Eric Shannon recently wrote an insightful article called "Everyone says job boards are dying - so it must be true, right?" where he tackled whether job boards would outlast the social recruiting wave. In the article, Eric provides some great evidence on why this question may be a bit premature (which I encourage you to read) but what really caught my eye was his list of common problems people bring up in regards to job boards:

Why is this such an evergreen subject? Here are several potential reasons:

1. Job boards cost money: Recruiters and HR staff are always short of funding – and job boards have grown more expensive over the years.
2. Job boards haven’t changed: Look at a job site from 1995, and compare it to current sites. In most cases, you won’t see significant differences in functionality or services. Most job boards make their living selling job postings and resume access – just like they did 15 years ago.
3. Where’s the ROI?: Job boards haven’t consistently shown HR what their return on investment is – and because of that lack of data, HR assumes the numbers are poor.
4. The big boards dominate the discussion: When a writer complains about job board, he or she almost always means Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs. Never mind about the other 100,000 sites out there – the venom is reserved for the
   big sites.

Are these complaints justified? Well, I agree with 2 & 4. These job boards are going to have to adapt and re-work the way they do business in order to keep social recruiting at bay. (Also, when I refer to job boards, I mostly am talking about the big three: Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.)

I have some serious disagreements with complaints 1 & 3 mainly because I think they are easily fixable. Companies and recruiters obviously gain value from job boards or they wouldn't use them but the real question is which job boards / web portals provide recruiters with the best bang for the recruiting buck (and are they worth the cost)? Recruiters have two choices when trying to answer this question: wait for the job boards to provide them with decent reporting or be proactive and find a technology solution that can provide them with personalized data on their marketing mix. When given these choices, why wouldn't you pick the latter!?

To put this in perspective, let's take a look at how your company would handle a different marketing initiative: a website re-design. How would your web marketing team measure success? Simple, they would measure the before and after results through a web analytics solutions. From page views to clicks to form conversions to Google rankings, your web marketing team would measure and report on all these metrics and test out different iterations to see how they can increase the ROI derived from the website.

Now let's take a look at the cost. You may spend $40,000 on a full website re-design (with more cost depending on the analytics solution) but this cost probably pales in comparison to the amount of money you spend on recruiting each year. So why does your company not employ similar metrics and analytics to help you better spend these recruiting dollars? The answer is you should.

If you want a solution to your recruiting metrics problem, take a look at SmashFly's recruitment marketing software platform, WildFire. WildFire allows companies to easily launch job campaigns anywhere on the web to job boards, social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) and web ad banners. More importantly, WildFire tracks and measures every one of your job campaigns providing you personalized real-time data (views, clicks, applicants, etc.) on wherever you post your job. This allows you to gain transparency on how job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder perform compared to your Twitter and Facebook profiles or job search engines like Indeed or SimplyHired in recruiting for the same job.

Click here to learn more about WildFire or sign up for a free demo.

And check back to the SmashFly recruitment marketing blog as we will be tackling what ROI you should expect from your recruiting.