State
of the Art Job Boards
by Peter Weddle
Just
about everyone uses them these days. Job boards, I mean. Whether you’re
an in-house corporate recruiter, a staffing firm recruiter or an executive
search consultant, job boards are now an integral part of how our
jobs get done. But, are we making the best use of their services?
And no less important, what should we expect from the job boards we
do use? How do they stack up against the state-of-the-art in this
industry?
To answer these
questions, I asked our research team to analyze the features, services
and fees of the 350 recruitment sites we selected for inclusion
in our 2005/6 WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Web Sites. (The
book is available from our Web-site
catalog right now and will be in bookstores in about 6 weeks.)
This sample represents a good cross-section of the sites in all
segments of the industry:
# commercial general purpose recruitment portals, such as Monster.com,
Yahoo! HotJobs, TopUSAJobs, Best Jobs USA, and CareerBuilder.com;
# general purpose
career sites sponsored by newspapers, such as EmploymentGuide.com,
Workopolis, The New York Times Job Market and CareerJournal.com;
# commercial
niche recruitment portals, such as VetJobs.com, ConstructionJobs.com,
DICE, HireHealth.com, and Medzilla; and
# career sites
sponsored by associations and other affinity groups, including JSAJE
Plus, the joint job board of the alumni associations of the federal
service academies in the U.S., HRJobs, the job board of the Society
for Human Resource Management, and IEEE Job Site, the job board
of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
So, what is
the state-of-the-art among these job boards?
First, job boards
are no longer simply platforms for filling permanent positions.
According to our survey, 91% post part time openings, 85% post contract
jobs and 77% post consulting opportunities. In other words, today’s
job boards are “one-stop employment centers” where you
can source candidates for virtually any kind of workplace activity.
The convenience and capability of such resources could well affect
some of the major trends in contemporary workforce management. For
example:
# In a large and growing number of organizations, temporary workforce
management is now viewed as a supply chain optimization challenge.
As a consequence, it has been moved out of the HR Department and
into the hands of the Chief Financial Officer. Finance, after all,
knows how to cut budgets and minimize expenses. However, the ability
to piggyback temporary staffing onto permanent staffing—which
job boards can and do provide to HR Departments—not only saves
time and money, but it locates staffing in the corporate department
w to do it.
# Staffing firms,
of course, are the traditional source for much of the temporary
workforce. Does this expanding role of job boards eliminate the
need for them? Absolutely not. It does, however, change the value
proposition they offer to employers, and the best staffing firms
have already figured that out. They know that they have to provide
candidates other than those their clients can find online. Hence,
they must now become experts in (a) identifying which sites among
the 40,000 job boards will connect them to the best prospects for
each of their client’s openings and (b) building relationships
with those prospects so that they will consider the recruiter’s
opportunities even as they ignore everyone else’s.
Second, there
is a very clear hierarchy of value among the three major categories
of job boards. This value is determined by the caliber of the candidate
offered at a job board when compared to the price the site charges
a corporate or third party recruiter to gain access to those candidates.
At the top of this value chain are commercial niche sites. They
generally have very high caliber candidates in a specific field,
industry or geography and charge, on average, just $178 per posting.
Next in the chain are general purpose sites which generally have
high caliber candidates in a wide range of fields (but often fewer
candidates than a commercial niche site in any specific field) and
charge, on average, $182 per posting. And, last in the value chain
are association sites which have very high caliber candidates in
a specific field or industry, but charge, on average, $208, per
posting. If you have any doubt about this alignment, consider the
average number of job postings at each of the three categories:
# 6,371 postings at commercial niche sites
# 90,287 postings
at general purpose sites, and
# 516 postings
at association sites.
Further, for
the first time since we’ve been conducting our User’s
Choice Awards poll, not a single association made it into the winner’s
circle in 2005.
Finally, at
least a third of today’s job boards have forgotten about the
passive job seeker. Most passive job seekers (including most “A”
level performers) are, by definition, not looking for a job. That
means they are unlikely to have a resume to post in a resume database
or to use for applying to a job posting (on those rare occasions
when they do take a peek at what’s posted online). Despite
that reality, 33% of all job boards do not currently provide a way
for passive job seekers to fill out a profile that can be stored
in their “resume database.” They are, in effect, telling
these high quality prospects that they are persona non grata at
their site. To add injury to insult:
# only 66% of association sites and 70% of commercial niche sites
offer a confidentially feature in their resume database, and
# only two-thirds
of association sites and 81% of commercial niche sites offer a job
agent—the single most important job board service for passive
job seekers as it enables them to keep an eye on the job market
without doing any work or putting their confidentiality at risk.
