Employees in an organization drive its values, goals, and legacy. For a strongly founded venture, of any nature, hiring the right kind of employees is a must. So, companies invest a lot of time and resources in hiring a talented bunch of candidates. The recruitment team is always on the lookout for hiring candidates with the most niche skills, either through local job postings or through digital advertising. The idea is to hire candidates who will contribute to both, personal and organizational success. The number of job seekers in the market, however, exceeds the number of vacancies available with companies. This demand and supply mismatch make advertising on job boards and through newspaper classifieds helpful, bringing vacancies and candidates closer. The modern-day job boards we see today have come from the initial newspaper classifieds. There was a time when people would opt for newspapers to check the classifieds section. The offline job advertisements were unique in their own style, with crisp content and a wide outreach. Classifieds were the best source of reaching out to the local candidates, quickly and economically.
But, with digitization, the classifieds gradually became obsolete, and digital job adverting platforms started gaining popularity among recruiters, employers, and candidates. Classifieds evolved into digital classifieds, with local job postings reaching the Internet and the television. And this went on for a while till globalization made its way into the economy. Now, companies started expanding their boundaries and began looking for talent, worldwide. The need to advertise job listings globally gave rise to job boards that used the Internet, ensuring that job seekers in every corner of the world would see both, the local job postings and the job opportunities across the globe.
Why recruiters moved local job postings from classifieds to job boards
Job boards act as the professional networking tool between a candidate and a company to find the right match for each other. With the flexibility to customize the search features and the ease of accessibility from anywhere and from any portable platform (read mobiles, laptops, and tablets), job boards offer the following advantages over classifieds, which made recruiters shift their focus to them:
· Extending to a wider audience
The basic idea behind advertising is to let people know about your product and services. In this regard, while a classified may help in reaching out to people, its scope is quite limited. The circulation limits of a newspaper or flier confine the job classifieds to people within a certain geography, city, or town. However, job boards have an expansive reach that is not limited by geographical boundaries. Hosted on the World Wide Web, job boards can be accessed by anyone from any part of the world. It was with this in mind, that recruiters opted for job boards for a company’s local job postings. Be it a marketing job, an acting gig, or an open baker’s position in a local bakery, job boards have current and active databases across the world, for all career levels and industry domains. Thus, a company gets more exposure, not only in terms of recognition but also in its talent hunt. The comprehensive search-and-find feature that comes with job boards helps a job seeker to streamline his job search with respect to location, seniority level, and skills expected.
· Finding the right candidate
Brian Tracy has said, ‘‘the smartest business decision you can make is to hire qualified people. Bringing the right people on board saves you thousands, and your business will run smoothly and efficiently.”
The higher the exposure to a local job posting, better the quality of applicant entries. With a wider reach, the number of applicants applying to a job listing increases, thus bringing worldwide talent to a company. This way companies have access to a versatile profile of job seekers. One of the biggest reasons why recruiters turned to job boards to hire their workforce is the numerous and varied class of candidates they get to screen and assess before making a choice.
· Filtering with sophisticated tools
As the job industry evolved, job boards followed the evolution too. Job boards added the most advanced and state-of-the-art features for both, employers and candidates to leverage. These modern-day job boards do not simply act like a notice board for jobs. The boards help companies with the initial candidate screening and filtering process. With sophisticated algorithms that match jobs to candidates, based on the keywords entered by the employer during his candidate search, the job boards filter out the applicant resumes and forward the most relevant ones to the company. Some job boards, with their applicant tracking systems, facilitate a smoother interaction between the end parties. Email notification, updates on new jobs, various job categories and sub-categories available, and social media integration all aid in quick and active communication between the company and the candidate via a job board. By facilitating all this, job boards enable a ‘modern’ recruitment industry.
But, are job boards doing enough?
The benefits mentioned above have undoubtedly changed the way the job industry recruits today. However, in a Global Job Board Trends survey by Job Doctor, that assessed nearly 211 job boards across America, it was found that about 32% of the job boards were not tracking the applications for paid postings on their sites. If the paid postings are not well received by a job board, then it is quite reasonable to ask – “are job boards actually doing enough to aid the endeavors of the recruitment industry?”
Some factors that may be affecting a job board’s performance are:
- The broad reach of a job board brings to a recruiter’s table multiple candidate profiles from across the world. But, from this vast pool of applications, there might be very few applications that might actually fit the job requirements. With millions of applications for a single local job posting, the companies gradually get lenient with their screening policies. While the initial applications are severely tested, the later ones undergo lax assessment, thus resulting in a company overlooking some real talent.
- A lot of candidates apply to jobs only to check their market value. Because the first step of the screening involves just the resume, companies are not able to recognize the worthy candidates from the ones resorting to a trial-and-error method in their job hunt.
- Another aspect where job boards falter is the initial screening process they employ for the resumes. Job boards that integrate with a company’s application tracking system have to filter out the resumes based on the company policy. This leaves very little room for flexibility in matching the local job postings to a candidate’s job search. The rigidity can affect the number of vacancies filled over time by a job board.
- Job boards are not a company’s first option for recruitment. Most of the companies prioritize their job portals for candidate search before resorting to job boards for help. This causes a delay in posting the latest job openings on a job board. Top Echelon’s State of the Industry Report revealed that a majority of the job seeking results comes from referrals from within the company. Nearly 43.6 % of the talent was hunted down from references while job boards made it to the last of the list with a mere 9.5% contribution.
- As mentioned before, job boards have a wide reach. However, many boards have their preferences set to filter results based on the prominent cities in a country. A lot of famous job sites exclude small towns and cities that do not call home to multinational companies or offer sophisticated job profiles. This approach may not always end up with good results and restricts a job board’s scope.
- Another major factor that affects the efficiency of a job board is the internal framework it works on. There have been many instances where the job board’s website breaks down due to data overload. And then servicing and updating the website stops the traffic on it, thus affecting its performance.
A job board acts a listing board for companies to put their local job postings. There are very few websites that perform job crawling and aggregation to scout the Web for the latest and most niche job postings. As it can be cumbersome for a job board to shift its focus from listing jobs to hunting them in the first place, job boards must depend on premium job servicing tools that will elevate the board’s performance, while achieving other tasks of job scraping, wrapping, and aggregating.
In conclusion, we see that while job boards do serve recruiters in reaching out to a wider candidate audience, they lack in many aspects still. But, with premium job wrapping solutions like Propellum to improve a job board’s infrastructure and working, job boards can easily make up for the lag. Job boards have been evolving over the years to adapt to the dynamics and changes of the job market, but the fact that job boards still haven’t gone obsolete says a lot about how the change in focus from the classifieds to the job boards has proved significantly beneficial to both, the companies and the candidates. Therefore, job boards must now take their evolution to the next level with automated job wrapping services.