Job Board Scorecard

Does anyone have a scorecard they use for evaluating websites? We are looking for criteria on how to differentiate between various sites. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Permalink Reply by Faisal Javed on November 26, 2008 at 2:12pm

Hi Cassui,

Visit craigslist.org, you will find ranking of most popular job boards on it.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/job_boards_compared

Regards,
Faisal

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Permalink Reply by 01. Lonnie McRorey on November 26, 2008 at 3:19pm

http://www.quantcast.com/

You can compare website activity on target site

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Permalink Reply by Michael Hanson on November 26, 2008 at 3:40pm

Hi Cassie - boards shouldn't be a focus in 2009. Search Engines, Social Networking, and anything Web 2.0 is where you'll be able to leverage a huge passive candidate talent pool - rather than competing for the same active talent on job boards, etc.

You'll notice that Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com are the 51st and 55th most visited websites on the net. Things will begin to look bleak without an organic search presence on Google, Yahoo, and Live in 2009 and beyond. You have a very strong brand that attracts (I'm sure ...) a lot of active candidates - but, how are you bringing in the passives that are on search engines, etc.?

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Permalink Reply by Cassie Dunn on December 1, 2008 at 9:38am

Hi Michael,
Thanks for the info. I guess I should explain my purpose. I am a Sourcer, and I do the passive searches (Google, Yahoo, Live). However, we only have 4 Sourcers currently for 70 recruiters. My project right now is to identify what sites work for which position. We are blessed right now to still be hiring in this economy, and with 1600 positions at the corporate office along, the sheer volume can be a road block. Because of this, we are trying to identify what niche sites work well for others in particular areas of search, so we can leverage absolutely all of our resources. We just have a history of paying for sites that don't work out and we don't have a way to track the ROI. We want to be able to capture this information so that we do not duplicate efforts as a team.

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Permalink Reply by Cassie Dunn on December 1, 2008 at 9:48am

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Permalink Reply by Cassie Dunn on December 1, 2008 at 9:50am

BOTH

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Permalink Reply by John Sumser on December 1, 2008 at 10:51am

These are the right questions to ask.

The difficulties of tracking job board performance and ROI are pretty well documented. A number of companies (Arbita and Hodes come to mind) either offer or will soon offer job board performance tracking.

All of the approaches that work involve tagging job ads and utilizing a separate system to track performance. Most Recruiting and Staffing departments don't accurately track the data. There is no ATS system that accurately follows the job posting effectiveness data.

The results are always going to be company specific. The results will always reflect the current news and economic cycles. In other words, Microsoft's results from any job board have varied over time with the strengthening and weakening of their employment brand. That dynamic is true for every profession and every industry. It's also true for every kind of source.

Market dynamics require continuous adaptation from Recruiters.

Generalizations (approach A is always better than approach B) are not very useful, either. Each job class in each company represents a specific set of market supply and demand variables to be solved. The labor market shifts quickly and is really very local.

Part of the dynamic is the "fishing hole" syndrome. Once the word gets out that Source X is a really good place to find Synthetic Biology Engineers, everyone starts to flock there. The result is that Source X gets over used. The ratio of candidates to Recruiters falls. The source declines in value.

That's why so many people are turning to community pipeline development; the technique of identifying all of your candidates for the next three to five years and building relationships with them. Again, it's one tool in the toolkit.

The ideal model involves a systematic approach to decision making. Sourcing and Recruiting demand different workflows depending on the time criticality, general labor supply in the job category, employment brand and so on. A thorough approach to your company's recruiting strategy will offer guidelines for these decisions.

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Permalink Reply by Norman L. Harris on December 3, 2008 at 3:24pm

Hi Cassie,

John Sumser mentioned a useful source to track external job board performance -- Bernard Hodes. My company bought a license that gives us access to their "SmartPost" system. Their site scraps our open requisitions 4x per day and houses them on the back end. When we are ready to post a requisition externally we choose the media we want to use, tag that media, and launch the requisition. SmartPost does provide useful information about each job board you use: how many people viewed the posting, how many candidates were pushed to your corporate site, what part of the day and day of week candidates viewed your posting as well as time of day/week they were pushed to your corporate site. You can also determine (by viewing a graph) when your posting starts to loose it's luster on the site. Tracking in your ATS may be daunting especially if you receive hundreds of bids for a single requisition. A best practice for us to drill down source when we screen the candidate and edit source description in our ATS to reflect the true source. In summary, I have found a few components in SmartPost to evaluate ROI for each site. Hope information helps!