A common saying in the Job Board Industry is job postings and candidates are the “chicken or the egg” dilemma, which comes first, job postings or candidates. A job board needs job postings to attract candidates and needs candidates to
get job postings. As such, the value of the job postings advertised on your job board are quintessential to resolving the chicken or the egg dilemma. By establishing your job board as a source of high quality job postings, the candidates will begin to flock (I couldn’t resist) to the site and thus allowing your team to attract the desired employers. In this post, we are going to focus on the best practices for your site job postings to build up quality listings to resolve this dilemma.

Firstly, job boards are facing stiff and considerable amount of competition in the recruitment market with the likes of Indeed, LinkedIn, Zip Recruiter, etc. According to the 2015 Candidate Behavior U.S. Job-Seeker Data Report, jobseekers utilize 17.7 different resources during their job search. This begs the question of how a job board may establish the job board as the go-to-resource. As such, here are helpful tips for your site to follow.

Educate employers to list the key job posting details for your candidates

In the U.S. Job-Seeker Data Report, listed the following key items in job postings that impact the jobseekers decision to apply:

• The job duties/responsibilities are clearly defined – 85%
• The salary range is defined – 77%
• The benefits package is described – 60%

By understanding this key information, it is important to rely the information and importance of these items to your employers. The ultimate goal as the job board operator is to provide value to our employers and candidates. Therefore, conveying this knowledge to the employers to include this information to the job postings will help your candidates job search.

Work directly with your employers to build direct relationships and rapport

During our job board experience, we have found a common practice for job boards to rely on back-fills to populate their job board with job postings. As a result of this approach, job boards experience some benefits by easily adding considerable amount of jobs and some revenue. However, disadvantages follow suite as well; directing traffic to your competitors (the source of the back-fill, traditionally difficult to control the quality of the job postings)

As such, a job board may work directly with the employer to advertise the postings on their site through an XML feed for long-standing success with the employer.

The approach includes receiving and publishing a direct feed of the job postings from the employer. The advantages of this approach include:

• Traditionally the job postings are higher quality
• If the employer elects to direct the users to an external site, then the jobseeker will be directed to the employer’s career site. With back-fill, the traffic is directed to your competition.
• By removing a third party, back-fill provider, your job board may use the site performance metrics to speak about the number of job views, applications and your candidate traffic.

Any approach you may implement as a job board to focus on the quality of the job postings will help the job board to stand out of the crowd and establish the job board as a key source of candidates and employers alike.

Content, Content, Content

An additional avenue to attract and retain jobseekers to your job board to view the job postings on the site is content. As voiced earlier in the post, jobseekers are utilizing 17.7 sources during their job search. As such, delivering high quality and consistent industry specific content will assist in your quest to establish your job board as the go-to-source in the industry. To begin, our recommendation would include publishing unique content on a weekly basis, and as such, the following benefits will follow:

• Improve your SEO rankings – search engines value unique content
• Establish to the jobseekers and employers your industry specific focus
• Opportunity to advertise key employers and job postings within your content

Job postings and traffic are the life-line to your business as a job board. And, by leveraging the industry specific data and best practices will greatly improve the value of the job board and establish credibility and rapport with your jobseekers and employers.