Category Archives: Job Boards

One Job Board to Rule Them All? Hint: It’s not Facebook.

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Like many people in HR/recruiting, I recently read about Facebook making the jump into offering searchable jobs.

What took them so long anyway?

Apparently, Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, and the board will aggregate the job postings of third-party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users.

This comes after Facebook announced late last year that they would be entering into a partnership with the U.S. Labor Department to provide job-hunting resources to explore and develop systems where jobs can be posted and delivered “virally” through Facebook at no charge.

Some people think that Facebook offering job board functionality will positively affect the U.S. economy and job marketplace.

No offense to Facebook, but I’m happy to say we don’t need them to launch a job board to help put America to work.

I believe there is something that the United States government (or any country’s government, for that matter) can do to facilitate putting more people to work, without the help of any other site or company, let alone Facebook. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong with Job Boards?

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What’s wrong with job boards?

Nothing, in my opinion.

However, from the ridiculous overabundance of articles, comments, and recruiting conference content that trashes job boards as if they are the worst source of hire, I am obviously in the clear minority.

I continue to see and hear well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the value of the job boards is waning and that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and it hasn’t slowed down.

Because there is such a strong belief that job boards somehow only offer low quality candidates, I am taking the time to offer a different point of view, as well as leverage statistics to prove that the job boards have the same percentage of “A” players as LinkedIn or any other source of hire.

News Flash: Job Boards Still Very Much Alive

Weren’t the job boards supposed to die, like, 5 years ago?

Funny how that didn’t happen.

It so didn’t happen that they are responsible for more hires than any other source other than referrals.

The most recent CareerXRoads Source of Hire Report showed that job boards are still pretty effective, weighing in at the #2 spot.

 

 

The facts do not support the belief that job boards are an “ineffective” source of hire.

As you can see, job boards also solidly crush social media as a source of hire, which I am sure most people find a tough pill to swallow, especially given that “social recruiting” is supposed to be a magical solution to all hiring troubles.

Um, wasn’t social media supposed to kill the job boards?

I am sure that it’s supposed to happen any day now, but something tells me that even in the next few years, while the talk of social media killing job boards will continue, the source of hire statistics and surveys will continue to tell a different story. Continue reading →

Boolean Search Strings, Referrals and Source of Hire

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I read an article on ERE about the other day titled “Love Writing Boolean Instead of Recruiting? Then Don’t Read This Post.”

While I happen to be pretty good at and thoroughly enjoy writing Boolean queries for talent mining, I actually love the entire recruiting life cycle. Sourcing is a means to an end, not a means in and of itself for me. Even so – with such a provocative post title (nice work John!), I had to read the article.

The article is a pretty strong pitch for Scavado, which “does the search work for you, saving hours of time otherwise spent developing Boolean search strings and applying them manually to each site searched.”

Things really got interesting when I got down to the comments on the article, as I stumbled into an interesting exchange between Amybeth Hale and Keith Halperin which covered direct sourcing, referral recruiting, and outsourcing sourcing at $6.25/hour.

Read on to learn my thoughts on all of the above. Continue reading →

What if You Only Had One Source to Find Candidates?

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question markImagine that you were just assigned a position to recruit for and that you needed to present 2 fully screened, highly qualified and well matched candidates within 5 business days.

Your manager/client is requesting candidates with:

  • 3-5 years of related work experience (your choice – something not too vanilla/easy/common, but not “purple squirrel” either)
  • Experience in a specific industry, and experience working in a similar environment (size/scale/team/software, etc.)  to the manager’s/client’s
  • Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline

Furthermore, let’s say that you don’t have any qualified candidates in your pipeline, so you are essentially starting from scratch.

Under those conditions and assumptions, if you were limited to only 1 method/specific source for identifying candidates to contact, engage and recruit, which would you choose, and why?  Continue reading →

What is the Low Hanging Fruit in Recruiting?

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If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know I’m a fan of leveraging every information resource available to me – my internal ATS/CRM, the Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and yes, even job board resume databases (gasp!).

Have you ever heard job board  naysayers refer to the resumes you can find on Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, etc. as the equivalent of “low hanging fruit?”

I know I have – MANY times.  When I hear people say it or read people write it, it always seems to be used with a negative connotation, and sometimes with derision. 

Is “low hanging fruit” intrinsically a bad thing? Is it even an accurate way to describe searching for resumes on the job boards? 

From what I can tell, “low hanging fruit” is a concept most people understand because they’ve heard others use it in context. But what does such a statement actually mean?  In this article, I will show you there are at least a few different takes on the meaning and use of the phrase and you may be surprised at what actually fits the bill as low hanging fruit in recruiting.  Continue reading →

Is LinkedIn Becoming a Job Board?

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Is LinkedIn a social networking site, a job board, or a little of both?

