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When it comes to job boards, you have many options. If you’re like many HR professionals, you use a variety of them as a way of casting a wide net. Unfortunately, some job boards can end up cluttering your inbox, or even disrupting your hiring workflow, with confusing metrics or redundant add-ons.
In this article, we’ll discuss proven tactics to choose the best job board for your needs and examine the strengths and weaknesses of the most popular job boards right now. Which is the best job posting site for your company to use?
Choosing a job board based on popularity can be a mistake. The best job board for your needs may be one that’s new to the table or one that others haven’t yet seen the value in; if a job board is very popular, your posts could be buried unless you pay for premium placement. On the other hand, if nobody in your industry uses a given job board, potential candidates might not even find your position.
When choosing a job board, it’s important to place less importance on popularity and more importance on whether it aligns with your goals and your organization’s needs.
There are several different kinds of job boards. General job boards publish jobs of every kind, in every sector. These kinds of job boards don’t discriminate based on job type, but they also don’t specialize. While the all-inclusive approach sounds nice for job seekers, niche applicants may go to niche boards to find positions.
General job boards can be further broken down into two categories: posting services and aggregators. Posting-service job boards push to multiple, even hundreds, of individual job boards. Posting-service job boards include ZipRecruiter, America’s Job Exchange, and Nexxt.
The second category of general job boards, aggregators, compiles job postings from other sites (including posting services) and publishes them on their own site. Aggregators include Google Careers, Jobrapido, Jooble, and Indeed. This means that you might post your job on a posting-service job board but find your inbox inundated with applicants who came through an aggregator. At the same time, applicants like aggregators because it makes it easier for them to find many positions quickly.
This is one of the major complications with job posting and managing applicants. Even if you’re trying to only target certain kinds of applicants, you may have to sift through hundreds of candidates coming from aggregators who aren’t suited for the role. This makes the hiring process unnecessarily cumbersome.
Beyond general job boards, there are also niche boards – job boards specific to a given industry. Industry or association job boards are for more specialized positions, like programmers, educators, hospitality workers, jobs requiring specific certifications, and so on. If you’re hiring for an organization in a field with a trusted industry-specific job board, consider using one.
A third type of job board specializes not in a particular industry, but rather in a particular demographic. These job boards are designed to attract certain applicants such as interns, work-at-home moms, veterans, seniors, seasonal workers, people with clearances, or disabled persons. These types of job boards can be useful for recruiters who may be seeking to diversify their workforce or who are looking for specific demographics.
Finally, some jobs boards are segmented based on the actual work needed, such as creative jobs, contract or one-off jobs, or jobs in the tech sector. Again, a job board like this may be useful if your job opening is specifically related to a certain kind of candidate.
Remember that the best job posting sites for your needs will ultimately depend on your hiring goals and the industry you’re hiring for. A G2 Crowd study examined the most popular job boards, scoring them on user satisfaction. This list is not all-inclusive, and only covers general job boards, not anything industry-specific. Let’s look at the top and bottom three results in the study:
Indeed scores a perfect 100% for ease of use. Jobs open in a pop-up window when a candidate clicks on them, eliminating the need to go back and forth between tabs. The downside is that Indeed is an aggregator, so you may get applicants from Indeed that are underqualified or irrelevant to your needs.
LinkedIn Job Search scores evenly across ease of use, meets requirements, and ease of doing business with, at 91%, 87%, and 89%, respectively. It’s popular with executive level professionals and equally popular with recruiters. One major downside is the lack of desktop alerts and the cost. Only mobile users have access to the notification app.
Glassdoor scores a 95% for ease of use. Applicants like being able to read reviews from current or former employees to get the inside scoop. An 86% score for ease of doing business with for employers does, however, put it below the previous two.
ZipRecruiter apparently doesn’t make it easy for job hunters as other boards, with only a 75% score. Job posters like it more, giving it 86%. ZipRecruiter’s big plus is letting applicants know when their application has been seen. Consider ZipRecruiter if you are wanting to cast a very wide net for entry-level applicants or for positions that have only basic requirements.
Monster scores a zero for ease of use and a zero for meets requirements. These two downsides make Monster a potential last choice for recruiters, even with the 87% ease of doing business with. Monster’s biggest plus may be their career advice section, which draws in major traffic to the site.
CareerBuilder is a lemon for ease of use, with a score of zero. The biggest downside is that applicants are less likely to search CareerBuilder at all. They also only score 82% for ease of doing business with for employers.
The best job board is the one that is the right fit for you and your organization. Even the best job posting sites for employers are useless if you keep attracting the wrong candidates or your data is confusing and unmanageable. It’s crucial that you consider all the variables, such as whether the job board is a posting service or an aggregator, whether it’s general or specialized, or whether it has regional or geographic constraints. Another variable to consider is regional trends; for instance, in some areas of the country, Craigslist is considered the job board for both candidates and recruiters.
Your choice of job boards will also depend on other factors. Consider the level of position, such as executive, secretarial, or managerial, as well as whether it’s a salaried or hourly position. Are you hiring for a specific industry, like nonprofit or hospitality? Is this a career job or is it contract based?
The Applicant Manager (TAM) is an excellent option when you want to glean insights from your job postings and results and if you want to make job postings easy and affordable. Using job board software helps you to figure out if you’re on the right track with your job postings and choice of job boards. Are you making the right job board investments?
When you use TAM, you gain the ability to run detailed sourcing reports so that you can see how successful your posting was in several different categories. For example, how far did applicants progress in your recruiting workflow by position? When did applicants quit the process? You can also share reports with key members of your recruiting team.
Even better, with integrations with free and paid job boards, aggregators, and posting services, TAM makes posting to job boards easy by eliminating inefficiencies so you can concentrate efforts on finding top talent. Contact us to learn how you can get started with TAM today.