In recent years, recruitment automation software has become a quintessential element of job boards’ and recruiters’ toolboxes. Your job board platform most likely uses some form of the recruitment automation tool that carries out tasks like crawling the internet for jobs and posting these jobs on your job portals. If you have a premium recruitment automation software, it can enable you to automate the entirety of your job board operations, by automating tasks such as:
- finding job postings from different sources,
- analyzing these job postings for validity,
- filtering out invalid and low-quality jobs,
- repackaging job data into a consistent and custom format,
- posting the job to a job board platform, and
- updating or removing the job posting when necessary.
Such tools make your job board operations efficient by minimizing operational costs and labor requirements. They also help you offer quality service to your clients, i.e., the employers, in a way that justifies your job board pricing. However, getting job board automation tools that offer such broad functionality can cost you a pretty penny. And by cost, we mean more than just the one-time upfront cost you pay to get an automation solution. There are other non-obvious costs you might be paying by owning automation tools for your job board throughout the ownership cycle, such as:
Cost of customizing your job board platform
If you want a customized automation solution that meets your specific job board requirements to help you differentiate your service from your competition, then most likely you’ll have an automation solution built just for you. Customizing automation solutions involves tailoring the tool to your specific niche, using unique ways of formatting job data, and building a business-specific user interface. All these customizations will lead to added costs when you first implement a solution, as well as when you need to add customizations with changes in your job board strategy.
Cost of operations and quality
Depending on how versatile and multifunctional your job board is, your operation costs may vary. For every function that your automation software doesn’t quite ‘automate’, you are continuously paying in terms of man-hours. For instance, you may use an automation tool that only crawls the web to find jobs and fill your internal database, leaving other tasks — like performing quality control and posting — to your team. If your team spends a considerable amount of time on repetitive automatable tasks, then you incur opportunity costs, i.e., you miss out on opportunities to utilize your team for more creative and value-enhancing tasks. Also, if your software does not guarantee the quality, you may have to incur extra costs to ensure the quality of your job data.
Cost of maintenance and upgrades
Software tools require regular updates and maintenance in order to run uninterrupted at maximum efficiency. Not updating and maintaining your automation software can not only lead you to lag in terms of quality of output in the form of bugs and glitches but also lead to quantitative losses. That’s because the longer you choose not to update your automation tools with improvements in the code, you are potentially missing out on opportunities to make your job board perform better. This may lead to you losing your competitiveness among other job boards that incorporate upgrades as and when they become available. And performing these upgrades and maintenance activities may incur recurring costs if your vendor does not offer you free updates.
As a job board platform owner, it is important to be cognizant of these lesser-known costs associated with job board operations. Now that you are aware of your costs, you can ask yourself how much you are paying for your recruitment automation software. You should also ask yourself whether what you’re paying is worth what you’re getting in return. If you aren’t satisfied with the answer you arrive at, then you know it’s time to upgrade to a software service that gives you end-to-end job board automation, free updates and maintenance, and most importantly — assurance on quality!