Most people consider LinkedIn to be a social networking site, or more specifically a professional network service. LinkedIn describes itself as an “interconnected network of experienced professionals.” However, when I take a step back and take an objective view of LinkedIn, I see a great deal of “job board” functionality with some social networking features.

Before you cry “blasphemy!,” let’s do some research and look at the facts. 

What Exactly is a “Job Board?”

I tried doing some research to find a definition of exactly what a “job board” is, and found that Wikipedia considers Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, Dice, etc. to be employment websites. According to Wikipedia, an “employment website” is “…a web site dealing specifically with employment or careers. Many employment websites are designed to allow employers to post job requirements for a position to be filled and are commonly known as job boards.”

Common Features of Job Boards

According to INTERNET Inc, “job boards are usually free for job seekers though there are some exceptions mostly in the realm of upper management and executive jobs. Job ads can usually be found by browsing or through search on keywords, job type and location. Employers usually pay a fee to post job ads… Most job boards also offer employers resume database access for searching out candidates that match specific criteria. Additional services offered by job boards to employers often include: job agents that alert recruiters by e-mail to newly published job seeker resumes that meet specific criteria, …and brand building advertising with e-mail campaigns, banners, buttons and company profiles.”

What LinkedIn Says About LinkedIn

I did some digging and found LinkedIn’s press site. Under the heading of “What is LinkedIn?,” you can read that “When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments.” Continue reading →

Don’t Be A Sourcing Snob

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Are You a Sourcing Snob?

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Is a candidate identified on LinkedIn intrinsically “better” than a candidate sourced from Monster?
  • Is candidate sourced by cold calling inherently “better” than a candidate sourced from a job posting on Careerbuilder?
  • Does it really matter where a great candidate comes from?

I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and there seems to be no shortage of those in the recruiting and staffing industry who are happy to jump on that bandwagon. However, whenever I read or hear broad, sweeping statements claiming that an entire population of 50,000,000+ candidates is low quality just because they happen to be in an online resume database of a major job board – my response is a mix of shock and disappointment. 

Stereotyping is Poor Judgement

Broad statements such as “the job boards have low quality candidates” reeks of stereotyping.  A stereotype is an oversimplified conception or opinion based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the “other group” (in this case, job board candidates) have in common. Stereotypes are often formed by an Illusory correlation , a false perception of an association between two variables where in fact none exists.

You just can’t go around claiming all job board candidates are bad. That’s like saying everyone in New York is rude, or that everyone in California is a hippie. To stereotype all job board candidates as low quality is downright insulting to the many fantastic people who make the decision to post their resume to well known online resume databases. If they only knew that posting their resume to a job board was equivalent to moving to “the wrong side of the tracks.”

Sourcing Snobbery

Many sourcers and recruiters use the Internet to source and identify candidates all the time, yet there is never a mention of the intrinsic “quality” of candidates who happen to post their resume on their own websites. As if creating a website and posting your resume to it somehow makes you a better person than someone who either doesn’t know how do do that or simply doesn’t care to, instead opting to post their resume to a well known job board site.

And what about Social Media? The last time I checked – there is no “candidate quality filter” built in to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or any social network. ANYONE can decide to create a web page or a Social Media profile, from “A” players to “F” players. Continue reading →

Job Boards Evolving With Social Media?

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With the rise in companies effectively leveraging SEM (Search Engine Marketing)/SEO (Search Engine Optimization), vertical job search engines such as Indeed and SimplyHired, and social media campaigns, it seems as if many feel that the ROI of posting jobs on the major job boards has steadily declined.  Perhaps this is where the strong anti-job board sentiment comes from within the recruiting and staffing industry.

However, there is another side to the job board coin – the resume databases. Personally, when I think of the job boards, I think of their resume databases – not job posting. Job posting is job posting – whether it’s on a corporate website, paid job board, a free board, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Indeed.  While it can definitely work, it’s a passive and reactive technique that has a low ROI in most cases with many respondents who do not meet the basic qualificiations of the position posted.

As the positive buzz surrounding social media and social networking sites continues to build and the negative buzz surrounding the major job boards seems to rise, I knew it was only a matter of time before one of the major job boards stepped out of the proverbial box and took an evolutionary step forward. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Poll: Job Boards More Effective for Getting Jobs

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Job Boards vs. Social Media – which is more effective at helping people get jobs?

At least for now, statistics appear to support that job boards are either more widely used to find jobs, or simply more effective at landing people jobs than social networking sites.

According to a recent LinkedIn poll, 4310 people responded and 22% of the respondents used a major (Monster, Careerbuilder, ec.) or niche job board (Dice, The Ladders, etc.) to find their last job vs. 6% who indicated that they landed their last job through the use of a social networking site (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).

Here is the link to the poll results. Continue reading →

Job Boards vs. Social Networking Sites

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I follow a number of recruiting blogs as well as many sourcers and recruiters on Twitter and I see a growing trend of job board bashing – typically comparing them (very) unfavorably to social networking sites and applications.

