Job Boards Aren’t Working. Here’s what to do about it.

Job boards are cheap, easy and reliable, yes? Well if you’re an HR guru with a focus on recruitment, the chances are you know that’s not quite true. In reality, they can lead us on a merry dance of false promises and further expense. Job boards are prolific, but your recruitment needs to be specific. So, what’s the problem? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Job Boards – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

As recruiters, job boards lure us in. They are there when and where we are, at a low cost, and usually bring a great army of candidates marching into your inbox. You don’t need to be an advertising pro, or have a budget to match.

They are also where candidates are. Joe Bloggs looking for a new job will likely stumble onto, wade through, and respond to job boards at some point, whether they are a newbie graduate or a director. It’s often the starting block of the candidate’s recruitment journey. This is particularly true for finance and HR talent which ambles across a range of industries and can be either specialist or generalist.

Job boards are fast. There’s no waiting for 9am to get in touch with an agency. There’s no waiting for a publication date. Simply, pop in your requirements, hit ‘post’, and sit back with a cuppa waiting for the CVs to roll in.

So, on the face of it, all looks great. Well, not quite.

Job boards quickly become unstuck as a recruitment solution when we dig a little under the surface. Let’s look at those good points again, and this time let’s be a little more realistic:

• Cost: See that advertised job board listing price? Now turn your back on it. Why? Because it’s completely and utterly unrealistic about how much filling that vacancy will cost you. Yes, it’s a nice quantifiable cost. However, it doesn’t show some crucial things. It doesn’t show the intense resources you need for the fact it’ll be you doing 99% of the legwork of sifting through copious amounts of applications, short-listing, and interviewing, and possibly recruiting the wrong person and having to start again. Your time is money. Even less quantifiable, but even more important, it doesn’t cover the value added that your business receives when you receive that one golden employee who never happened to be on that job board in the first place, in fact, they were passively bumbling along in another job not looking.
• Advertising Skills: No one is saying you need to be a word whizz with a spot of graphic design knowledge on the side. However, formulating a vacancy advert serves a very important function behind the scenes: it gets you thinking clearly about what you truly need, and what the ideal candidate looks like. If you’re not clear on what you’re looking for, neither will your applicants be.
• Candidates: In reality, yes there are some great candidates out there on job boards who would be perfect for your role. However, finding them is like searching for a needle in a haystack. There are a plethora of job boards, mostly far too generic, and each one has a population of candidates to rival a capital city. In addition, matching candidates to positions requires matchmaking skills and a good deal of detective work – not something the average job board or recruiter can do. Then there are our passive candidate friends: the ones who aren’t actually looking but could be wooed and moved for your perfect position.
• Speed: Yes, we know you need that position filled yesterday. However, posting on the job board is just one small facet of the recruitment process. Rush it, and you make the next steps more cumbersome. List your vacancy in the right place, at the right time, and the rest of the process is streamlined. To do this, you need a human who knows your field inside out and has their finger on the pulse – both to get the right information from you, and to hunt down that awesome talent.

Then we have another couple of little snags when it comes to using job boards.

Job boards aren’t exactly best buds with social media. Yet, you need to be actively using social media in your recruitment strategies. If you’re not, you’re not keeping pace with your competitors, who will be doing just that. Social media can increase candidate applications by as much as 50%. Your recruitment strategy needs to be harnessing the power of social media.

Also given a helpful boost by social media, and nearly impossible to convey over a standard job board, is your employer branding. Post on a job board and you become a grey generic listing. Yet, for Millennials and Generation Z, employer branding sways 40% of candidates towards who they want to work for. Employer branding needs to be so closely integrated with your recruitment process that you can’t tell one from the other.

Job boards aren’t looking so good now after all are they? That’s all well and good, but what can we actually do about it?

Be Recruitment Savvy

Unless you happen to have a time-creation machine on your hands, you’re not suddenly going to be able to take the approach needed for each and every vacancy you have, much less have the resources needed. For finance and HR roles in particular, where you’ve got a large pool of potential combined with the nuances of your own industry and business, it would be an incredibly tall order. You’re looking at highly targeted detective work, filtering, and matching.

Behind every job board there is something of value – the database. This is the resource you need to tap in to, with the perfect Find formula, without the white noise surrounding it. The way to do that is to choose a recruitment consultant who can access the gold whilst sifting the sand and sludge: a tech-savvy strategist with their finger on the pulse, who takes from job boards what they can, but then hones in, listens to your requirements, boosts your employer branding, and uses a multi-channel approach.

Instead of fifty applications with a handful of so-so potentials, you’re instead facing a powerful handful of genuine choice: candidates who have been carefully matched to suit your business, and are ready to add value.

Talent for Tomorrow, Starting Today

At QPLtalent we provide the recruitment solution you need, a local recruitment consultancy offering a full recruitment cycle for permanent, temporary and contract staff: Affordable solutions that save you time, energy, stress, and money in the long run. You receive pre-qualified candidates from a network of talent, bringing you genuine choice in your recruitment, and a solution that works for each and every vacancy. And we’re just as easy as a job board to get started. Simply get in touch by calling 02476 99 2004, or via our webform, and we’ll be in touch within the hour. Yes that’s right – faster than your average job board. 

GET A COPY OF OUR eBook How to Build An Employer Brand That Attracts Talent You Want CLICK HERE