Author: Maddy

How Niche Job Boards Solve Big Problems

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

Niche job boards can solve a lot of problems for recruiters, and there are many different types of recruiters. Most of them have to really hustle and work hard to do their jobs, and while new technologies are opening up all kinds of doors and possibilities for the future, it can be overwhelming. Some people who need to hire employees aren’t recruiters at all – they’re primarily business owners and office managers who are also responsible for recruiting and hiring.

 

Hiring feels like an aberration of some kind. It’s a disruption to an employer because it means that somebody has quit, retired, or been fired. Or it means their business is growing and they need more hands on deck to get the work done or even just to keep their heads above water.

 

Often, it’s a big hassle that needs to be dealt with in a rush.

 

And yet, without the right people to fill those gaps and come on board, businesses can really struggle. Niche job boards can help solve these problems for employers and recruiters.

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Quality Job Posts Drive Job Board Success

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

How can you, as a recruiter or job board owner, make hiring easier and more effective?

There are so many factors that you might consider – your job board’s design, an employer’s brand, candidate experience, SEO – but the answer to that question really begins with what is perhaps the most important element of the recruiting process: the humble job post.

Those other things matter, but without good job posts, you run the risk of leading a horse to water without it taking a drink. To use another animal-based metaphor, you’re fishing without bait.

Where Most Job Posts Go Wrong

Job descriptions are important. Depending on the employer’s size, the type of work and the kind of contract involved, it can be very important to define a job description for both the new hire and the employer. A company’s HR department may need to keep job descriptions on file in their records for multiple purposes, but it does not follow that that description is the one that must be used to advertise a new job opening.

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Retaining Homegrown Talent with Community Job Boards

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

Recently, we talked about the challenges that smaller towns and cities face, along with their chambers of commerce and local governments, when it comes to attracting and retaining a skilled workforce.

Many municipalities, their leaders, and businesses are working hard to make their communities great places to live and work, and are proud to see their youth achieve success in school and work. But they still struggle with being able to effectively connect those young people with the kinds of opportunities that will allow them to stay there and help grow the businesses that employ them.

So how can a community job board run by a chamber of commerce or municipal government help retain their young, homegrown talent?

To answer that question, we need to look at some key factors that make a community job board successful:

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Local SEO for Regional Job Boards

by Maddyin Marketing

Something many businesses that serve a particular geographic region take advantage of when it comes to their Search Engine Optimization is local SEO.

If you live in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan and search for “pizza”, it’s not very helpful if the results you get are for restaurants in New York. That’s why search engines try to deliver results that are relevant to your location as well as your search terms.

So, if you make great pizza in Moosejaw, how do you reach local potential customers? Okay, I know if you’re reading a blog on a job board software provider’s website, there’s a chance you run a job board or a recruiting business and are not in the business of making delicious pizza. (That said, if you’ve found a market for pizza-related employment and you’re thinking of starting a job board…call us!)

Below I’ve gathered some tips and resources for bolstering your local SEO and ideas on how to handle some of the challenges that online businesses may face.

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Municipal Job Boards for Regional Economic Development

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

Cities both big and small find themselves focusing on economic development to improve the lives of their citizens, help local businesses, and their local economy. One challenge that cities and local employers face is both attracting new talent to their region and retaining their local workforce.

Cities, counties, and other types of municipal regions can play a big role in helping local employers with these challenges through a regional job board, career portal, or recruiting platform. Whatever you want to call it, the following list outlines ways that a municipal job board can significantly help local economic development:

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Does Your Job Board Have a Defined Niche?

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

The online recruiting industry is a big and bustling place, full of competition, but small job boards that are niche have a lot going for them.

Many new job boards can find themselves struggling to stand apart from both older, more established job boards and those mammoth-sized, generalist platforms. One of the questions we encourage job board entrepreneurs to ask themselves is, “Am I niche enough?”

This blog post will outline how new job boards can think about being niche, explore ways to further specialize, and highlight a few helpful tools that may help.

How to Get Nichier

If your chosen niche is too broad (for example, a whole industry), your first step may be to look for patterns and trends among your jobs, customers, and candidates. Let’s take a look at some dimensions you can explore in your quest to get nichier.

