Selecting a Job Board
Recruitment Advertisement
Choosing the right job board or combination of job boards is vital to ensuring that you attract the right employees to your vacancy. However, there are thousands of job boards to choose from, all offering a surprising complexity of USP’s, service, statistics and target audiences. It can leave even the most experienced business owner or HR professional confused and bewildered.
At Flat Fee Recruiter, we spend a huge proportion of our resource and time on researching, trailing and tracking the success of every job board and combination of job boards that we use (and subsequently don’t use). After all, our service is focused on ensuring you have a selection of quality applicants whom you can interview. If we can’t attract these applicants for our customers, then we don’t have a service and certainly won’t have a business for very long either.
Although it is increasingly uncommon for the SME, you may still decide to advertise direct with a job board. To help you choose the right one, we have put together a 5 step guide which should assist you in ploughing through the fog of job boards.
Step 1 – Think like a jobseeker
Before you start to analyse all the different services on offer, put your job seeker hat on. What would you do if you were looking for your job? Where would you start your search and what keywords would you use? Most applicants start their job search in Google (or a similar search engine) and will probably use the job title, location and the word “job/s” in their string. Test it and consider both the paid for and natural listings you get. You now have the starting point for your research.
Step 2 –Identify your top 3-5 job boards
There will probably be pages and pages of results. Unfortunately, job boards will be mixed up with social media sites, job board aggregators and recruitment agencies.
It may take a few clicks and a little bit of time, but if you start with a target list of at least 3-5 genuine job board sites you can then achieve step 3 much more cohesively. Hopefully, you may already know some of the websites from your own experience to make the process quicker.
Step 3 – Make a comparison list
Once you have decided on the job board sites to research, creating a simple comparison list will enable you to isolate the best job board to advertise on much more effectively.
When creating your list, think about what you want to find out from each supplier. For example percentage of the target audience and who uses the site, how does the site perform, how do they generate their applicants, up to date testimonials, traffic performance, ease of publishing, branding options, enhanced listing options, CV database search, the breakdown of database and of course the cost/s.
Much of your research may have been done online to this point; however, we would recommend that you have a conversation with each job board too. This will also give you a feel as to how they work, the kind of service you could expect, the knowledge of the account manager in making your job advert perform and your confidence in the performance of each job board. Don’t forget to record your results on the comparison checklist too as it is very easy to get confused.
Step 4 – Site performance
The bottom line for most companies advertising on job boards is to fill their vacancy. However, the ROI achieving this can be calculated with a cost-per-hire ratio. It may be difficult to determine this at the onset of choosing a job board and with no live and relevant data to analyse at this stage, we would recommend that you start with estimating a cost-per-application. A job board should be able to report the average number of applications they receive per vacancy. In some cases, you may be able to break this down to region or industry sector.
Step 5 – Narrow down your options
OK, so you now have at least 3 -5 sites to choose from. You should be able to narrow down to 1 or 2 preferred suppliers by viewing your comparison document along with the cost-per-application figure and your budget.
At this stage, you have now done all you can to find the most appropriate and effective job board/s for your vacancy. The next big challenge is about to begin… making your advert perform and deliver!
Articles that will help you with the next stage:
- SEO: How to Get Your Job Advert Higher in Job Board Search Results
- All You Need to Know About Writing Job Board Adverts
- Make Your Job Advert Sparkle