This is a guest post written for us by Andrew Mace, Director of Roc Search, a specialist IT and Engineering recruitment company, as part of our Recruiting Weekly series, where recruiters who work at the coal face on a week-in week-out basis share their expertise. Andrew asks Why are job boards so boring?!
Working for a Recruitment company that spends £100,000’s on advertising with Job Boards each year my statement might sound counter-intuitive… However, if you think about it your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds are all filled with short videos or well-designed graphics; so why haven’t job boards caught up with the rest of the market?
Job boards charge a high price to advertise boring-looking text adverts with, at best, your company logo (which you have to pay extra to include in most cases) and that’s it.
Unemployment is at an all-time low and confidence in the job market is high, demand for passive candidates is on the increase and applications to most job boards is down. So, what are the job boards going to do about it? Invest in an app, lol?!?!?!
They need to make the investment in providing recruiters and businesses the ability to include videos in our adverts. That way you can really show people what your company/client’s company is like. A frequently quoted statistic from Forrester Research that one minute of video content holds the same value as 1.8 million words.
It’s over to you Job Boards…..
PS to prove his point Andrew has produced this blog post in a video format for us too:
Hi Andrew, this is a great observation. I think job boards are moving in this direction, but it does actually become a barrier for a vast majority of customers who don’t have the content to maximise the value they can get from media-rich company profiles.
At Hunted.com all recruitment company profiles are media first. In the recruitment industry it’s the company culture and the team that really make a difference for people looking at recruitment jobs rather than the description of what a recruitment consultant does – like companies post on other job boards!
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Jack, this is not a great observation by Andrew at all. He’s used the less-than-thrilling IT and engineering industries to generically dump all job boards in the same box. Our site accomodates video and most other promotional services and had done for ages. Often it is the lack of recruiter creativity and apathy towards job promotion that it is the issue.
Absolutely agree Simon. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes that a lot of recruiters and certainly candidates don’t realise. If a recruiter is willing to invest they can have hero and background imagery, corporate profiles, streaming video or even a map feature showing where their office is located….all on the same job ad! Facebook is for watching videos of random entertainment or amusing posts. Job boards are for productive, relevant recruitment content.