Are Job Boards Dinosaurs?
Anyone who has ever been unemployed or even under employed can appreciate the frustration that builds and needs to be vented. One of the places where that frustration is now being vented is against the job board industry. Many, although I don't think most, pundits believe that job boards are dead. According to Peter Weddle of the International Association of Employment Web Sites, "a recent Google search of the phrase "job boards are dead" identified 31,900,000 documents. Allowing for the search engine's mistakes (for example, including the Knock 'em Dead Job Search Guide), that's still a lot of fatal references to an industry that just five years ago was considered the state-of-the-art in employment."
Peter and I agree that the drastic change of opinion about our industry is in large part due to the repeated publication of bogus statistics. For example, the CareerXroads Source of Hire Survey found that job boards only account for 10 to 15 percent of hires made by employers yet those employers spend a far larger share of their sourcing budget on job boards.
Peter points out a huge problem with that statement:the CareerXroads survey collected its data on hiring trends from corporate recruiters yet those recruiters collect their data from their applicant tracking systems and of all of the things that applicant tracking systems do terribly, actually tracking the source of hire is probably the worst. The ATS industry has done a terrible job of overselling its ability to provide meaningful information on source of hire to its clients and, fortunately, many of those clients are waking up to that fact and realizing that there are other alternatives available to them, including Salesforce.com. Don't believe me? Just asking someone at Electronic Arts.
WEDDLE's, on the other hand, conducted a survey that collected its data directly from the source: job seekers. The WEDDLE's study took a year to complete and generated over 13,000+ responses in 2008. The results didn't surprise me but may surprise those readers who have bought into the "job boards are dinosaurs" fallacy.
Respondents were asked "How did you find your last job?" The top five responses were:
- 35.4% - Responding to an ad or posting a resume on an Internet job board.
- 8.5% - A tip from a friend.
- 6.8% - A call from a headhunter.
- 6.6% - Responding to a newspaper ad.
- 4.9% - Referral by an employee of the company.
WEDDLE's also asked, "How do you expect to find your next job?" The top five responses were:
- 62.6% Responding to an ad or posting a resume on an Internet job board.
- 5.9% Sending a resume into the company.
- 5.5% A call from a headhunter.
- 3.9% Networking at a business event.
- 3.2% Responding to an ad posted on a company's Web-site.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think that there's a lot wrong with the job board industry and some of my opinions are either not widely shared by my fellow job board owners or they won't let themselves agree because sometimes the most difficult thing you can do is look into a mirror and realize that the change needed needs to come from you.
Want an example? About 90 percent of job board revenues come from the sale of job posting ads and resume searching. Job posting ads are fast becoming a commodity in virtually every niche and especially amongst the big, general boards. So why would an employer pay $400 to post a job for 30 days to one of the big general boards when they can post that same job for free or at a fraction of the cost and get the same number of hires? The answer is they don't yet because they don't have the ability to track their hires so they rely on the bogus proxy of number of responses and fool themselves into thinking that a large number of responses to their posting means that it is working well. Wrong. A large number of responses only means a large number of responses and says nothing about the quality of those responses.
Resume searching is also a doomed product for job boards. In addition to all of the identity theft problems, there's this site that you may have heard of: LinkedIn. Could there be a better resume bank out there? Oh yeah, and it's free.
CollegeRecruiter.com has never relied on job posting or resume searching revenue. We don't even sell resume searching anymore. Our biggest products by revenue are targeted emails, cell phone text messaging, and other such innovative, non-traditional job board products. I sincerely hope that my fellow job board owners have the strength of character AND checkbook in order to turn away from postings and searching and instead embrace more innovative products that will allow them to more efficiently and effectively serve the needs or our employer clients. And I also sincerely hope that the ATS companies either get it together or get out of the way so that employers will actually be able to track the sources of their hires.
Hi Steven,
Nice writing, but there seems to be something wrong with your theory on free resume searching. Although Linkedin is a free service, there is an absolute limit to what you can do with a free subscription. A medium sized agency such as mine will need at least a "Pro" subscription, but that will set me back about USD 6000 and allows me only 50 direct messages per month. Some time ago I got a proposal for the Linkedin "Talent Advantage" option. That would have cost me about EUR 10.000/yr more than my Monster Membership.
Best regards,
Pepino van Tol
You're absolutely correct, Pepino, that LinkedIn is not free for recruiters and others who have the need to do more than the occasional search if they want to rely on the direct message method of contact candidates. But many, many recruiters have found that they can use LinkedIn for free if they use it as it was intended to be used: as a networking tool. Start a group. Participate in other groups. Build your network from the handful you likely had when you started to dozens to hundreds to thousands. That will create a fantastic talent pipeline for your organization and make it far more likely that you'll be able to convert those messages to your candidates into acceptances of job offers.
But even if you don't have the time or inclination to build a strong talent pipeline using LinkedIn or one of the other tools out there, I hope that my blog article was helpful because if you're relying on searching Monster's database to fill your requirements then you have problems long-term as their resume bank and the resume banks from all other job boards will become less and less effective and less and less available. This is a strategic problem for any organization that relies on resume banks. That sourcing tool is going away. Not today and not tomorrow. But will they exist five years from now like they do today? Not a chance.
Hey Steven.
I talked with Peter about the stats just the other day.
In my opinion both Peter's and CareerXRoad's are both off somewhat. Either way, I don't think it matters.
What we in the industry know and what we are doing about it is very different. Hence my response.
Job seekers are continuously applying to 100's of jobs to companies that they have no relationship or contacts with, hoping or prayer that they will get noticed.
In reality, if an employer posts a job on a site like a big job board they could get upwards of 300 responses.
The hiring team, or admin, or recruiter has no way of managing that flow of candidates. From a pure statistical point of view, in this case the candidate only has a 1 in 300 chance of getting hired. We also know that most of the resumes are just getting thrown in the trash and do even get close to being read.
On the other had are the stats from Mark & Gerry showing that 32% of the employers that they surveyed hired at least 1 in 4 referrals.
That's better than 25% odds.
If I were looking for a job, I'd go with the referral odds any day.
More importantly, a Referral Job Search is not straight "Networking", it's the process of finding contacts in the company, creating a relationship with them (it can be virtual as well), learning about the company, and if there is a fit, asking for a referral. A lot of this can be done via social networking sites.
I hope this helps job seekers!