Many of the speakers were employers, including corporate recruiters, third party recruiters, and staffing agencies. Two main themes emerged from those speakers: they are frustrated by their inability to get adequate metrics from all of the job boards and they applicant tracking systems (ATS) do not provide them with the information they need. When questioned, they agreed that they do not provide the job boards with information such as how many candidates that came from the boards were interviewed or hired. They also agreed that they have not put pressure on their ATS vendors to include pretty basic tracking features that would allow the ATS systems to automatically and accurate track the source of resumes (leads) and therefore allow the employers to track the source of hires (sales). Without those basic metrics, it is impossible to calculate a return on investment (ROI) and that more than anything is what they said they need.

My takeaway is that the IAEWS will play a large role over the next year in working with the ATS companies to create a standard method for tracking the source of leads and hires. When that standard becomes accepted, and hopefully that will be sooner rather than later, we will all be better off. Transparency is a good thing. As job board owners, we each believe that we provide excellent value to our clients yet we are unable to prove it because they will not share with us accurate, reliable data about their source of hires. When that happens, they will quickly know which boards are providing the best ROI to them and they'll increase the amount of business they do with those and eliminate those with negative ROI's. That process should also open the door to them doing business with additional sites.

Another hot topic amongst the employers was their desire to increase their hiring of what they called passive candidates and diverse candidates yet they all focused their attention on resume banks (I still don't understand how you can define a passive candidate as someone who posts a resume to a job board) and they all spent most of their money with the Big Three (Monster, Careerbuilder, and Yahoo! HotJobs). One employer claimed that none of the diversity sites were any good, but I find that hard to believe. There are dozens of high traffic diversity sites. Has she used all of them? Did she use them all properly? Or was she shifting the blame to the boards for her failure to spend adequate time researching the sites and getting trained on how to use them? Also, did she only use their resume searching feature or did she try other products such as targeted emails? CollegeRecruiter.com, for example, is not a diversity site yet we can and often do help our clients connect with diverse candidates. We've done email campaigns on behalf of employers who only want to reach Hispanic candidates in certain metros and with certain qualifications. We've done email campaigns on behalf of employers who only want to reach candidates who speak Arabic and Farsi and have a math or computer science background.

While I love our targeted email product, I know that we aren't unique in providing that kind of service. If employers want to reach more diverse candidates, then they need to start looking beyond job postings and resume searching packages on the Big Three and really get creative and proactive. As Ms. Frizzle on The Magic School Bus says, don't be afraid to take chances and make mistakes as it is the best way to learn.