My favorite weather site is WeatherUnderground. For some obscure, probably cookie-driven reason, I tend to see a lot of HR-related ads there. A few SHRM and iCIMS ads, for example.

The other day I noticed a corporate blue banner that said “Job Boards Are Broken”. It led to TheLadders.

This had me scratching my head, because: a) TheLadders is a job board. Really.; and b) I didn’t realize job boards were broken.

Well, marketing hyperbole aside, it got me thinking. How might a job board be ‘broken’? 

• the job board failed to deliver on its promise (i.e., a certain number of candidates or job applies)
• the job board’s results were out of line with its pricing
• the job board failed to deliver results as quickly as the customer wished

I’m sure there are some other ways a job board could be broken, but these came to mind first. What do these really boil down to? Results, on time, at a competitive price. Sounds pretty simple, eh? But you know it isn’t. Any recruiter or HR pro who has tried to locate multiple qualified candidates for a sheaf of jobs knows just how hard it can be.

So, ask yourself: is your job board broken? How do you know? 

Well, you have to start somewhere, and I will suggest starting with the customer. What are his or her expectations? How many candidates or applies or whatever do they expect? How quickly? At what price? You have to take the answers with a grain of salt – but if you ask them consistently, across enough customers, patterns will begin to emerge. You may, for instance, discover that 80% of your customers expect at least 30 applies per job, that they’re willing to pay $199 a post to get them, and that they want the applies within 7 days.

I didn’t say you would necessarily like the data.

But think about it: if your job board could routinely deliver the results that 80% of your customers want – consistently – do you think you’d have to worry about them thinking that your site was ‘broken’? Probably not. And if you marketed the fact that you could deliver those results – well, you might have more customers. More referrals. More revenue.

I’m not going to get into whether or not TheLadders is broken…