I love and leverage social networking as much as the the next recruiting professional, but I refuse to just blindly follow the crowd or jump on the bandwagon when it comes to anything. With all of the buzz about social media and so many people running away from and disparaging the job boards, I am going to step out of the crowd and try to figure out where this perspective that job boards = old/bad, social networking = new/good comes from, because to me, some of the reasoning doesn’t add up.

JOB BOARDS: JOB POSTING vs RESUME DATABASES

First, let me say that when I think of the job boards, I think of their resume databases – not job posting. Job posting is job posting – whether it’s on a paid job board, a free board, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Indeed.  While it can definitely work, it’s a passive and reactive technique that has a low ROI in most cases with many respondents who do not meet the basic qualificiations of the position posted.

I ACTUALLY USE BOTH JOB BOARDS AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

One thing I want to make clear is that I actually have access to and use major paid job board resume databases, and I also use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. It is very important to realize that some people who speak negatively about the major job boards actually don’t use them. I am not really sure how someone can review or form an opinion of a product they don’t use. I’ll leave that for you to figure out.

EXCELLENT BLOG POST

This well-presented post was brought to my attention via Twitter recently: Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Recruit Thru Social Networks, and I agree with most of the points made and reasons presented. However, because there is an undertone of job boards = old/bad and social networks = new/good, it offers a good platform to me to offer some counterpoints.  Continue reading →

Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google Round 2

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In response to my post of Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google one of my readers commented that “While it may be true that Monster has more resumes than Google, using a zip code search is not a fair comparison for Google. People who post their resumes on Monster are required to enter their zip code, while people who resumes are stored online will generally only put their email and/or phone number. Also, even using the term resume can be limiting in Google. Because it was not built to only index resumes, you have to get more creative to filter out the noise. You can try the ~CV or ~Resume, you can also take that out completely and search for types of documents, .DOC, .PDF, etc. and look for words commonly found in CV’s like education, objective, etc.”

His comment inspired me to get these industry heavyweights into the ring for a second battle and experiment with not using zip code ranges or the word “resume” when searching for resumes on the Internet using Google. Let’s begin with the same searches as Monster vs. Google Round 1.

Search #1 – Java, Oracle, Sprint or Nextel, State of MD

Google #1 Zip range (original search) = 4 results

(intitle:resume | inurl:resume) java oracle (sprint | nextel) 20601..21930 (MD | Maryland) -~job -~jobs Continue reading →

Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google

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If you are a sourcer or recruiter I am sure that at some point in your career you’ve read somewhere or heard someone say how the Internet has 10X the number of candidates that can be found on the online job boards. I’ve always taken that for face value because, to be honest, it’s really tough to prove or disprove such a figure/statement.

However, I am a little bit of a skeptic by nature and I tend to question everything. Socrates and I would have been fast friends. I don’t typically accept what other people say or write just because they say or write it. So that whole “there are TONS more candidates on the Internet than the job boards” thing has been slowly eating away at me and I’ve decided to take a stab at dispelling the myth by pitting The Internet (via Google) vs. Monster.

Before you jump all over the Boolean search strings I settled on for this little exercise – I’m going to keep them relatively simple for easy apples-to-apples comparisons. I am well aware that the searches you see below can be tweaked in many ways – and just so you know, I did experiment with them before settling on a particular search string format. I did not find any significant variation in the results by tweaking the approach I took to pulling resumes. For example, when I used intitle:~resume, I got a couple extra CV hits, but also a bunch of false positives that were not resumes – so I kept it pure and simple at intitle:resume.

I chose to go with 1 Internet search engine (Google) and 1 major job board (Monster). Yes – I know that there are resumes that you can only find using other search engines (hey – I do have a Black Belt in Boolean) – but I figured I would let the 800 lb gorillas of their respective niches battle it out. Plus, there are other major job boards – so we’re even.

It is important to bear in mind that I set out to just run a little experiment to see how many resumes I could find via Google for particular search terms/skills in specific locations vs. how many I could find on Monster with the same search terms and locations.  I chose the state of Maryland and a 20 mile radius of 94118 in San Francisco, CA. 

Google – are you ready? Monster – are you ready? Now, LET’S GET IT ON!!! Continue reading →

Job Boards = Bad Candidates? Don’t believe the hype.

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I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the value of the job boards is waning and that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low.

A few years ago, I weighed in on an ERE discussion in response to the question of, “What would happen if the job boards became obsolete?” I noticed that many people in the discussion took the stance that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low.

I originally wrote this post back in 2008, and because there is still a strong belief in 2012 that job boards somehow only offer low quality candidates, I am taking the time to update my thoughts and republish an article on the topic, using statistics to prove that the job boards have the same percentage of “A” players as LinkedIn or any other source.

Once it’s published, I will link to it here.