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Stop wasting your time and money on job boards

For you job hunters out there I hope you’re spending little, if any, time using job boards…unless you’re looking for an entry level position…or you’re in a passive job search…or if you want to leave your employment destiny to some automaton sifting through hundreds of resumes. Job boards are by and large ineffective. They are little more than glorified want ads. Depending on the source, only 1-10% of jobs are filled through job boards, or 3.5% of available jobs. I don’t know about you, but if I were in the market for a job I wouldn’t be placing any bets. There are far more effective ways to go about sniffing out employment.

3 Reasons you shouldn’t submitting your resume via job board

  • Many jobs are already filled and companies are merely looking to add resumes to their databases
  • Your resume ends up in a database with thousands of others and if you don’t have the “right” keywords on it forget about anyone finding it
  • Quality companies don’t waste valuable time searching for a needle in a haystack

Companies need to heed this message too

The same goes for employers. Stop wasting money to have overworked, and often inexperienced, corporate recruiters post ads and have to sift through hundreds of resumes trying desperately to find the one needle buried in 1000 bales of hay. The candidates you’re looking for aren’t looking for jobs on boards, unless they’re unemployed and/or lower level candidates. In fact, many of them aren’t looking for jobs at all.

Bill Warren, former president of Monster.com, is laughing all the way to the bank because of this herd mentality from both job seekers and employers. He’s founded a “new” type of job board and says things will be different. He’s got some of the big boys investing in it and says this new site will reduce costs to employers. In essence this is still a job board, just with a new twist. And may I repeat? Job boards don’t work.

This is not about reducing costs. You must begin to look at this with regard to increasing your ROI. You do this by finding, hiring and retaining top talent. If you do this, costs will consequently be reduced.

According to David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Efficiently matching applicants and companies is only a small part of the problem when it comes to filling jobs. An employer still has to decide who is the best fit. The challenge for employers has not changed in the Internet age. It’s hard to figure out who is the right person to hire.” It’s refreshing to see I’m not the only one who feels this way. The bottom line is that if you want to recruit “achievers and overachievers” you must go back to search basics. These include, but are not limited to, the labor intensive task of “hunting” for candidates, getting them to talk to you, getting them interested in the opportunity (if they’re even open to hearing about new opportunities), putting them through a well thought-out interview process, and negotiating an offer that will be accepted. And all this must be done by having the organization aligned from the CEO down. You can buy all the software in the world to improve your process, but if you’re not getting the right candidates in the door the process will be unsuccessful.

Creator and Host,

Carol Schultz

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