If you missed the 1st part, check it out: Job Ad Posting Distribution: Rise of Niche Job Boards.

For the second part of this series, we’ll take a look at Job Search Engines, describe what they are and the inherent advantages they provide when distributing your recruitment marketing campaigns.

What is a Job Search Engine?

A job search engine is exactly what it’s title suggests: a search engine for jobs. Think of it as Google built exclusively for job positions. Basically how it works is the website will send a bot out to search the web for any new job positions that are listed on webpages that have been crawled by them before. This happens automatically every so often to keep an updated list of positions that are open. Job Seekers can then search through these job based on particular parameters (location, keywords, etc.) to find jobs that match their qualifications and interest. Once they want to apply, they click on the link and are taken to the job site where the search engine pulled the position from to apply.

The two best known job search engines are Indeed and SimplyHired.

So what do these job search engines provide over job boards and social networks. Here’s a few:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): While job boards do pretty good work at remaining high in Google rankings (niche boards are great at this), job search engines do a great job at this well, ranking on the first page consistently for broad and more specific job search terms (i.e. Marketing jobs or Marketing Associate jobs)

Free Listings: For Indeed and Simply Hired a regular listing is absolutely free (they do charge for sponsored listings). So after you get into their job search engine, you get all the SEO benefits at no cost.

Applicants come to your job site: When your job listing appears in a job search engine, the link to the job will take you to the employers job site to apply. This is a benefit as you are able to control the look and feel of the application process that the candidate goes through. Whether it is including interactive content like a Web Commercial or pointing them to your Careers Page after they submit their resume it gives you an opportunity to enhance your employer brand in a candidates eyes.

Job Search Engines are a useful and free tool that can help you reach a greater number of high quality candidates. Take a look at Indeed and SimplyHired and check if your jobs are showing up in search results. If they aren’t make sure to add your career site to their listings so your jobs can be listed in their results. It may be the best 5 minutes you spend as it will pump out your job positions from then on out.

Most importantly, make sure to measure how job search engines perform against their job board and social network counterparts!

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly provides a recruitment marketing platform that enables companies to easily launch and more importantly measure their recruiting efforts online.