Tag: Branding

Meet Careerleaf at Hiring & Workforce Housing Forum

by Jonathanin News

The City of Penticton’s Economic Development department is organizing the Hiring & Workforce Housing Forum on Sept. 18, 2019, a ground-breaking event that intends to handle some of the most complex challenges faced by the workplaces today. 

This stream is intended to give hands on training and valuable resources to those looking to up their game and reach the right labour market. The full-day event will host experts, running interactive workshops to help employers learn the latest concepts, achieve same-day results and gain new skills to help your organization attract your ideal recruit and scope out new opportunities.

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Successful Job Boards Aren’t Just Job Boards

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy1 Comment on Successful Job Boards Aren’t Just Job Boards

“Job Boards” are for Job Seekers, “Talent Acquisition Platforms” are for Recruiters?

Terms such as “recruiting” and “talent acquisition” speak to recruiters and employers, but not necessarily to job seekers. Thinking of your job board or career centre as a “talent community” is great when it comes to strategy – it means you’re thinking about making your recruiting site an interactive community that attracts and engages the candidates you target.

But does it translate for job seekers? Do the candidates you want to attract actually think of or refer to themselves as “talent”?

Candidates – be they active job seekers or passive candidates – don’t really see themselves as a product to be nurtured, whose contact information and resume data can be bought and sold to employers, recruiters, or other entities. They have their own wants and needs.

Candidates are people who are interested in one main thing: furthering their careers.

Typical job seekers are primarily searching for jobs and researching employers. They’re not likely to type “talent community” into a search engine to discover the opportunities they seek. To the job seeker, a “job board” makes sense.

Successful Job Boards Aren’t Just Job Boards

Talented and employed candidates who are open to opportunity but not actively looking aren’t going to apply to a ton of jobs, but they might become regular and engaged visitors to job boards that provide interesting news, resources, and advice that is relevant to their careers. Then when the right opportunity or offer comes along, they’ll find themselves in the right place at the right time – that is, your job board/recruiting platform/career centre/whatever.

I don’t think we’re going to crack the code and discover the ideal job board nomenclature anytime soon. There is no clear answer because every case is different. Some recruiters and employer look for “job boards” to advertise their open positions, while others may respond to different language. Making a splash by portraying your recruiting platform as something brand new can help you grab the attention of the customers you seek.(And if you’re one of the few out there solving problems in a unique market – you probably are brand new!) Making a big fuss about how you’re not a “job board” isn’t necessarily as helpful. If someone can advertise jobs on your site, then you are a kind of job board, even if those words don’t take centre stage in your branding.

For successful niche job boards that aim to attract both active and passive candidates, perhaps it makes sense to approach the job board more holistically. Developing an online community, resource, or publication that just happens to have amazing and relevant job opportunities on its job board, as a part of its overall offerings, may be a more balanced approach to marketing to quality candidates. People specifically looking for jobs can find them, and those who are passive or merely browsing can be exposed to those opportunities and be found by employers and recruiters.

Once you have the right candidates, finding the language to connect with recruiters and employers in your niche may become easier. The choice to brand yourself a talent community, a job board, a recruiting platform, hiring tool, or talent acquisition thingamajig will fall into place if you know your market, what they’re looking for, and what language they use.

Successful job boards today simply aren’t the 90s web design nightmares that the term may conjure up in the imaginations of some recruiters. Is it up to job boards to challenge the stereotype that lives in the minds of recruiters and marketers? I’m not sure if it’s really a problem.

The nature of a job board – the kind that serves the needs of multiple recruiters and/or employers – is one of duality. You have to speak to both the people who do the hiring and the people they want to hire. Maybe “job board” isn’t right for both of your audiences, or neither, but it still means something and people still hit up Google looking for job boards that cater to the jobs they want. It’s up to you to know (or find out) what language works with your two markets.

How Job Boards Help Publishers Generate Revenue and Cope with Industry Disruption

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

Publishing is an industry that is no stranger to disruption. The digital revolution, while no longer new, still continues to make waves in publishing as technology, media, economic and social forces all impact both new publishers and venerable institutions that have been around for more than a century.

Subscriptions and advertising have traditionally made up the bulk of newspaper and magazine revenue, and it’s no different for today’s publishers. Online advertising has long been a staple of Internet-based businesses as well, and news sites, online magazines, and blogs have good track records of being able to deliver the traffic that advertisers seek from them.

The challenge of generating revenue from advertising is not simply down to transitioning from print to digital for publishers (especially given how many big players are now digital-first), but also in navigating the increasingly complex world of online advertising. From PPC and programmatic advertising to interstitials and paywalls, the online publishing world has been at the forefront of testing out and experimenting with new ways to sustain themselves and profit through advertising revenue.

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Your Job Board Branding Checklist

by Maddyin Marketing

Whether you’re starting a new job board or you’re giving yours a fresh coat of paint, it’s important to think about your branding.

For some people “branding” just means a logo and a name, but it can encompass a lot more than that. Visual graphics and their placement, as well as messaging and content all contribute to the brand of your job board or recruiting platform.

