Are Job Postings Dead?
Job postings are to job boards a little like your younger sister: you love her and you know that she's part of your family, but they can sometimes be annoying even though you know that you need them. Of all of the products that job boards sell to employers, most job boards rely most heavily on the sale of job postings to drive revenues. I think that this is lunacy because they're the product of which is sold most often by most job boards. In other words, job postings are commodity products and commodity products tend to have small margins due to pricing pressure exerted by consumers who know that they can purchase a very similar and perhaps identical product from a competitor so aren't going to be willing to pay anyone a premium for that product.
Rather than focusing on the sale of job postings, we focus on the sale of products that we believe provide much greater value to those of our clients which have much greater hiring needs. These products include targeted emails, cell phone text messaging (SMS), and direct mail. We still sell job postings and probably will for years to come and I believe that they provide excellent value to our clients, but I also believe that we cannot properly serve the needs of our clients by focusing on job postings. They are the lowest of the low hanging fruit, but successful orchards do not just pick from the bottom of the tree. They also reach skyward to pick the most flavorful and difficult to capture fruit from the top of the tree because they cannot satisfy all of the needs of all of their clients by ignoring the high hanging fruit.
Another benefit to targeted emails, direct mail, and cell phone text messaging (SMS) is that the products tend to be much friendlier to the student who is hunting for an internship or a recent graduate who is searching for an entry level job. Think about it from the perspective of the hopeful intern. Rather than wading through dozens and perhaps hundreds of job postings and contacting many and perhaps most of those organizations, products like targeted emails allow employers to zero in just in the candidates who are most likely be interested in being hired for the internship. And rather than the employer being forced to look at 200 intern resumes to find 25 which are qualified to find five to interview to find one to hire, they can instead accelerate right to the 25 which are qualified because the candidates do not self-select: the employer's email is only delivered to those who already meet the basic qualifications. Less noise for the hopeful intern and less noise for the employer.

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