to prioritize achieving freedom from the evil job boards? Or should you be focused on sales and operational excellence? Would it make sense for Honda to prioritize going television-ad or magazine-ad free?

"what you’ll get is a myriad of jobs" and "and some will be from company sites"

When I searched Google for 'sales jobs Chicago', there were no job postings in the first page of results. There were no company sites either.

"companies are optimizing their own job boards so that their results will show ahead of the job boards on search."

Easier said than done. If you are CNN.com, no sweat. But for the average company, this is a pipe dream. There are 10 search results on the first page - because of rapid click through drop-off, the first five really matter. The lions share of traffic goes to the first result, a lot less goes to the second result and so on. If you're not on the first page, you might as well not exist. The truth is, CNN could get a top ranking for 'sales jobs Chicago' but doesn't need one. And that's how this works - if you don't need the ranking, you can get it. If you do need it, it's beyond your reach. Reminds me of the saying "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".

Let's go one step further and pretend that I'm flat out wrong about this. Let's imagine that average companies could get top Google rankings. Now pretend that 10 companies have beat the job boards out of all the first page rankings on Google. That means just five companies have traffic flow with which they can do some real recruiting. How many companies in the Chicago area hire sales reps? More than five?

For all these reasons the "job-board free in two years" movement is deeply flawed.  keep reading...

job boards
| 3 comments | flag

3 comments

Log in or register to post a reply.

  • 1 point 2 months ago

    Eric, thank you for your blog it was a very interesting read. I think you have a lot of merit to what you are saying, but I would like to contribute a few more details.

    Google can't list jobs from companies on their site if those jobs are part of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) because they are part of a database and not a static page. Therefore a company must post to a job board to get their jobs listed on a site like Google.

    Another method is to purchase Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services such as Optijob or Jobs2Web. These services create landing pages with keywords on them that are crawlable by search engine bots. They have links to the ATS Job Listings for specific categories of jobs and over time they build page rank based on subscribers (RSS subscriptions) to the page as well as clicks from users choosing the link from search results. It is possible to get your company to the top of a search engine list using this method however not very likely if you have competition.

    I agree that you are correct that there are only 10 results on the first page and there are more than 10 competing companies in almost every city. That is where I believe Search Engine Marketing (SEM) comes in. For a period of time you can sponsor your jobs to appear at the top of a list on aggregation sites like indeed. Indeed only contains jobs and therefore your search results are much more accurate. Furthermore, you can maintain being at the top so long as you are willing to fund it. Therefore you can be on top today and not tomorrow but then back again the following day.

    Let's all face reality, the fact is, money can buy you anything.

    Here is my example:
    Say you want to post your Structural engineering Job on Monster.com. And for simplicity sake we will say it costs $100. After 60 days you could have 0 to 1000's of candidates who viewed or click on the job. But the return on your investment is all over the board. Typically you don't get any more applicants after 5 -10 days and once you post you can't update anything or they will charge you another $100. I have seen many postings that never broke 25 clicks

    Okay, now let's explore the SEM model. Indeed will scrape a companies Job site (including that ATS Jobs) everyday for free. Then you can purchase SEM credits and specify which jobs you want to use these SEM credits on. So our Structural Engineer position now has $100 of SEM credits applied to it. For simplicity sake we will use $.50 as our SEM fee. (This fee can be less if you buy more or more if you buy less SEM credits) If 200 candidates click this link we would be charged $100, and the SEM automatically stops after 200 clicks so we don't have to worry about going over budget. If only 100 candidates click our link we would only pay $50.We can unpost and repost at any time with updates at no cost. Control and flexibility is now in the hands of the recruiter.

    I do see a trend in more people using sites like indeed or simply hired and/or more social networking sites like linkedin and facebook.
    Regardless of which method you prefer for your company you need to be able to prove that it is the best method. Using a Media Management company like KRT to select your tools and a metric measurement tool like Smashfly will help you make your case either way.

