The present-day job market is characterized by numerous trends like the automation of low-skill jobs, an increase in demand for high-skill labor, and diminishing employee tenures and hiring cycles. To adapt to these trends, employers are constantly revisiting their recruitment strategies. However, the one constant through all these changes is the significance of job boards as a channel between recruiters and job seekers. But that does not mean that you as a job board owner can rest easy and get complacent about your role in the job market. That’s because the competition among job boards and other sources of jobs is as stiff as ever. And to stave off and rise above your competition, it is essential that you become a trusted and reliable job board for recruiters despite the changes in their recruitment strategies. And to be able to align with these strategies, it is important to be cognizant of them to make modifications to the way you operate your job board.
Programmatic advertising
The most common recruiting strategy used by employers across the world is the incorporation of programmatic advertising. Finding qualified workers with the ability to meet organizations evolving technical needs is getting increasingly hard. With the continued proliferation of technologies like AI and data analytics, the need for workers specializing in these fields is also growing. Similarly, jobs requiring excellent interpersonal skills are also rising in value and demand. In order to secure the best workers from this shrinking pool of candidates, businesses are now resorting to highly targeted methods of reaching these candidates, one of them being programmatic job advertising.
Programmatic job advertising is the method of showing candidates highly relevant job postings data based on their personal information. Using an individual’s browsing data and other details collected from different sources such as website form data and cookies, software algorithms can determine the kind of ads they are most likely to engage with. By doing so, employers can ensure that they reach their most ideal candidates without having to spend a lot on their hiring campaigns.
How can job boards respond to this? In order to compete with programmatic job advertising, job boards must offer employers what they are seeking from programmatic advertising — focused targeting of candidates. Using tools to find accurate matches between candidates and jobs, job postings portals can ensure that they offer the same value to employers as programmatic advertising. To achieve this, job boards can use to classify their job data as well as candidates based on skills, location, education, and experience. By doing so, job boards can find the perfect candidate-job match and make it easy for employers to find the candidates they need.
Talent pool building
Since finding the right talent to fill jobs is getting hard, employers are resorting to accumulating information pertaining to candidates even when they are not actively hiring for anyone. By doing so, they can ensure that they have a large enough pool of qualified candidates to choose from when they need to hire. This pool does not necessarily have to be composed of active job seekers. In fact, a majority of the candidate pools built by employers can consist of passive job seekers. However, unless a candidate aspires to work with a particular company at some point in their career, they don’t keep coming back to visit the employer’s career site to check for new job postings.
To respond to this recruitment trend, job boards must aid the employers in their objective of having a well-replenished talent pool. And how can job boards do that? By offering services and features that go beyond those of traditional job boards. For instance, features like a resume or portfolio builder, courses on basic skills, tests on those skills, informative content like blogs on career and soft skills can help in retaining job board users. Since such features provided add value to your job board users, they are more likely to have you at the top of their mind when they want to look for jobs. This will lead to them being a part of your talent pool, and consequently, your clients’ talent pools.
It is important to note that providing value-added services will only work if your core offering is up to desired standards. And that means always providing job seekers with top-notch job data on a consistent basis. To do so, it is important that you automate your job sourcing tasks with the help of advanced job crawling solutions. By using such a solution, you can rest assured that your job board is populated with the most accurate and up-to-date job data and will continue to do so. You can then focus on building on this through your value-adding initiatives and marketing campaigns.
Employer branding
In order to attract the best talent, businesses have realized that it is important to be proactive in the way they position themselves in the eyes of their potential employees. Thus, they are paying increasing attention to employer branding initiatives and campaigns to supplement other recruitment strategies. In addition to the marketing and communication campaigns undertaken by employers, the ease of applying to a specific company also plays a significant role in how candidates view that company. For instance, if the application process of an employer is more streamlined and simple as compared to that of the others, candidates will have a more favorable view of that employer.
While job boards cannot directly help job board owners in terms of employer branding, what they can provide employers is with the ability to make their job application processed as streamlined and as simplified as possible. The easiest thing you can do to achieve this is to ensure that all your job postings and ‘Apply’ buttons lead directly to the relevant job page on the employer’s career site or their ATS platform. Or you can go one step further and integrate your job board platform with your clients’ ATSs or any other recruitment systems they might use, by using a job board API.
Social recruiting
Social media and search engines are becoming increasingly popular among employers as hiring channels. Professional networking platforms have also become a preferred medium for employees to reach out to potential hires. Social media and professional networking platforms provide employers with the opportunity to engage and interact with candidates in a more open manner, giving them more insights into whether a candidate would be a cultural fit for their organization or not. This makes hiring even easier for employers, as they will have a clear picture of who they are interviewing before they make a long-term hiring decision.
Job boards can emulate the features of social media and professional networking platforms by providing your users with an open community to interact with each other and exchange ideas. They can also enable these users to create public profiles and allow individual users to connect with each other. By fostering such a community, you can ensure that their users keep coming back and spend more time on your job board. In order to optimize your job board and specific job postings for search engines, it is important to tag your job data with appropriate keywords. By doing so, these jobs will become visible on the search result pages for the relevant search terms.
By adapting your job board operations to align with these recruitment strategies, you can maximize the likelihood of you becoming the most preferred job board for recruiters. As a result, you can ensure that your job board stands the test of time, even through periods of transition and change like the one we’re witnessing now.
