Advertising on online job boards can be difficult, time-consuming and as a result stressful, and these problems are prone to grow if you are looking after several different contracts at once, let alone one or two.
According to Recruitics, advertising on job boards is one of the three most common ways to advertise jobs online. The traditional approach involves recruiters paying a flat fee to post jobs on vendor websites (e.g. Monster, Reed, Glassdoor) for a specific period of time (typically for 30 days). Although this may sound simple enough, it is the measuring of job boards that makes trying to manage this method especially tricky. Unlike PPC (pay-per-click) job advertising where recruiters only pay when an interested candidate clicks on the job they are posting online, and thus the performance of the posts are measured for you, traditional job board advertising does not have the ability to calculate the rate of clicks a job post receives. On top of this, it does not have the ability to track candidate “drop-off”. This tends to occur when a candidate clicks on the job advertisement, reads the job description, and then clicks off because it does not interest them. The only notification that can be provided is when a candidate has actually applied for a job (Conversion). It is for these reasons why job board advertising is deemed the “post, pray and spray” approach. There is no way of measuring the performance of the job advertisements on each vendor’s website, so you just have to hope for the best.
In a nutshell, job board advertising comes with its cons, but if managed correctly it can add some value to your business: as outlined in ‘Job Boards; Do They Still Work?’, LinkedIn reported that 46% of all hires come from job boards in 2017. In this post, Wave explore the three biggest challenges that recruiters face when trying to look after multiple vendor contracts, in which we also provide some advice on how to tackle these issues.
Challenge 1: Job boards require a lot of TLC
As previously mentioned, if you invest in job board advertising, you must be prepared to also dedicate some of your time to look after each post. This can evidently be a huge challenge when you take into consideration the many other recruitment activities you have to carry out every day.
Our advice is to invest in a job board management system. Such systems enable recruiters to look after all of their job posted in one place. WaveTrackR is a prime example of this.
Challenge 2: How can I eradicate “post, pray and spray”?
“Job boards are useless because of their ‘post, pray and spray’ approach.” This is one of the biggest complaints that recruiters have with job boards, and it is undoubtedly a challenge that many would like to eradicate.
Wave, has been working within the recruitment advertising and media buying world for best part of 20 years now. We understand paying for a contract for a job board that is not generating quality applications is a total waste of money.
Rather than relying on the job boards themselves to tell you that their site is the best, companies can take advantage of the data-driven analytics from recommendations generators, which analyse which job board is performing the best.
Challenge 3: How can I get the best ROI (Return-On-Investment) on each contract?
This ties in the Challenge 2: getting the best value for what you spend is an important part of job advertising and can be an on-going battle.
For one, make sure you have chosen the right job board to start an annual contract with. This can be done by contacting the supplier beforehand, and asking them questions (e.g. In accordance to “x” sector and “x” location, how much traffic does your site receive?) If the job board you have chosen does not receive a lot of traffic, then it may be time for you to cut your losses and invest in another.
Managing job board contracts can be a daunting task, but with the help of new technological services, there is the chance to relieve some of that anxiety and make use of the benefits that come with this job board advertising method.
