Marketing

 by Maddy

Quantity vs Quality: Improving Your Job Board’s Performance

There is a tendency for job boards to get tunnel vision when it comes to website traffic. Lots of traffic usually means lots of candidates, which means applications and/or clicks, which help the job board directly or indirectly generate revenue and provide the value they promise to recruiters and employers.

 

While you certainly won’t make money from a job board that no one visits, a high volume of applications won’t necessarily guarantee continued success. With a high traffic, high volume strategy, you’re essentially betting that among the thousands of job seekers arriving at your site and applying to your jobs will be some really qualified people.

 

While on the surface, bombarding employers with dozens or hundreds of applications might make them feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, you’re actually not making their job easier. The higher the volume of applications, the more work is involved for them, and the more likely it is that candidates aren’t going to be fairly or consistently screened and evaluated. The end result is that your customer may not wind up hiring somebody they found through your job board.

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 by Maddy

5 Steps to Making More Money With Your Job Board

For job boards that find themselves struggling to retain their past successes in the ever-changing world of recruiting, there are five core things you need to do to stay competitive and make more money.

 

1. Be Niche. Start Niche. Become Niche. Get… Niche-ier.

Generalist job boards – those that deal with all types of jobs on a national or international level – have the most competition. Not having a niche makes it really hard to stand out when it comes to your marketing, your SEO, and your overall value proposition to customers. (If you expect someone to search for “jobs” and find you on the first page of search results next to Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, Craigslist, Facebook, and other big established job boards, you’re going to have a long, expensive, and difficult road ahead of you.)

 

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 by Maddy

How to Promote Your Job Board in 2017

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on June 13th, 2016 but has remained popular ever since. We’re posting it again with a few updates – let us know what’s worked for you in promoting 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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 by Maddy

Help Community Stakeholders by Marketing Your Job Board

 

Chambers of commerce or local governments running community-focused job boards have a lot to gain by thinking of this resource through the lens of marketing.

 

The biggest mistake that anyone can make in trying to reinvigorate or launch a job board project is to fail to market it to the people who stand to benefit from it the most. For community leaders who have taken on the challenge of tackling unemployment and economic development, it’s vital to get the word out.

 

As with all job boards, you’re marketing to more than one audience. You need to reach both the job seekers and the employers in your region, and make your pitch for other workers and businesses to relocate.

 

One of the reasons a regional job board can be so valuable is that it centralizes disparate information that is typically spread across a combination of big national job boards, help wanted signs and bulletin boards. If it’s easy to find out who’s hiring and what talent is available to hire, it simply becomes easier to do business.

 

But the localization of business and opportunity is about more than just job postings and resumes. It’s also important to provide other information about your town to shed more light on living and doing business there.

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 by Maddy

Balancing Act: Speaking to Both Candidates and Recruiters

Job Board. Careers Portal. Recruiting Platform. Talent Acquisition Platform. Website that does the thing.

 

There are lots of different names for digital spaces where people get connected with employers and job opportunities. A recent post by Jeff Dickey-Chasins over on Job Board Doctor’s blog got me thinking about how individual job boards are communicating their value to their customers.

 

Is “Job Board” a Bad Name?

Many recruiters have come to associate the term “job board” with old, outdated relics of the 90s and early 2000s that are difficult to use. It makes a compelling case for job boards to rebrand themselves as something different.

 

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 by Maddy

Retaining Homegrown Talent with Community Job Boards

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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 by Maddy

Local SEO for Regional Job Boards

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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 by Maddy

Are you niche enough?

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.

 

Writing for the Society of Human Resource Management, Roy Maurer describes the advantages of niche job boards in recruiting:

“Niche boards may not boast the traffic of mammoths like CareerBuilder and Indeed, but their use often leads to lower cost-to-hire and higher quality-of-hire metrics because they are more likely to attract highly coveted candidates with specialized skills and relevant experience, experts say.”

 

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.

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 by Maddy

Recruitment Marketing Platforms: Dead or Thriving?

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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