There has been a lot of speculation and debate in the Recruitment community of late as to whether or not Job Boards are dead. Today I tuned in to Bill Boorman’s radio show Ready for Lift Off on Blog Talk Radio where the answer was a resounding “No”.
In my opinion, the spread of free services and a growing plethora of social media tools are leading job boards to suffer – particularly in the current economy. It is difficult to justify spending money on a job board when it is getting increasingly easy to put your job in front of relevant candidates for free. I don’t think the job board is going anywhere though. I imagine they are still the first port of call for the majority of job seekers so will have a place in our recruiting arsenal for a long time to come.
I think job boards could be doing a lot more to become social. In doing so, they would remain relevant and valuable in this ever more challenging online landscape.
Here are some suggestions of what I would like to see happening on job boards to make them more interactive, more useful and essentially more social;
Job Ratings
Something as simple as “How relevant is this job to your search?”
This rating could then be used to inform and adapt future search results for either the same job seeker or other job seekers using the same search terms.
Recruiter Reviews
As much as it pains me to admit, reports of bad recruiter behaviour are rife. Have you ever applied for a job and received not so much as a ‘thanks but no thanks’ from the recruiter posting the opportunity on the job board?
It’s amazing that this doesn’t exist – eBay and the Amazon Marketplace have been allowing buyers to rate and leave reviews of sellers for years. What a great way to encourage better recruiter behaviour. The job board could also allow you to sort jobs by recruiter quality/popularity. Recruiters could also get badges for their company profile pages when they reach positive feedback milestones.
Forums or Questions
Either a forum or something along the lines of LinkedIn answers. An “Ask a recruiter” section could be very valuable with the ability for recruiters to build their reputations as experts in their field – especially if the answers could be rated and the best recognised.
Easy Sharing
Almost every job board allows you to email a job to a friend and most have some way to let you share on social media sites. This could be much more intelligent though, if job boards had their own URL shortening services, they could provide valuable feedback to recruiters about how their jobs had been shared and distributed.
Improved Advertiser Profiles
Allow Recruiters to build better profiles on job boards. Let them pull in their twitter stream, add their LinkedIn company page so that job seekers can see if they are already connected and promote all the good feedback that recruiter has received on the site from its users. If nothing else it will help keep job seekers in the domain of the job board rather than tempting them off to seek information on that recruiter from elsewhere on the web.
These things would allow job boards to provide higher quality, targeted opportunities to the right job seekers. They would also attract a lot more quality candidates – I know that I would choose a job board with these features over any other. This would allow them to remain valuable to recruiters and possibly deter recruiters of an unscrupulous nature, improving the experience for job seekers. A good thing all round, surely…
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I really like the retweet idea, if Twitter’s popularity and spread continues, this is a surefire way to increase the reach of a job ad to relevant passive candidates.
What about retweet to list? Not sure of the funtionality on this from Twitter’s perspective, but the new list feature enables you to categorise followers. If I see a great Marketing job, I could retweet this to my @kieronmayers/marketing list? Just a thought.
Hi Katherine
Great synopsis of candidate and recruiter centric thinking. My thoughts:
Reviews: Jobsite has used it to rate the recruitment company/job posters - but few others dared. The challenge, to me, of ratings is that it is tough to get all participants to actually make the ratings - leaving the chance that you get one-sided ratings. But, still better than nothing.
Ratings/matching: My ‘hot button’ - there is no reason to not include better matching technology to make all searches, for the job seeker and the candidate seeker, to have relevant matches.
Forums/questions. always a challenge for job boards - are they a job destination, or a ‘career portal’? Will job seekers spend the time on a job board to do the Q&A? Still would add value.
Sharing and profiles. Great ideas
Keep up the questioning of the industry!
Alan
Some good points raised, and I agree that Job Boards like ours (eatjobs.co.uk) will have a purpose for a long time to come, providing that we adapt in line with new technologies and trends, such as social media.
As much as Social Media sites can be used to attract candidates and view jobs, job boards have specialist functionality that cannot yet be matched.
Change is good, and we have to constantly adapt - but we hope our site will be advertising teaching and training jobs for a long time to come!