Almost since job boards existed, they’ve partnered together to share job content. One job board may have an excess number of candidate traffic in one area while a second may have an excess number of job posting ads in the same area. A real win-win can be created if the first sends its candidates to the second in return for a share of the revenue the second receives from its employer customer.

Unfortunately for the publisher — the site with excess candidate traffic — these backfill deals often took on the form of API calls, meaning that all of the jobs from the advertiser — the site with excess demand from employers — appeared at the bottom of the publisher’s search results. The publisher may have five jobs that match the interests of the candidate but their search results page would end up showing those five jobs plus hundreds of others from the advertiser.

Even worse was that the advertiser’s brand was typically adjacent to the jobs and the candidate would be sent to the advertiser’s site to register and, perhaps, apply to the job. To the candidate, the experience was searching for a job on the first job board, finding a potential match on the search results page, clicking, and going to a second job board. That created, at best, confusion for many job seekers. Were they at the employer’s site? Why were they being asked to register again? Was registering the same as applying?

A solution to one of these problems is original backfill, which means that the advertiser sends to the publisher a file each day (or sometimes multiple times a day) that contains the job title, job description, job requirements, category, and other details about the job. The publisher can import the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of postings into its database and display the results in its search results as it sees fit. I can choose to import certain jobs and not others. I can choose to include the imported jobs in its job match alert emails, or not.

But original backfill does not necessarily solve the problem of the candidate being sent from one job board to a second, and sometimes even a third, fourth, or more. The solution to that problem is the advertising job board to send the candidate to the employer’s applicant tracking system (ATS) or other such page so the candidate sees the job on the first job board (the publisher), clicks to apply, is instantly and automatically redirected through the second job board (the advertiser), and lands on the ATS to apply. The redirection through the second job board is typically necessary so that it can track and report the candidate traffic to its employer customer.

Even better, at least for niche job boards, are original backfill partnerships where the job content is well aligned to the demographics of the publisher. That is almost impossible to find as the backfill publishers are dominated by large, general, aggregators. But there are some exceptions, including College Recruiter http://www2.CollegeRecruiter.com/home.

College Recruiter believes that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. Our customers are primarily Fortune 1,000 companies, federal government agencies, and other organizations that hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of students and recent graduates a year from one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities for part-time, seasonal, internship, and entry-level jobs.

At any given time, we’re buying candidate traffic through our Clickcast-powered, private exchange for 100,000+ jobs from sites primarily targeted to U.S., students and recent graduates of one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities. Most of the jobs pay a CPC of at least $0.20 and some are at $1.00 or even more, so we’re paying well above market rates for well-targeted, quality traffic. Sites that target a more general audience can access our postings through Appcast. We’re more selective about the jobs that we distribute through that channel as the traffic is typically not as well targeted as through our private exchange.

We have about 1,500 college career service office and other career sites active or about to be active in our private exchange. Some of the sites are more interested in the revenue than the content, but many are more interested in the content than the revenue because our feed is dominated by high-quality jobs from Fortune 1,000 companies, federal government agencies, and other organizations that hire at scale.

For more information, contact:

Steven Rothberg, Founder
College Recruiter
Steven@CollegeRecruiter.com