Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

As you are posting your job ads across the web, what are the job boards and websites that you distributing your jobs to? It's been estimated that there are anywhere from a few thousand to over 40,000 job boards across the web (depending on your definition of job board), these range in two main categories: major job boards and niche job boards (job search engines are a different animal which we'll talk about in Part 2).

The major job boards are boards like Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs. These boards typically have high numbers of unique monthly visitors and allow you to post jobs for any industry or position.

The niche job boards are boards that cater to a certain profession or industry. These boards may be run by an association or an individual in the industry and while they might have less unique monthly visitors it is a more targeted user base that visits these sites.

So which job boards should you post your job on. Let's compare them and their key differences to find out:

Reach - The major job boards reach multiples more people than niche job boards do and therefore provide you with more opportunities to find the perfect candidate. Even the best niche boards will receive a good deal less traffic than the major job boards.

Audience - While the major job boards provide considerably more reach, the candidates that they help you reach may or may not be what you a looking for (as they cater to many different jobs and industries). Niche boards do a great job at providing job opportunities to a select targeted profession or industry so usually candidates who view your job on a niche board will be in the profession or industry you are recruiting for. (i.e. Only IT professionals would visit an IT niche job board.)

Price - Major job boards usually carry high prices due to the amount of monthly traffic they receive with these prices rising over the last few years. Niche job boards on the other hand usually provide flexible inexpensive listing options to employers and some are free resources.

While there are some more differences, these three a key differences you should take into consideration as you launch your recruitment marketing campaigns. Most importantly, you should measure and test the effectiveness of both major and niche job boards in your recruiting campaigns.

Find a way to get recruitment metrics and analytics that enable you to measure Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Applicant and see which boards give you the greatest recruiting ROI. I think you be surprised with what you find.

FYI: If you are looking for niche job boards to use in your recruiting campaigns, here's a great list by Eric Shannon that is a great resource: Top 100 Niche Job Boards 2009

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Specialist of SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly provides a recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies to easily launch or more importantly measure the performance of their job ads anywhere on the web (major job boards, niche job boards, social networks, job blogs, etc.)