Selecting an online job board – Developing a job board based online recruitment strategy
Online job boards have become very popular over the last few years. This is in a large part due to the fact that it’s easier, cheaper and faster to advertise a job online. One of the good things about a maturing market for online job advertising is that there are now a wide range of specialist sites to choose from. These sites tend to be focused by job, location and industry sector. Unfortunately the rapid growth of online advertising also means there are now a lot of different websites which you could use to advertise a particular role.
There are a range of sources you can choose from when it comes to job advertising:
- Job boards
- Banner advertising
- Keyword advertising
- Social media (link to article)
- Company’s website (link to article)
The critical success factor when it comes to marketing your vacancy online is choosing which candidate sources to use so that you allocate your marketing budget well. With so many options available, selecting between them can be confusing. This article will focus on helping you to start selecting some job boards which will work for your vacancy.
Given that you want to obtain as wide a reach as possible it makes sense to start your advertising with some of the larger job boards which cover all sectors and locations. With the relative cost of these options quite low, it’s generally a good idea to pick two or three which you think will be most suitable and run your online job advert first, before approaching recruitment agencies or even looking at other more expensive advertising options like print. Picking two or three job websites avoids putting all your eggs in one basket and also saves time as collectively the websites will attract candidates to your job more quickly.
When advertising a standard job which will have a large group of qualified candidates – example roles being Administration, Sales, Account Management, Marketing, HR, etc – you should advertise your vacancy on reed.co.uk, Totaljobs.com or Monster.com as these websites collectively give access to the largest range of job seekers at a relatively low cost.
Reed.co.uk is one of the largest job advertising websites the UK. Over 2 million jobseekers visit reed.co.uk every month, making over 45,000 job applications every day.
Reed is particularly strong in London but also has a substantial presence across the UK. Popular sectors are Temporary Work jobs, Accountancy and Financial services, Sales and Management / Executive roles. Pricing for a single 45 day job posting starts at £125 + Vat.
Typically totaljobs.com carries over 150,000 live vacancies at any one time; generating around 1 million online job applications from 2 million unique users.
Generally focused on London based roles, particular strengths are Sales, Engineering, Manufacturing, Financial services and IT. Pricing for a single 28 day job posting starts at £99 + Vat.
Monster.co.uk is one of the UK’s leading online recruitment resources, it has over 3 million visits per month and 4.1 million CVs on its website and more than 1,900 new jobs are posted every day.
London roles are predominant although Monster do have a better than average level of regional advertising, strengths are IT, Accountancy & Finance and Engineering. Pricing for a single 14 day job posting starts at £99 + Vat.
Although advertising on more than one job board will ensure you can shortlist the most talented candidates available for your role, one of the major downsides of a multi job board strategy is keeping track of the applicants from each job board. Using the different job boards individually quickly creates an administrative nightmare which becomes hard to manage.
You can use a website like www.simplifiedrecruitment.com to coordinate your job posting from one single interface, automatically reply to all shortlisted and rejected candidates as well as keep track of which website is attracting the best applicants.
Should your job require either specifc skills or a significant amount of experience, you may find it valuable to also consider the following websites.
Jobsite currently advertise over 100,000 jobs a month and have over 30 additional specialist job sites linked together through the jobsite.com network. Strengths include Finance and IT jobs although it is a generalist job board and covers all other categories.
The website is more strongly suited to the higher salary ranges (£30,000-70,000) so should be used as an additional site when advertising for senior or professional positions. Pricing for a single 14 day advert is £199 + Vat.
Fish4jobs is Ideal for Health, Nursing or Social Services roles as well as local entry level roles. Fish4 power the job search on 180 local news websites.
Pricing for a single 30 day job posting starts at £89 + Vat however fish 4 also offer a 3 day job advert for £29.
S1jobs is Scotland’s number 1 recruitment site, with over 500,000 monthly users all based in the region. If you have a vacancy in Scotland, S1 jobs would be the first place to consider advertising it. If your vacancy is Scotland based advertise here first and then use monster and reed if you do not fill the vacancy.
Pricing for a single 14 day job posting starts at £299 + Vat.
Once you have run your advertising on at least two of the generic job boards, if you have not had a satisfactory response, you can look to advertise your vacancy on a specialist targeted job site or consider other options like agencies. Due to the immediate nature of online advertising, you should be able to tell within a week if you are getting the quality of candidates you want for your role.
