INNERGISE!

Social media is without doubt here to stay and in recruitment we have seen a shift from marketing managing the social media channels to recruiters having their own voice. With this change recruiters have utilised social media channels as recruitment tools by engaging with and approaching candidates directly. Whilst this isn’t a new method of recruiting it has certainly made the process easier and more cost effective by allowing these conversations to happen online.

Something we often hear if there is still a need for job boards now social media is becoming more of a recruitment tool. From our point of view the answer is yes, let me expand.

Job boards and social media (we’re lumping LinkedIn into social media for the purpose of this article but we see it as a separate tool to social media channels and job boards) are different and were built for different purposes. Job Boards were solely built as a platform for recruiters/organisations to advertise their jobs and search a database of CVs from active candidates, and on the flip side, for candidates they are a quick way of searching for jobs as well as uploading CVs for recruiters/organisations to search through and approach with any suitable jobs. Social media channels were built to connect groups of people, share, exchange and engage with information in a community environment (and of course share photos of your cats, baby scans and what you had for dinner). Different purposes = different results.

Job boards are a great way to advertise your jobs here are a few reasons;

• Job boards are still attracting high volume of candidates and are experiencing an upward curve in number of applications per job.
• Established job boards have great visibility in google. Many candidates are now searching for jobs via google, typing the job they are looking for and the location, the returned results are job board urls not social media.
• There are many different types of job boards available from the big names with broad job ranges from the specialist job boards. This gives better scope when choosing where to place your adverts.

However, to really see a return on investment for advertising on job boards, they need to have the same time and attention dedicated to them that we are now spending on social media.

Job adverts – A well written job advert will attract the right type of candidate, a basic job description posted on a job board will not get the same high calibre of candidate. The job advert itself is the most important part of advertising a job (regardless of where it is going) and is often what gets rushed to get the job posted and online. It takes time to craft a job advert and recruiters need to get into the mind-set of spending time selling the job and the client to their full potential.

Many job adverts start ‘Our client is looking for...’ is this what the candidate wants to hear? Is it an attention grabbing start? Probably not, your client is probably more exciting than that first line indicates to the candidate. Think about what a candidate wants to know and the type of candidate you are looking for. Think of the language used by that type of candidate and adopt that style of writing. Give an insight into what working for that company will really be like, not just a bullet point list of the job requirements. 

Choosing the right job board – Choosing the right job board to advertise on is also important for getting the right results. Try googling the type of job you are advertising in the location and see what results would come up for a candidate doing the same thing, this can give a good steering on the type of jobs advertised on the job boards as well as the job boards used. The great thing about job boards is that there are many specific job boards out there that cater for particular industries – whilst going for a niche board might not get the same volume of applications the type of candidate applying might be more suitable.

In the second part of our Job Boards vs Social Media blog post we will look at job boards as a candidate database and how social media can be used to fill the gap of searching for candidates.