Any job board operator will tell you that one of the toughest things about keeping your site running well is ensuring that you have a steady flow of the right kind of candidates. What exactly is the ‘right kind of candidate’? Well, this would a candidate that is qualified for a particular job AND responds to that job. If you have enough of these candidates, your employers will be happy and they will pay to use your site.

Problem is, finding these candidates is easier…

Do you ever feel like your head will burst if you have to create or remember another login/password combo? Sure, your browser tries to help (at least mine does), prompting helpfully to ‘remember’ the login – usually. But that’s specific to your computer. What happens when you’re away from it? If you’re like me, you try to stick to a few combos and keep them in your head.

So what does this have to do with job boards and career sites? Plenty. If you use…

I’m a great believer in stealing ideas. Think about it: are most successful businesses truly original? Not often – instead, they take an idea and perfect it, then execute skillfully. (This applies to art, music, and literature, too – if you listen carefully, you’ll hear Matthew Sweet stealing from The Beatles, who stole from Buddy Holly, who stole from Hank Williams, who stole from….).

Are there ideas out there that are worth stealing for your job board? You bet! And…

There have been a lot of blog posts here over the years – 120, to be exact. Some faded quickly, and some didn’t. So I thought it might be useful to have a roundup of what I consider to be the most interesting and useful (if not always successful) posts. Hope you like them!

• People, Balance & Technology: The…

I'm conducting a survey on how recruiters (and job seekers) use online recruiting tools - and I would love it if you could help! It will take about 3-4 minutes of your time - and I will send you the results if you like.

So how about it? To participate, click here:  Online Recruiting Survey

Thanks,

Jeff Dickey-Chasins

Job Board Doctor

Imagine that you’re one of the thousands of job boards that provided Indeed with job postings from its inception. Imagine that in addition to providing those jobs (which turned Indeed into the most visited job site on the web), you also spent money promoting those same jobs – thus providing Indeed with a lucrative source of income. Imagine that, in return, Indeed provided your job board with a stream of inbound referrals (both organic and…

As recently as several years ago, it was considered standard operating procedure for job seekers to post their resumes on as many job boards as possible. Why?Visibility. Employers and recruiters used the job board resume databases to find possible hires, so it made sense to have your resume in as many places as possible. Job boards encouraged this behavior because it made the resume access features easier to sell to employers.

Enter LinkedIn. It was…

One of the first business lessons I learned many years ago was that it is often better to havemany smaller customers than fewer large ones. At the time, I was learning the ropes from a battle-hardened magazine publisher. He said (in reference to my naive comment that I would rather have Microsoft as an advertiser than a dozen smaller ones), “Where are you when your big customer decides to ‘shift focus’? Your loss will be 100% of income, rather than 15% or 20%. How long does…

The times they are a-changin’ – and Mr. Zimmerman never even envisioned the internet, much less job boards. One way or another I end up looking at a lot of online recruitment sites – some aimed at employers, some at job seekers, some at who knows what. Examining sites is, in my opinion, extremely worthwhile – there are always ideas to ‘borrow’ and ideas to avoid. So, without further ado, let’s go on a

magical mystery job site tour:…

There is a lot of activity in the online recruiting industry now – more than I’ve seen in many years. Money is flowing in, startups are blossoming, and established players are branching out.

So why now? Part of it stems from the (slow) retreat of the recession – more people working means more interest in finding candidates. Part comes from the rise of social media and mobile, spurring innovation and new thinking about old recruiting…

Why do job seekers go to job boards? Ahem – to find a job.

I might add that’s why they network, Tweet, post profiles on LinkedIn, and troll through company career sites. They just want a job. Right?

Well, no. Not exactly. They want a lot more than a ‘job’. They in fact have an entire laundry list of desires:

• work that fits their skill set
• work that pays well
• work that lets them…

Go to any animal shelter and you will usually see pets that simply got too big for their owners – hulking St. Bernards, twelve-foot pythons, walking catfish, and so on. It’s easy in hindsight to blame the owners. But the owners weren’t thinking about how big the animal would one day become; they were focused on how much they wanted it.

Since roughly 2005, job boards have lived with aggregators such as …

Although it may not seem like it at times, the job board industry is a technology-driven industry. After all, it was the combination of a database and the web that gave it birth so many years ago. After a fairly lengthy period of incremental and erratic technical growth, the industry is seeing lots of change – and I suspect that those sites that ignore these changes may suffer.

So, which technologies (and technology trends) are changing job…

Mobile is omnipresent – at times it seems as though more people are on their mobile devices that actually talking to each other. Butwhat role is mobile playing in recruitment?

This was the question I set out to answer a few months back. (Thanks again to my co-sponsor on this endeavor, AllTheTopBananas!). The survey, which was targeted at HR and recruiting professionals in the U.S.…

In the beginning, there was the job board, and the candidates rejoiced. So many jobs! So many locations! So much easier than paper.

The employers liked it, too.

But after a while, candidates realized that general boards were, well….general. They discovered that many (er, most) jobs were inapplicable to their interests. So they asked the job boards to make things easier. “Help us find just the jobs we want!”

Job board operators responded in a variety of…

Back in the dark ages, when the Job Board Doctor was first learning the mysteries of sales and marketing, he was told that he should “sell benefits, not features.”

Fast forward, umm…many years. I’m still telling clients (and myself) to focus on the benefits, not the features. You think I would’ve learned by now!

It’s a tough lesson to learn. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to list the new, snazzy, ‘gee whiz’ features that your job board has:…

There has been a spate of articles recently about TheLadders – specifically, how the site is a bad deal for job seekers. To wit:

when I see the new commercials for The Ladders, I want to puke on my shoes…the jobs on The Ladders can be found on sites like LinkUp, …

There's a lot of talk about the use of mobile technology and tools in recruiting - but not a lot of data. I'm hoping you'll help me rectify that by taking a short (3 min) survey - whether you're already doing mobile recruiting or not. Here's the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/98QJHNR

Your responses are completely anonymous, and the survey results will be freely available to everyone - in…

Predictions are a dime a dozen – and if you’re lucky, no one goes back at the end of the year to see how accurate your…