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How to Get the Most Value out of Job Boards
As a hardworking business owner, HR professional, or hiring manager, you know how essential it is to populate your company with the right people for every position. You are also well aware of how difficult it can be to find the perfect pieces to make up your team.
There are, of course, steps you can take – offering competitive pay and benefits, as well as advertising for positions in a variety of ways, for example – but these efforts don’t guarantee that you’re going to attract suitable applicants, or that you can do so in a timely manner when you need to fill a position. This is where job boards enter the picture.
You can list available positions with your company in order to fill temporary, contract, part-time, or full-time positions. Generally speaking, job boards are not the best choice for high-level positions, but it depends entirely on the job board since many are specialized by industry or type of worker.
Before you elect to list your open positions on a job board, however, you need to understand what you can gain in the process, as well as how to select the right job board to partner with. Here are a few things to think about when it comes to job boards.
Convenience
One of the best reasons to use a job board is convenience. It may take you some time to figure out how to properly utilize the tools and options available to you, but once you have a handle on the process you can post jobs quickly and start to see responses in no time.
You have many options for finding job seekers, such as searching for passive candidates through social media or engaging in old-school advertising (through classified ads, for example), but these options can be time consuming and they’re rarely the best means of finding the right employees.
The online arena has caused a revolution in the way companies seek workers and workers seek jobs. If you want the best opportunity to find the candidates that are right for any position you offer, using a job board can make the process a lot easier and deliver results you won’t necessarily find elsewhere.
Cost-Effective
When you start comparing job boards you’re going to discover that some are free and others offer paid services. It’s tempting to choose options that are free, but this probably isn’t the best choice for a couple of reasons, namely in that you get what you pay for.
When you use a free service, you’re likely to be inundated with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of candidates that are not qualified for the position you’re offering. This can be tedious to sift through. What’s worse, listing with a free site often leads to poaching of ads, whereby other free sites take your ad and post it on their own site for their own benefit.
In some cases, these secondary listings are altered without your consent. Plus, once you fill a position and remove the original listing, you have no way of knowing where else the listing has been posted, so you may continue to receive applications long after the listing is posted.
You should think about using a paid service. You can significantly cut down on the applicants you receive, saving you time, which in the end, saves you money. And still taking the sourcing on by yourself, through a paid job board, will be much more cost effective than a recruiter that may charge not only to gain access to candidates, but also to hire them.
Specificity is Your Friend
If you want to ensure the best possible outcome when utilizing job boards, specificity is essential. The more specific you are about what you’re looking for in a candidate for a position, the better chance you have to weed out unsuitable candidates.
This begins with crafting a proper job description and making requirements clear. However, many job boards also allow you to select several options, such as location, whether the position is in-office or virtual/telecommuting, and so on. Make sure to select all appropriate options to ensure the best results.
Picking a Better Board
Like most online services, job boards are constantly improving. If you’re wary of using job boards to find potential employees, you shouldn’t be. You should just look for better boards that fit your criteria. For example, you might seek out boards that eschew up-front costs and only require payment when you successfully hire for your position.
You might also want to mix your job board use with “try-before-you-hire” platforms that allow you to post listings for day jobs or one-off projects so that you can see how a candidate performs before you follow through with hiring.
Job boards can be extremely beneficial if you use them properly, and this begins with finding the boards that are going to provide the best results for your business.
