When Job Boards Don’t Work

Often the easiest way to get the ball rolling as you seek to employ staff is to place an ad on popular Job Boards with the adage “Post and they will come”. However there are certain reasons why Job Boards simply don’t work. Here are three:

You’re Adwriting and Placement is Wrong

I often hear from Employers when their ad didn’t work. With the knowledge of candidate supply and demand within certain geographies sometimes this doesn’t ring true. So I look at their ad. Hello! There-in lies the reason.

Often well meaning managers post poorly worded, ill-structured ads with generic templates. First impressions are everything for the candidate market and it will take the more “desperate” of individuals to apply to something that, on the face, looks so bad. The process that goes through an applicant’s mind is “if this is how the company presents itself, what will it be like to work for”. Poorly worded advertisements lead to a confused audience. They don’t know what the role actually is or whether they are suitable. It’s too hard they simply don’t apply.

Secondly Job Boards have many classifications that you need to categorise your ad. You could have written the best ad but place it in the wrong category and this can blow your chance of honing the right audience. With geographies, industries, categories and classifications that make the permutation of where you can place an ad into the 1000’s you may find yourself putting the advertisement in front of the wrong audience. Before you choose categories on your Job Board, search the Job Board as if you were a Job-Seeker. Look until you find similar ads and check how previous advertisers have classified their advertisements. Look at the category and classification and select the same for yours. Then you can be confident you are putting the role in front of your target candidate audience.

You’re Seeking Individuals in a Skills Shortage Arena

There are many disciplines where we purely lack local talent. These people are already highly engaged with their current employer. Their employer knows the specialisation is rare and treats their employees in this category extremely well. These people won’t be looking at job boards purely because they don’t need to. If, by chance, they left their employer they know they could get another role in their industry tomorrow by making three calls. Why would you go through the pain and effort of applying on-line if you knew it was that easy to land your next job?

The better way to gain candidates in this category is to immerse yourself in their specialisation and ask for referrals of people who may be on the look out. This is a complex and arduous process requiring company and org chart research and mapping and then making direct approaches. It’s not easy and here you may seek out assistance from Executive Search Consultants to find the right individuals in the end.

You seek Specialists

There are those roles that the Specialist has been educated to look elsewhere in finding opportunities and so a Job Board would not feature in their search. If Job Boards are not their currency you need to determine which media channels are.

A friend of mine who is a Psychologist said he used to advertise in the newspaper for Psychologists, but he found it extremely expensive to source candidates this way. He then went onto job boards, but this was too broad and he attracted Psychologists the world over.  Now his proven channel is to advertise in industry magazines read by Psychologists. By doing this he targets his exact micro-niche of candidates.

Moving into the IT, Web and Software space, jobs are now being presented in chat rooms where specialists in this discipline gather. Again, these individuals don’t need to move away from the chat room to be presented with a career opportunity.

In job board world not all roles are equal and nor do they yield similar response rates. Do your research, find out if jobseekers are plentiful on the job board you are considering – call an Account Manager and get the scoop. If you’re in skills shortage or specialist arenas you really need to weigh up if a job board is a worthwhile channel at all when it comes to sourcing talent.

Article written by Maree Herath, Executive Search specialist and Director of Harvest Recruitment and Harvest Human Resources.