Providing you are explaining the job well and have an appropriate salary , you should be able to fill 90% of roles using online advertising. Even for highly specific roles, the applicants are increasingly looking to online websites with even recruitment agencies sourcing a large percentage of their candidates online.
Some of the most popular websites for Finance, IT, Media and the Charity sectors are listed below.
(For other sectors, typing “advertise ‘your sector’ jobs” into google should give you a list of the most prominent websites either in the first two pages of the main results or in the sponsored links.)
Finance:
Specialist job board for the banking and financial services sector. Prices start at £500 + Vat
Specialist banking and finance job board, powering the jobs channels for Euromoney, Asiamoney, GlobalInvestor, Myaccountancyjobs and UKbankingjobs. Prices start at £299 + Vat
Specialist job board for accounting and finance professionals. Prices start at £375 + Vat
Information Technology:
Jobserve is one of the larger job websites in the UK. They currently advertise over 2.5 million jobs a year and have 800,000 subscribed job seekers. Jobserve are particularly strong for IT and Healthcare jobs, for IT jobs especially you should advertise with Jobserve. Pricing for a single 7 day job posting starts at £100 + Vat.
Specialist IT job board with 300,000 IT professionals and over 25,000 jobs per day.
Specialist IT job board drawing over 320,000 IT candidates a month – Prices start at £199.
Media:
Brand Republic Jobs is a leading specialist jobsite for marketing, advertising and media jobs. Prices start at £499 + Vat.
Guardian.co.uk is the jobs website of the guardian newspaper. The site specifically focuses on sectors including Media, Education, Government, Graduate, Secretarial, Charities, Marketing and Arts among others. Prices start at £750 + Vat.
Lastly there are a range of totally free job websites which employers can use to advertise jobs. These vary in quality but as they’re free it’s sensible to include some of them in your sourcing campaign.
Free search and social media:
Jobs UK list thousands of jobs from many of the Internet’s major UK job boards, agencies and employers. They also take direct feeds from employers and a number of niche job boards in specialised markets.
Twitter is growing hugely in popularity and its rapid adoption by the media and technology community has created a platform for reaching large numbers of users. Twitter job search allows employers to advertise their jobs to the twitter community.
Inovahire is a job search engine for jobs in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, China, India, and Australia. Job openings in any country can be posted to the job board for free, you can also search for and contact registered job seekers.
Paid job search websites:
Paid job search websites are job aggregation services which charge a small fee for each person sent to your job advert. These sites function like google by indexing a large volume of jobs and then directing candidates to the jobs which they are searching for. These sites vary in cost and can be used successfully as part of a wider job board strategy.
Simply Hired have millions of job listings worldwide and are one of the largest job search engines. The website consolidates jobs from the top job boards, content sites, newspapers, organizations and company career sites together to offer job seekers a single, powerful job search site.
Workhound offers an aggregated vertical search of more than 700,000 UK job listings sourced from job boards, employment services and company job postings. Workhound.co.uk is the UKs largest search engine for jobs.
Indeed.com is a search engine for jobs, allowing job seekers to find jobs posted on thousands of company career sites and job boards.
Summary
Because it takes time to register with multiple websites, companies often choose to register with just one generic job board and post all their jobs in the one place. A much better recruitment strategy is to target your job posting to the most relevant sites, selecting a range of different job boards rather than just posting all your jobs on the same generic one. Not all the generic job boards will work well for all types of job and occasionally some of them will be totally unsuitable for your advertised role. For this reason, it’s better to choose a selection of job websites to attract a more diverse range of candidates for your positions.
To manage the applications process across a range of job boards it’s a Very Good idea to use an applicant tracking system. These keep track of all the rejected/shortlisted applicants and allow you to communicate with applicants centrally, they also to track the response rates from each job website so that you can tell which website is working well and remove those which are wrong for your role.
For a free, simple and easy to use applicant tracking system which allows you to easily post your job to generic job websites as well as a whole host of other online sources including social media, take a look at www.simplifiedrecruitment.com. The simplified recruitment site is an excellent way for employers to streamline their online recruitment, advertise on multiple job websites cost effectively and keep track of the all the applications.
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