Jobs Board: 12% success

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 - Job Application, Jobs Board

Jobs Board: 12% success

I was listening to an online radio show recently, and was surprised to hear the founder of a major jobs board publicly state that only 12% of jobs are fulfilled through job boards.

It wasn’t that this ratio came as a surprise to me, either as a recruiter or a Professional CV writer. It was just that it was a job board owner stating what those of us in the employment industry already know.

Job search

When you start a job search, and its probably been a while since you have done that, you learn about the new and easy way of getting a job called jobs boards. These seem to have multiple advantages over the old style newspapers:

• More jobs
• A greater variety of jobs
• More employers
• You can spot/avoid the recruiters

Well, all that is true. But, the reality of the job search market is that:

• One third of jobs are never advertised: they are fulfilled by internal promotion
• One third of jobs are fulfilled by known job applicants: these are either people from existing suppliers, partners or competitor companies. This is the biggest growth sector in employment, through companies offering incentives to existing employees to find new recruits, representing now around 8% of the employment market
• Residual third are fulfilled by some form of job advert system: either through recruiter networks, or employers directly placing job adverts in newspapers or on job boards

Therefore, having grabbed almost half of the total potentially available market share in around five years, shows the great success of the jobs board market. Hence why most newspapers now have an online jobs board presence.

But there had to be a downside to jobs boards.

Human jobs boards?

As a job application made via a jobs board is no longer a human interaction, the average job seekers chances of standing out as different to everyone else are limited, and hence the chances of your being rejected are higher.

Many corporate job boards recognise this human interaction problem, by putting some form of test in the job application process. Often these are based on some form or another of psychological theory. The concept is that only the type of people who both show the right type of skills for that job, and would fit with the culture of that organisation, will get through to the point in the job application process where the job applicant interacts with an employee of the company.

Even if you agree with psychological testing and screening, what does it say about a company that wants to employ human beings, and yet asks them to deal only with computers when they want to join them?

Jobs board business model

The second major problem with is the job boards business model. As the job board market is fairly easy to enter – £2000/$3000 or less – the competition is fierce between job board owners. This result means that the major business model which survives is the one where job seekers are a commodity, and hence are offered the service for free. Money is made on recruiters and employers paying to access databases of open profile job seekers, and advertise their jobs.

However, as competition is so fierce, the cost to advertise is continually decreasing, and hence job boards owners needs new techniques to make more money. One of the simplest is the repeat advert, or the multiple “buy one, get X free.” Both techniques result in the job boards encouraging advertisers to keep the same job adverts rolling around again, and again, and again. The outcome is that in a recent survey on regional job boards, less than 20% of the adverts were both still open and the only copy of that text.

Successful job application

The outcome of both of these problems with job boards is that, as the job board owner summarised, only 12% of jobs are fulfilled by jobs boards.

Job boards should not be dismissed from your job search, but be aware of your chances of being employed when you hit the “click to Submit” button. There are better and quicker ways of getting employed than one which at best returns 12%.

Good Luck!

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2 Responses to “Jobs Board: 12% success”

1. Tweets that mention Job Boards: 12% success | Professional CV -- Topsy.com Says:
   June 9th, 2010 at 5:14 pm

   [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ian R McAllister, Ian R McAllister. Ian R McAllister said: Job Boards: 12% success http://www.professional-cv.co.uk/jobs-board-success/ [...]

2. Nein Says:
   June 11th, 2010 at 1:39 am

   Nice write up¡! I usually never reply to these things, but this time I will. Thanks for the great info, Regards, Nein