Job Boards and the battle for quantity over quality...

With the threat of social media networks moving in on their territory, job boards have had to work a little harder recently to convince their clients (e.g. recruiters and direct employers) that their services are still as valuable as ever and that their well established business models can withstand the threat posed by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

This is most notably evident through the significant increase on advertising spend to increase the number of job seekers registering on their sites. The campaigns seem to be working, with a number of job boards boasting record traffic statistics.

So what does this mean for the clients who advertise vacancies on their sites? Does it improve their chances of finding the best candidates? Possibly. Does it mean they will receive more applications? Certainly. Does it mean they’ll spend more time filtering out irrelevant applicants? Definitely. Quantity is assured, quality isn’t.

One job board even seems to actively promote the ‘spray and pray’ method of searching for work in their TV campaign, implying that a wholesale change in career profession is achieved as simply as sending your CV off for something that catches your interest!

Ask any recruiter what they dislike about using job boards and they’ll all tell you the same thing; too many irrelevant applications. Job board users can send their CV’s to countless vacancies in no time, regardless if they do not have the experience requested in the vacancy advert.  Very few recruiters will tell you they just want even more applications.

There is also a logical argument to say that this focus on volume has a negative impact on the job seekers who use the job boards in the manner intended. Relevant applicants will inevitably get overlooked from time to time when their CV’s are buried in amongst hundreds of irrelevant applications.

So what do I think job boards could do to improve their services? Here are a few suggestions:

·         If a job seeker is applying for a very wide range of different role types, at salary levels that indicate a reasonable level of previous experience might required, send a ‘yellow card’ email, asking them to be more realistic with their applications, or face restrictions on the number of applications they can make.

·         Limit the number of applications job seekers can make daily. This might be a bit extreme, but it would encourage job seekers to spend more time reading through adverts to see if they have a realistic chance of being considered.

·         Universal use of filtering questions. Some job boards have this feature, but couldn’t they all allow the advertisers to pose some yes/no experience questions that filter out unsuccessful applicants?

·         Require more information to be entered manually by the job seeker for each application (to reduce spamming). Adding a layer of process in to the application process will take more effort on the job seekers part. Perhaps allow the vacancy advertiser the option to add a specific question field, relating to the advert (e.g. ‘please describe your involvement in a systems upgrade project’).

So when I receive a promotional email from a job board telling me that their new TV advertising campaign is about to start, I now find my finger pressing the delete button before I’ve reached the end of the first sentence.

What do you think of the above suggestions? Would they improve service for you as a recruiter/hiring manager? Or would they be too restrictive as a job seeker? Or have you got any better suggestions? Please comment below…