Are Job Boards A Good Way To Recruit Employees?

Congratulations! You are now officially responsible for hiring new talent for your company. So, where do you plan on finding these people? Do you use traditional methods like newspaper ads (does anyone even do this anymore?), head-hunters, and referrals from current employees? There’s always social media, but who knows what kind of people you may get there. But perhaps you should give job boards like Indeed, Monster or CareerBuilder a closer look.

Let’s switch the example around now, to the other side of the hiring desk: you are looking for a job. Where do you focus your efforts? Is it worth trying to find something on a job board? After all, if you’re out of work, the whole idea is to get hired as soon as is possible, and that means not wasting your time on ineffective methods like handing out your resume in person to random companies.

Here are four very persuasive reasons as to why job boards are a good way to bring new people on board.

Casting A Wide Net

Whether you’re posting a job or looking for one, job boards bring to the table an instant audience, a community of fellow professionals. A job board is the place to see or be seen, and establishing your presence on a board is a good first step to getting noticed, whether you’re a potential employer or employee. Once you get yourself set up, then you can start schmoozing with the audience and making contacts.

Boards Never Sleep

Thanks to the 24/7 world of the Internet, job posters can put up positions at their leisure, check out resumes sent in by candidates, and even fire off a few questions to an applicant. By the same token, if you’re looking for a job, you don’t have to spend your days pounding the pavement when you can just set things up on a board with your profile and resume. Job posting and hunting are no longer limited to the traditional work week, and that makes it convenient in terms of time management.

You Can Be Picky

Whether it’s by posting a position on a specialized job board, or simply putting in filters on a job advertisement on one of the big boards, you can be selective in who sees and responds to your advertisements. By putting in certain questions, for instance, an employer can screen applicants so that only the most relevant candidates show up. Even if some over-eager applicants who aren’t qualified manage to show up on the board, all an employer needs to do is delete their email and resume and never have to deal with them on the phone or in person.

You Can’t Beat The Cost

Head-hunters and job placement services cost money, at least to the employer, anyway. The total cost of doing online job postings is measured in a few hundreds of dollars at most, while using recruiters runs into thousands. Granted, the recruiters do all of the screening and other grunt work, but in these days of refined searches and many boards’ ease of use, it’s not all that daunting a task. That’s probably why, according to the article “How Employers Gauge the Effectiveness of Job Boards”, a board’s user-friendliness is an important factor. In any event, sifting through even a short list of candidates culled from an online job posting may take a little time, but the savings make it so worth it.

Think of job boards as something akin to online dating sites, albeit with a lot less creepiness or eye-gougingly hideous commercials. It all boils down to two parties who are searching for something; a connection, a good matchup, and they use the world of online communication to achieve that end. Employers get a good place to post their positions and communicate what they’re looking for, and job-hunters can search for positions based on their own skills, experience, and other parameters.

That’s why both employer and employee can confidently use job boards for their best chance of getting their happily ever after. Give it a shot; you could be pleasantly surprised.