With LinkedIn conquering every bit of Recruitment left it’s still a tough run for many job boards to survive. We’ve tried to assimilate their key challenges and how can they be addressed to avoid this aftermath.

Job Boards, if realize their niche early can penetrate in any sphere of Recruitment and rest the real benefits to Candidate and Employers has always been intact. Let’s discuss what these challenges are.

1. LinkedIn- It is indeed the fiercest of all and we have a reason of discussing it in the start owing to its importance. They’ve given all reasons to a company to lower their costs and hire on LinkedIn. Acquiring Bright has further improved their match & selection of candidates for the jobs. But here’s the thing. They can’t beat job boards in holding geographical edge and niche in their respective industries. So if you’ve already got one stick to it or start creating one. Even today LinkedIn doesn’t cater to all kind of jobs. An interesting post by Adam Lawrence of Alexander Mann solutions also conveys the same message.

2. Interface- The big difference lies here. Your website is sloppy and clumsy in providing me the right job or information; as a result, I prefer leaving your website early owing to high bounce rates. So you’ve got to be simple and as easy to be used. Stick to basics and simplify user experience on your website. Candidates should be able to apply or register in just a few or maybe One Click.

3. Search & Match- When technology has affected every business how can be a job board left behind. You ought to have Search & Match technologies that show only relevant jobs to the candidate and relevant profiles to an employer. This would enhance your user experience and in result will bring more visitors on your website. So don’t hesitate to buy a better solution rather going for a cheap one which mocks technology.

4. Social Connections- We simply can’t ignore social logins on our job boards. They ease the process of signing up and create profiles in seconds. Give candidates option to sign up via LinkedIn or Facebook and built mechanism to fetch their profiles. This would increase your submissions and halts exit rate. Job boards should definitely invest in Social Sourcing to stay abreast with technology and trends.

5. Auto-fill forms- Candidate spends very less time on your website and the more you’ll ask from him, bounce rate will go up. Instead, auto-fill the forms either from Resume via Parser or Social Profiles connected with an account. Most of the job boards still don’t realize the importance of having resume parser in place and if we avail it, candidate journey would be quite different from the onset; Complete Automation guaranteed. Be ready to handle more traffic and thus more registrations.

6. Passive Resumes- You’ve got a pile of passive resumes bombed in your database that can’t be used for current jobs. How can I make use of them? Interestingly now with Super Easy tools in the market you can fetch most current online profiles of candidates and present them to employers. With this, you can use your job board to the fullest.

7. Mobile Site- Keep your Job Board website optimized for Mobile as 70% of candidates prefers searching for jobs on mobile only. If possible go for full-fledged mobile app which makes you stand-out from others and leaves an impression both on Candidates and Employers. Give regular updates to candidates with relevant jobs in inbox and option to apply via phone. Of the Fortune 500, only 99 host a career site with a mobile-friendly job-search process, and only 14 of those actually allow users to apply for jobs.

8. Slow Adoption- Rest be ready to adopt above cited solutions for your Job Board with pace as this will impact incoming traffic on your website and registrations. Be handy with your support and FAQ’s as it further helps build great user experience. Job Boards need to find alternatives to engage their audience and solutions to automate their processes. Social Media presence is a must and helps them to remain in touch with their target audience.

9. Niche- As we are nearer to conclude this post, an intriguing question that haunts every job board is its Target segment or niche that it tries to cater; what’s my alternative? A complete roadmap is required to focus on these underlying factors to be at pace with LinkedIn and its acquisition strategies. Any job board that has maximum number of resumes of any specific industry can surface as Industry specialist and distinguish from other job boards.

10. Big Data- The most hyped word of the era; Big Data is still a mystery for many businesses including job boards. We need to have clear objectives, actionable outcomes before we start assimilating Big Data. Also, the final deliverables should help core processes of business to improve, rest insights would be of no use. Job boards can partner with 3^rd party tools that can provide analytics as Add-ons to businesses.

Rest it’s all about the quality that matters in every Industry. As long as you provide top level talent to employers in less time, there’s no way your job board is going down. Avail the benefits of Social Recruiting, Mobile Site optimization and continue serving your niche because job boards aren’t going anywhere as companies continue using them.