The following list may cover more (or less) than what you really need, but it should help guide your process. If you already have everything you need, let this list help you to organize it all into a cohesive branding package that makes it easy to use your branding as you create new content and promotions.

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Your Pre-Launch Job Board Plan

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

You want to start a job board, but you’ve asked yourself some tough questions and realize you may need to do some legwork before you’re ready to go all in. Don’t lose heart – Careerleaf’s pre-launch plan for job boards should help you reach your goal.

If you decided you’re not ready to launch yet – look at the reasons why and turn them into milestones along the path to starting a profitable job board business. The criteria you’re using to judge whether or not you are ready likely involves four key areas: market research, candidates, employers, and branding.

Build a Candidate Following

To get employers to be your customers, you need to prove you can deliver the kind of candidates they want to hire. To do that, you need to establish a connection with the candidates you and your would-be customers want to attract. There are a lot of great, cheap ways you can start community-building before you launch your job board, including:

  • Social media: share content, resources, and advice with the candidates you want to target. Take advantage of the hashtags, groups, lists, and search functions that social media platforms provide to discover and engage with the online community in your target industry. Interact with people and start providing value now.
  • Blogging: plant your flag and start creating your own valuable content and resources. You can also contribute content to other industry blogs to expose your brand to wider audiences in your market.
  • Start a Group or Mailing List: you might already be in the habit of finding and sharing amazing jobs within your space – why not start a social media group or mailing list to share them with subscribers? This is especially valuable, because people who have opted in to this service are more likely to want to use the amazing job board you’re going to launch.

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How to Promote Your Job Board

by Maddyin Marketing5 Comments on How to Promote Your Job Board

Start with Branding, and Know Your Value

I routinely come across a lot of recruiting, staffing, and software websites, and I’ve developed a very particular pet peeve as a result. I hate it when I visit a website and can’t ascertain in ten seconds or less what they actually do.

Reading their Twitter profile bio (if they have one) is often my best bet to get a quick summary or definition of their business, because it’s concise and to the point. 140 characters or less, baby!

It’s tough to take everything you do and boil it down to a tagline, but it’s so worth it. A clear message to your target market and audience helps focus your goals, making them easier to achieve. It’ll be easier to build upon that success and pitch to other markets as you grow, so don’t worry about excluding future verticals. Start with how you’re going to make money and serve your base of employers and candidates now.

Before you start your marketing campaigns, lay out the welcome mat. Put yourself in a stranger’s shoes–would this person be able to grasp all the amazing things your job board can do for them? In ten seconds or less? 140 characters or less?

It’s hard to pack the entirety of your value into such small packages, but if you lead with brevity and give them a reason to go deeper, you make it easier to stick around. A recognizable brand (name, logo, colours, taglines!) and a clear offering go a long way. Out of that, you’ll start to define keywords and more ways to sell.

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Your job board’s brand and why it matters

by Jonathanin Marketing

Every organization, as small or insignificant as they may be, has a brand – even my aunt’s bookkeeping sole proprietorship. It will never be as recognized around the globe as Apple or Coca Cola are, but to my aunt and her clients, the business’ brand is imperative for ongoing success. As the idiom goes, “you are judged by the company that you keep”, and the same wisdom can be applied to an organizational or personal brand (in my aunt’s case, much of the business’ brand is made up of the associations with her actual person).

Cast your mind back to 2013, and the damage that the Joe Fresh brand suffered (and is still defending against) when it was associated with the Savar Building catastrophe in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The unfortunate disaster stands as a reminder of how quickly a brand’s equity can be destroyed, and that the associations stakeholder make with your brand – both positive and negative – can linger for extended periods of time.

Noting that an organization’s brand as an employer is as important as ever, job board owners should be asking themselves whether they are doing everything they can to ensure that their board is a brand that employers wish to associate with.

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Turning Your Job Board into an Online Community

by Maddyin Marketing

Job boards are a tricky business. They have two types of customers, and in many ways they aren’t buying what you offer–they’re buying what they have to offer each other.

As a job board owner, you are the facilitator, the venue through which they are able to find each other. You create and maintain a space that attracts both parties.

Despite evidence that job boards are a significantly big, if not the biggest, source of hires, many employers and recruiters don’t always feel like they get their money’s worth. They want quality applicants. If you’re not attracting those applicants to your board, you’re never going to make your recruiting customers happy.

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Honesty in Employer Branding and Attracting Candidates

by Maddyin Marketing1 Comment on Honesty in Employer Branding and Attracting Candidates

You’re hiring! That means finding and attracting candidates who you then need to evaluate for the position. But it’s not that simple, is it?

Let’s define what it is you or your company wants when you’re looking to hire. Bottom line? You need somebody who can do the work you need done.

But typically, most employers also want that someone to:

  • Do the work really well
  • Have the traits and interpersonal skills that enable them to work with others in the workplace as necessary
  • Help strengthen their organization through their efforts

We’ve seen a shift in how we talk about recruiting and hiring, and the idea has emerged that employers need to market themselves to candidates as great places to work/people to work for, similarly to how a company markets to customers. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen the Internet multiply and diversify–no matter what it is you’re looking for, you will find it in abundance, and easily. A little too easily, sometimes.

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