The seamless worldwide connectivity offered by the internet initially came as a blessing for job boards. But the continued growth of the web and social media may now lead to the decline of job boards. That’s because people are beginning to use social media for everything. That includes finding and applying for jobs.
After all, what better way for employers to get to know potential employees than their social media activity. The same applies to job seekers as well — they can use the social media pages of potential employers to assess their work culture. Social recruiting also offers other benefits to job seekers. For instance, it gives them a more convenient mode of entry into an organization’s inner circles, giving them access to the best job opportunities as soon as they become available.
In short, social recruiting helps employers as well as it does job seekers. As a result, social media is growing as a useful recruiting tool and an alternative to the traditional US job feeds. However, it will be hard for social recruiting to take over the recruitment industry completely. That’s because finding jobs through social media may not always be an effective method for job seekers. It may not apply to all kinds of jobs in all industries. And it may not work all the time.
Job boards are still in contention for being the go-to source of jobs for job seekers. However, they need to use the right tools like advanced job feeds aggregators to compete with the emerging trend of social recruiting.
The rise of social recruiting
Social recruiting is growing in adoption across the world. That’s because everyone — including both the employed and those seeking employment — uses social media. According to studies, at least 79% of the US population has a social media profile. Most of these people, at least occasionally, post something about their current employers. Such posts are often used by potential job applicants to find a job that fits their preferences.
Similarly, employers can easily assess the cultural fit of potential employees. They can do so by analyzing the social media behavior of individual candidates. In fact, social media presence and activity is becoming an effective way for job seekers to get noticed and hired. Employers are increasingly relying on social media to assess, filter out, and shortlist candidates. It is helping them hire more qualified and culturally-suited candidates within shorter timelines than other recruitment mediums.
Now, it may seem like there is no downside to social recruiting. Does that mean that job boards are done for? Should they accept their impending decline and prepare to meet their fate?
The answer is no.
As perfect as social recruiting may seem to employers and recruiters, solely relying on social recruiting is not ideal. That’s because, not all kinds of vacancies can be filled by hiring employees through social media. For instance, not all entry level roles can be filled by social recruiting. Social recruiting can, however, be extremely useful to hire people with experience as well as to find people for managerial positions. Also, not all non-HR employees can be active on social media for long enough to form connections with potential hires and refer new hires. Thus, although social media may gain preference over job boards in many cases, a significant chunk of unfilled vacancies will be filled through job boards.
The need for job boards to evolve
The only difference that social recruiting would make is adding to the competition in the recruitment industry. As a job board, you must evolve to offer features that will enable you to compete with social media sites.
Job boards can try to incorporate elements of social recruiting into their user experience (UX). For instance, you can create different pages for different employers on your job board to display all their available jobs. You can embed feeds from the social media pages (like Twitter) of these companies to give job seekers a glimpse of the work culture.
You can focus on the advantages that job boards can provide over social media sites, and improve these aspects. For instance, social media networks (except for professional networking sites like LinkedIn), do not provide the feature of automated job aggregation. Social recruiting requires people from companies to actively ask their acquaintances and connections for referrals. Job boards can overcome this hurdle by using technologies like job feeds aggregators.
Using job feeds aggregators, job boards automatically gather job postings from different online sources. This process requires no data entry and manual effort. Hence, job boards can operate on a much larger scale than social media platforms. While social media platforms wait for their users to post jobs, job boards, using job feeds aggregators, can gather a larger number of job postings automatically. To be able to compete with social recruiting, job board owners must use premium job feeds aggregators to collect job postings.
An automated job feeds aggregator can give job boards a constant supply of updated job data. This job data can be sourced directly from employer sites and link directly back to them. Thus, your users will have a much more structured way of applying to jobs. This enables you to stand out from social sites that generally don’t have a standard way to apply for jobs.
The role of premium job feeds aggregators
Using job feeds aggregators, job boards can ensure that they have more jobs on their site than any social media platform. They can ensure that the job data is checked for quality before being added to the job board database. Any job postings with missing bits of information and search tags will be excluded. Similarly, jobs that are expired or removed by the employer will also be filtered out. This can make the information provided by your job board more consistent. Your users will have an easy time browsing through the job listings and sorting them according to their preferences. As a result, users will prefer to look for jobs on your site instead of their social networks.
Using premium job feeds aggregators and like Propellum’s job feed services can ensure that you have everything it takes to compete with social media sites. Propellum’s proprietary job feed technology which is capable of processing millions of jobs per minute will ensure that your job board can scale as high as you and your users need. You can even customize Propellum’s job feed service to your specific needs and niche. Propellum’s tools can be configured to aggregate data from specific sources or to collect only specific types of jobs. Just mention any specific geographic location or tag and watch Propellum’s tool accurately find all the jobs that fit your criteria. All this will be done within minutes without you having to spend any time on quality control. Thus, despite the rise of social recruiting, your job board can still ensure it retains and even grows its user base.