    I tend to lean more towards SEO & SEM with a small collection of Job boards for niche postings and diversity. My reasoning is that many of the employed people (who tend to be more successful in my opinion) are not looking for jobs. These individuals may click on a Google ad-word campaign displayed on sites they visit; while these same individuals would not visit a job board because they are happily employed. This is a very subjective point that isn't really measurable, but I believe exists. In the end I think a lot of different variables such as your industry, competition, volume of positions, brand and location contribute to your success or failure either way.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts I hope I added something beneficial to the conversation.

    -M

     

  • 1 point 2 months ago

    Eric,

     

    I agree with your response 100%, especially with the point that even in a recession, when there's an extreme over-abundance of talent and not enough jobs, employers continue to heavily use job boards to attract relevant people. They also continue to use traditional media such as newspapers, niche print and online publications.  New media is not killing old media. Media that works is replacing media that doesn't work, regardless of what form it takes.

     

    Over the past year there have been many saying that job boards are dead, that papers are dead, and that just about any media that does not involve social networking is dead. Most of the time these claims are based on no data and are more sensationalistic than educational in purpose.

     

    Here are two more points to support your argument:

     

    -Do you remember when Google Base came out 5-6 years ago? A friend of mine and a well-known industry expert who often speaks at industry events told me something along the lines of "Google Base is going to kill the big job boards. Once you have the ability to post to Google, you don't need to do anything else."  I listened to him, skeptically. Look at Google Base now. People use it to upload their content, but I don't hear about it as a game changer or anything close to it.  I go to Google many times a day. It's awesome. But it doesn't seem to have fully caught on as  the end-all destination for employment-related searches. It's a good tool for job seekers to use, but it's just one of many.

     

     

    -There are thousands of job boards, some good, some bad. Job boards do serve an important purpose though. They help employers showcase their jobs in ways that they may not be able to do on their own, either because the boards have dedicated resources for SEO and SEM (resources which employers don't always have) or because they reach specific niche audiences through economies of scale, or both. This holds true for large employers and very much so for small employers. Most jobs are created by small and medium employers. These employers typically have few resources to optimize their sites (if they even have sites) to reach their target audiences, so they rely on the job boards, which have already invested in SEO and SEM to promote employers' jobs to the most relevant audiences. 

     

     

    If job boards are dead, like you, I'd like to see some data on it. For now, I don't see any signs of this happening any time soon, or in in 2 years, or in 5 years. A better statement to make would be: "We will be free of media that doesn't deliver results in 2 years".

     

    Roberto 

    www.aftercollege.com

     

  • 1 point 3 months ago

    I agree that the job board free is flawed and fueled by recruiting firms, recruiting consultants and recruitment ad agencies.  They all have a vested interest to lay claim that the boards are done.  Why you ask?  Because it will simply drive revenue to their organzations. The more they can segment out areas to recruit talent the more consulting will be needed and difficult it will be to build a strategy and aquire talent. Same reason's why Ad agencies were thriving when recruiting was done via newspapers. Recruitment budgets have decreased for companies over the last 6 years as a greater ROI with the boards appeared.  Do you think that HR or Talent Aquisition Groups are going to be able to get more budget in this economy?  It has been a struggle to track what they get now...  especially when they are not tracking the indirect hires that they have made by using job boards.  The behavior of job seekers are to go to the boards.  Think about it... If i look at comscore and see the top 5 board sites and look at the cross over we are at almost 50% of all working people in the US visit these sites monthly.  And they are there for one reason... consume career content...why not embrace that?  Many of the major players are opening the data to the job seekers to get smarter on how to recruit... I would guess that only 15% of the companies using the job boards do any targeting in their strategy.  So before everyone follows the people saying job boards are done make sure that you try to compare as close as possible to compare before you jump into the chatter that floods the internet to shift the 2.5 billion job board industry to consultants and recruitment agencies...

    Example:  Take a SEM strategy to get you to the top of search on google.  Average cost $2 - $5 per click.  take the the number of views of a job on a board and i bet you would get a bill far greater then what someone pays for a  job posting.  I did and it was going to cost me 3x as much for the same numbers of applicants at the end of the day..