What is the future for job boards?

Job boards and job sites have existed for a long time. They were once the perfect place to post vacancies in a company. But their proliferation degrades the experience and effectiveness of finding jobs and talent.

Houston, we have a problem!

The facts:

The welcome and job search interface of a classic job board generally looks like this:

It can be seen as an “Employment” section where job seekers indicate the position they would like to access or the sector they would like to discover. There is also a “Location” section to locate the candidate's preferred location in order to know where he would like to work.

Problems...

• The proliferation of job boards contributes to a division of the audience. The more candidates there are, the less likely candidates are to apply to the one where the recruiter posts their ad. This therefore means that the recruiter must multiply his efforts in order to be visible... and therefore his budget.
  
• The candidate is supposed to guess what keywords employers used in their ads, otherwise they wouldn't get the same results. And this can put off many candidates who will therefore prefer to adopt other application alternatives.
  
• Job boards are accessible to everyone. As a result, recruiters are likely to receive unqualified applications, which they will then have to sort through. This is why many recruiters are opting for solutions that allow better targeting of candidates, such as software. Seeqle.

These are all problems that increasingly bother candidates and push them to abandon job boards in favor of more innovative, rapid and practical solutions.

As a result, the posting revenue of these generalist job boards is constantly declining. This is also why the share price of Monster has seen a historic drop below five dollars.

Niche job boards

If there is one type of job boards that does not know the crisis, it is niche job boards. These job boards specialized according to the sector of activity, region or level of experience are flourishing by the thousands and continue to thrive despite the crisis affecting generalist job boards.

Clearly, they always succeed in convincing recruiters to invest in their solutions., despite a reduced audience and a user experience similar to general job boards.

How can we explain such success? They play the card of the relevancy. Indeed, it is as if they had already pre-filled in part of the two standard search fields (job title or workplace). This pre-selection work is beneficial to both candidates and recruiters. It saves time for candidates and increases the accuracy of applications for recruiters who are more likely to receive qualified applications.

But their search technology is no more effective than that of general job boards. So recruiters face the same problems and sometimes worse. The amounts charged for posting offers are generally higher, without the assurance of results. And finally, the number of recruiters and candidates for these niche segments is stagnating.

LinkedIn and other professional social networks

why Social networks Are professionals attracting the attention of so many recruiters? A clue: it's not for posting job offers. Professional social networks make it possible to target so-called passive job seekers and to get in touch with them. This is a revolutionary change in the recruitment landscape, as it completely democratizes sourcing and headhunting.

However, the cost of posting job offers on professional social networks is constantly increasing, for two main reasons:

1. Professional social networks make it possible to broadcast job offers in what could be called the “natural habitat” of professionals. When people are on LinkedIn, Xing, or Viadeo, they are busy with their jobs and careers. It is therefore the perfect environment to be receptive to job offers and even more so if they are relevant.

2. Social networks collect a lot of personal and professional information allowing better targeting of candidates. And this social data can then be exploited by software like Seeqle to find the most qualified candidates for a given position.

Many see social media as the future of recruiting. Is that possible?

Certainly... but not in the form you imagine.

Targeted social recruitment on all social networks

Social networks are used by more than 40% of the world's population, which generates a massive amount of social data that can then be used by recruiters. This public personal and professional data makes it possible to anonymously target the candidates most suited to the profile sought.

Targeted social advertising then makes it possible to reach them with the appropriate job offers directly on these social networks that they use every day.

Targeted social recruitment therefore makes it possible to deliver the right job offer to the right candidates - and ONLY to the right candidates since they can be targeted according to their interests, demographics or online behaviors - and in the right place. Little more : it is a good tool to reach both candidates who are actively looking for but also the hidden market for passive candidates - that is to say candidates already in position but still listening to opportunities - who are often the most experienced and the most sought after.

To learn more about recruiting on social networks, read our white paper.

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