For RSS and e-mail subscribers it should come as no surprise I am not a big fan of most job boards - that is - the way that they are typically used by most organizations and candidates. For new readers, welcome, and here are a couple of posts to set the stage:

* Seriously, this is the candidate experience in a web 2.0 world?
* Reasons to slash your job board spend by 30% to 50% today!

Since most job boards are not effective, it wouldn’t be a big loss if they were obsolete. Don’t believe me (or you work for a board)? Here are five examples of problems today with some of the boards:

* For the most part, candidates need to register on the job board and then at some point, register on your career site. So, let’s build up their database, and pay to access it. Wouldn’t an agency model make sense for corporate recruiting functions? Your database and competitive intelligence is your goldmine, and the starting point for everything.
* For organizations that do not use branding templates for their postings, the job listings are filled with clutter and paid advertising. Again, the board is the winner here.
* They become a crutch for Recruiters, and give a bad rap to some recruiting functions… We’ve all heard about “posting and praying”. Well, there is a bright side - agencies stay in business with the current model.
* For some organizations and job postings, it is too easy for unqualified candidates to apply. This creates clutter and unnecessary work in the system.
* Without an effective tracking system, it is nearly impossible to track the effectiveness of your job board spend and ROI. As an example: A candidate, like the 100 million that did last month, start their job search on google. They enter “financial analyst job, new york“. Take a look at just the first page and the results. Out of the first 10 results, 9 of them are from different job sites. So when the candidate clicks on one and eventually applies to your opening, where does the credit go? Google, the job board, your corporate site? The fact of the matter is there are thousands of job boards, and they’re not all listed on your site (if you are still asking candidates the source). And if you are, experts agree, that 90% of the data is not accurate. Take the example above - what would the candidate say the source was? They may have seen the job on a networking site or received a call from a contact before even going online to search.

The impact of job boards becoming obsolete (which they’re not anytime soon) would change recruiting as we know it. Have they made hiring quality talent more effectively and efficiently?

There are boards that continue evolving with changing technology, and they do deserve some credit.

What can you do? Be an innovator. Start testing the waters with alternative online recruiting methods before your competition. The other alternative is do your homework, prove the decline in site traffic, quality hires, and hiring ratio’s to negotiate a better deal. You may be surprised and save the 30% to 50% right there, and everything else becomes self funded.