  • Industry and Job Function: These are very likely your first steps towards going niche, but don’t neglect the possibilities of combining the two. Many types of jobs are found across industries, so look for high demand or under-served combinations. (For example, accountants in the nonprofit sector, or event planners in the hospitality industry.)
  • Region: This is probably the best way to get more niche. Instead of trying to conquer the globe or your entire country, try starting with a city or a state/province/county with which you already have some experience and familiarity, or where it’s possible for you to do in-person networking, promote your job board, and build relationships.
  • Contract Types: I suspect this will continue to be an important way that both candidates and employers will narrow their searches for jobs and talent. Part-time jobs, summer jobs, internships, seasonal work, freelance/short-term contracts, or shift work are all examples of types of work contracts.
  • Pay Categories: Similar to contract types, but still worth exploring as a potential niche factor, is types of pay. Recruiting hourly workers vs contractors and freelancers can be quite different, as can recruiting for those getting paid $40-$60k per year vs those in the $200-$300k pay bracket.
  • Qualifications: Many jobs (like driving, construction, engineering, childcare, etc.) require specific types of certifications or licenses. In other cases, employers may prefer candidates with particular types of backgrounds. For example, an employer hiring for a finance role may want someone with a degree in statistics over one in business, or a business communications job may benefit from someone with a liberal arts degree.
  • Personal Traits: This is where you can really get creative. Some people may have specific needs or interests, and that may cross over with certain demographics.
    • Demographics: Employers today are increasingly conscious of workforce diversity and may need help reaching and recruiting women, people with disabilities, and minorities or marginalized groups (for example, LGBTQ people, or people belonging to specific ethnic or cultural groups).
    • Past Experience/Personal Interests: Switching careers is pretty common today, so why not target a particular type of transition, such as former athletes turned writers, or former educators turned financial advisors. Certain hobbies and passions might also be a great way to harness a particular market – some online gamers might take to quality assurance work, or cosplayers might find careers in the fashion industry.
    • Specific Work Needs/Preferences: Many claim that we’re in a candidate’s market today and top talent will go after the opportunities that suit their lifestyles. Focusing on employers that offer remote work, flexible hours, work/life balance, or great healthcare plans could be a great way to go more niche.
  • Employer Traits: It’s not just about what candidates want, and looking for things that make some employers distinct, their size and type of business, or on particular types of hiring paint points can help you narrow your target market.
    • Values: Some organizations pride themselves on being environmentally-friendly, committed to diversity, or being socially conscious and encouraging volunteerism among its employees. Or maybe their whole thing is on-site catering and ping-pong tables. These employers want to connect with candidates who will share their values and enjoy their culture.
    • Size and Business Needs: There can be big gaps between small-to-medium sized businesses who are relying on email and spreadsheets to organize their recruiting, and large companies with lots of roles to fill but need to get targeted exposure to their jobs. Focusing on solving the problems for a particular type of employer is a good way to go niche.
    • Hiring Gaps: What are the types of problems that employers in your niche are experiencing? Whether it’s employee retention, poor candidate experience, or employer branding, addressing these pain points can help you specialize.

Tools to Research Your Niche

Research tools:

  • Google’s Ad Preview Tool lets you preview what search results look like – you can enter keywords, and the location and version of Google being used (in Canada it’s google.ca, in the United Kingdom, it’s google.co.uk, etc.)
  • Google Trends & Keyword Planner can give you insights into how popular certain keywords and searches are
  • Stats & Demographics – Our guide to researching what social media platforms will be the most effective at reaching your target market has some tips and links to sites you can use to access demographic information.
  • SEO Tools – SEO.com lists eight tools they suggest using to research your target market on the web.

We always love hearing about job boards discovering and establishing their niche. If you have a great niche job board story, drop us a line!

Data Ownership in the Cloud

by Maddyin Technology

Understanding Cloud-Based Job Board Software

“It’s in the cloud!” is a phrase that doesn’t really tell you much, if you’re not already familiar with modern hosted software infrastructure.

One of the most commonly used cloud-based services is probably email. Web-based email providers from Hotmail to Gmail don’t require you to physically store your email data on your own hard drive or on your own server. Instead, you can access it on a website through your browser, where you can login and access your email. The email data is retrieved from where your email service provider stores it. In the cloud. Hmm. Still confused?

Let’s back up a bit.

Just where the heck are these clouds, anyways? Why are they so special? Part of why cloud computing has become so popular over the last couple decades is that it pools together processing power and other resources, which makes it easier for software providers to deliver their services more quickly and efficiently.

This is particularly useful when the software needs to use large sets of data and run searches and complex queries on it. It’s also why some cheap-and-cheerful solutions for job board software out there can run into trouble as their database grows. Data processing power is not equal on every server or hosting service provider.

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Recruitment Marketing Platforms: Dead or Thriving?

by Maddyin Recruiting

A couple weeks ago ERE published two articles on the same day, with each article’s premise opposing the other:

  1. 10 Reasons Why Recruitment Marketing Platforms Are Dead By Tom Steele
  2. Recruitment Marketing Platforms Are Not Dead. Here’s Why By Chris Forman

 

Both articles raise interesting questions about what problems need solving in recruiting and how different technologies have tried to solve them. Below I’ll dig into both perspectives and sum up the broader questions that recruiters need to ask about not just recruitment marketing platforms, but about their whole process and all the tools involved.

 

Steele’s contention is that most solutions calling themselves “Recruitment Marketing Platforms” come with a series of inherent flaws which will determine their demise. In his experience, a recruitment marketing platform adds unnecessarily to a recruiter’s tech stack, and doesn’t solve the fundamental problems like candidate experience, which continue to plague recruiting:

“Yes, I’ve heard you all say your career site is mobile optimized. But after your 35-step application process on my mobile device, I have to disagree. Maybe the front of your career site is mobile optimized, but not certainly the application.”

It’s a fair point, considering how many job applicants still face the situation described above. Recruitment marketing in and of itself does not fix a problem caused by employers and recruiting agencies who still use tools and processes that are suited to their own bureaucracy instead of a positive candidate experience, which in turn positively impacts hiring. So if recruitment marketing platforms are simply a glossy veneer designed to lure candidates in without the infrastructure to capture and retain them, as the picture Steele clearly paints, it does sound like they’re a dead-end.

 

But that’s not the whole story.

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