General purpose
sites are much better in both instances, with 91% offering a confidentiality
feature in their resume databases and 98% offering a job agent.
Job boards are
only as useful as the services they offer, and the savvy recruiter
will always use those that offer the state-of-the-art.
There is a large
herd of dinosaurs among the employment sites on the Internet today.
You can spot these atavistic destinations by the services they offer
(and don’t) to job seekers. The dinosaurs act as the electronic
equivalent of a newspaper’s classified ads. Basically, they
post jobs (Help Wanted ads) and store resumes (Position Wanted ads)
for all the world to see. Even when they surround those two activities
with some content about resume writing and interviewing (as some
do), they still appeal only to those who are actively looking for
a job. Why does that make them dinosaurs? Because you and I are
fighting a War for the Best Talent, and the best talent is almost
always passive. Said another way, the people we most want to recruit
aren’t looking for a job. The only way they’re going to
visit an employment site, therefore, is if it protects their privacy
and offers them more than job search-related information.
Why does the
Best Talent worry about privacy? Because they are usually already
employed. They believe (often correctly) that responding to a job
posting or putting their resume into a site’s database is fraught
with risk, unless their confidentiality is protected. And there’s
the rub. According to our study:
# Only two-thirds of the employment sites sponsored by associations
offer a confidentially feature for those storing a resume in their
database.
# Commercial
niche sites aren’t much better with only 69% of those sites
providing such a capability.
Contrast that
with general purpose employment sites; a whopping 91% of them make
personal privacy an integral element of their resume database service.
But general purpose sites are a minority on the Web. The vast majority
of employment destinations are niche sites or sites affiliated with
associations, and a sizable number of them don’t provide the
privacy that passive job seekers—the majority of the Best Talent—want.
Similarly, the
Best Talent never looks for a job; they look for a career advancement
opportunity. They seek out (a) positions that will enable them to
probe and extend the limits of their expertise in their field and
(b) employers that will bring them together with other “A”
level performers and provide an environment for accomplishing important
and meaningful work. How do they identify such opportunities? There
are, of course, several ways:
# They network with their peers. The Best Talent is a collegial
bunch, and they strongly value interaction with and the counsel
of their peers. Yet, in our survey, only 23% of today’s employment
sites offer a listserv or discussion forum where the Best Talent
can congregate and exchange information.
# They try to
get to know themselves better. They want to understand what motivates
them to do their best work so they can position themselves for continued
success in the future. Yet, our study found that just 29% of employment
sites make any form of assessment instrument available to their
visitors.
What does all
this mean? Are job boards fated to go the way of dinosaurs? I think
so. But, in true Darwinian fashion, they will be replaced with a
more adaptable and nimble successor. In fact, this is already happening.
Fossilized job boards are giving way to vibrant “career portals”—sites
that serve people who aren’t looking for a job as well as those
who are. These hubs will be part university, part guild and part
watercooler, with a dash of craigslist thrown in for spice. Here’s
what I mean:
Part university:
a career portal will offer a wide range of online developmental
opportunities for those in a particular field. These programs, may
or may not be delivered by the portal itself, but they will provide
certifications and even degrees that are recognized and valued by
employers.
Part guild:
a career portal will provide credentialing for those in a particular
field. While that function has traditionally been the province of
associations, it can be just as credibly served by other organizations
in the future, especially if the alternatives are viewed by those
in the field as more up-to-date and useful in their careers.
Part watercooler:
a career portal will enable those in a particular field to interact
and communicate with one another on a regular basis. This feature
will not supplant real world meetings and social events, but it
will provide a regular and important supplement to those less frequent
occasions.
A dash of craigslist:
a career portal will integrate the three capabilities above to give
those in a particular field the craigslist-like experience of community.
Employers have opted out of their traditional role as the career
“home” for workers, and the online career portal will
take their place. The connection that workers once felt with their
fellow employees, they will now feel with those who are their friends
and colleagues online.
As is the case
with the Internet itself, the state-of-the-art in job boards changes
from moment-to-moment. What’s important for recruiters, therefore,
is to recognize the direction in which the best of these sites are
moving and to gauge the progress of any single job board against
that standard before investing in its services.
Reprinted
with permission from WEDDLE’s (www.weddles.com). All rights
reserved. WEDDLE’s
publishes the leading guide to Internet job boards and career portals.
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