Job Board Advertising

The recruitment landscape has changed drastically over the past decade. We've waved goodbye to many traditional methods of advertising jobs and the role of the recruitment manager has become a little more technical. However, along with these technical advancements has arrived new methods to advertise, refine and select candidates so that you have a better chance of hiring the right person first time, every time.

The Web

The Internet has had a massive influence on how people find jobs. Traditionally, candidates had limited choices. They could trawl through the job sections of newspapers and magazines or they could register with a recruitment agency who would look for positions on their behalf.

For a while during the late 90s and early 2000s, recruitment agencies were in their peak and had formidable power. Companies could just outsource the entire hiring process to them and sit back and wait for candidates to turn up for an interview. In some case, larger companies would outsource the interviewing process, too. But this came at a cost.

Exclusivity

Also, some agencies would look for exclusivity. Essentially, they would look to be an organisation's only source of new employees, meaning they would be limited to one pool of applicants. Depending on the size of the agency, this could sometimes reap rewards, but it often made finding the right person difficult. In some cases, it meant that the applicant pool was probably not optimal for the hiring organisation's needs, and so a new type of agency began to appear, and these ones settled on a niche, hiring specialist people with specific skills.

The Technology Boom

This was particularly useful during the technology rise of the early 2000s. During this time, computing and engineering skills were in high demand. We were dealing with new technology coming into businesses at an alarming rate and this meant finding the people to implement and support it was difficult. For example, if you needed an accountant, you could hire from a pool of people who had been working with accounting principles that had remained solid for decades. If you decided to implement a new manufacturing system, you might find that your software was only a year or two old, it needed specific skills and, therefore, a dedicated agency that specialised in finding those type of people.

This eventually led to skills shortages and this fed recruitment agencies even more. With contractors now becoming the norm, sometimes because their skills were often needed on a temporary basis, sometimes because they were expensive, individuals now began to sell themselves more.

In fact, contractors may well be one of the biggest drivers of the current online jobs marketplace. With the web becoming ubiquitous, it didn't take long for them to discover that by putting their CVs online, and by optimising them so that people could find them easily, they could go direct to companies and cut out the middleman. As the fees for specialist recruitment began to rise, the need to find an easier, cheaper way for organisations to find employers and candidates to find work became a problem some people were bound to solve.

And so the job board was born. At first, it would be a private area on an agency's website. If you were signed up to them and you paid a hefty fee, you could search for candidates yourself and start the recruitment process. I remember one agency charged quite a premium for this feature some years ago and it dawned on me how ridiculous this was. We were actually paying a company to make the job easier for them!

Either way, this wasn't going to last long. The web has a habit of democratising things, and job boards were in its sights. People realised that in order to get the best candidates, they're going to have to advertise father and wider than ever before. People were becoming more skilful and contract rates were dropping. Now even salaried people wanted to get in on the job board marketplace and so the boards themselves had to evolve.

The job board that probably kicked this off in the mid-2000s was Indeed, which aggregated jobs from multiple job boards into one place. This many-to-one method of bringing all opportunities under one roof was ideal for the busy contractor who didn't want to go trawling through multiple websites in order to find their next role. But it also began to be a great place for 'traditional' job seekers to look for a career change.

And of course, other websites followed their lead and added new functionality, meaning these sites could begin to leapfrog each other in their attempt to become the one place for both recruiters and candidates to start their search.

Functionality such as job alerts really started to get things moving. For the candidate, this meant that they could set up a set of requirements for their next job such as skills, location and salary. When a new job appeared that matched, they would receive an email telling them with a link to apply for the job. This meant they didn't have to constantly trawl the website in search of that ideal position.

For employers, it meant that if a new candidate was added to the database that matched the skills of the position they were looking to fill, they would get an alert. Again, this cut-down administration and saved time and, therefore, costs.

Multiple Job Board Advertising is Born

And then it went further. Web sites became the place to find information on a daily basis. Newspapers were dropping in circulation and hardly anybody advertised in the job section anymore. Online news outlets realised that they could get a lot of more readers by advertising jobs, especially if they fitted with their readership demographic.

This gave recruiters a new angle. They could offer both candidates and employers the best of both worlds. For employers, they could advertise their jobs online, but not just on one website. Web sites that would aggregate your role across multiple sites began to appear. They allowed you to advertise your job, exactly how you want it to look and exactly when you want to advertise it for a smaller fee than ever before. They gave you automated alerts and, in fact, took away the need for traditional recruitment agencies.

And for employers?

Well, it meant that they could find jobs using whichever job board they were happy with. Again, jobs would find them rather than them having to seek jobs out.

This change in landscape has been incredible to watch. It almost seems as if there's nothing the web can't eventually disrupt. Multiple job board advertising is now the norm, and it's no surprise because it makes things easier for the two most important people in the recruitment process: The employer, and the candidate.