Are you posting “everywhere” when you post your job to college career service office sites?

Recruiting on-campus along with posting on-line has certainly gained traction over the past decade or so, but I would urge those who post on-line to do some research into their vendors. Just as no two schools are alike and, in fact, they’re almost all quite different and deliver very different returns on investment, the same goes with job search sites, whether those are tied in with specific schools or serve a broader and, therefore, more inclusive audience.

Recent estimates put the number of job boards, job search sites, job marketplaces, etc. (different names for the same thing) at about 100,000 worldwide with about 50,000 of those in the U.S. Take out the cookie cutter sites where you have one organization powering multiple sites and everything about those sites is identical other than the look-and-feel and you’re down to about 10,000 U.S. sites. Take out the sites which are run more as hobbies and generate negligible traffic and you’re down something like 500 to 1,000 sites. Take out the aggregator, general, and other such sites which are primarily targeted to candidates with more than a few years of experience and, therefore, not a good fit for students and recent graduates and you’re down to about a dozen. Take out the sites which only allow access to students from certain schools and therefore exclude students from other schools and, realistically, virtually all recent graduates and you’re down to a handful.

Employers who want to pursue a “post everywhere” strategy to build a diverse and inclusive candidate pipeline from students and recent graduates not just from a small number of four-year colleges where the employer goes on-campus but all of the other 7,400 one-, two-, and four-year colleges should be looking at the sites that align with that strategy. On the other hand, if your program is unable or unwilling to consider candidates from a broad range of schools — there are sometimes very legitimate reasons why that is such as the major required is only offered at 10 schools — then you’re going to want to use sites which are only accessible to students from those schools.

Another factor to consider: scalability. Are you looking to hire one person here and one person there and their skill sets are quite unusual? Then you’re going to want to zero in on the sites that allow you do a lot of filtering based on the profiles of the candidates or the sites that offer good matching technology. And for the matching sites, don’t just take their word that their tech works well as much of the matching technology out there is awful. Just as you’d do your due diligence with considering going to a new school, you need to do your due diligence when adding a new job board vendor. But if you’re looking to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands into the same or similar roles, can your job board partner provide data to you to demonstrate that it has successfully delivered well-targeted candidates at that scale for similar roles for other, similar employers? Again, do your due diligence.