3 common — and costly — job ad mistakes
August 11, 2008 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Online recruiting, Special Report
Most companies rely on general job boards for at least part of their recruiting. But how reliable are they?
Not very, say some of the people using them. When asked if most online job boards provide a “quality service” to candidates and companies, more than three quarters of HR pros answered “no” in a recent survey conducted by recruiting expert Jim Stroud.
What are the biggest problems? The boards’ pricing strategy was a big one, as well as the difficulty of searching through resume databases:
- More than 65% said paying for each post failed to get good results at a decent value. Most would prefer to pay only after they found a hire.
- About 55% “strongly disagreed” that resume searching uncovers quality candidates (another 20% “moderately disagreed”).
Get the most out of job boards
If satisfaction is so low, what are companies doing instead? Many have started posting to free job or classified sites (like Craigslist) or using niche sites that cover only specific industries, job types or geographic areas.
That said, the general boards are still popular. When the survey respondents were asked what they do when they have to advertise an opening, the top choice was — you guessed it — “post on general job boards.”
So what can companies do to get more value out of those tools? Avoiding these common mistakes should help:
- Writing a laundry list of “requirements” — Hiring managers sometimes fail to distinguish between skills employees can learn on the job and the qualities and experience they must already have in order to succeed. If the list isn’t whittled down to the necessities, a crop of great talent could be turned away before they even finish reading your ad.
- Being too general — The reverse is also true: Writing a job description with too few qualifications will only result in a flood of undesirable candidates. Help the manager find a balance between keeping too many people out and letting too many in.
- Putting zero thought into titles – To help job seekers find your listing, it’s important to choose an appropriate title. It should include variations on the key words that candidates are likely to search with. For example, using both “registered nurse” and “RN” in the heading of an ad will help increase your search engine exposure.
What has your organization done to improve its online recruiting? Let us know by leaving us a comment below.
Tags: classified, job board, Online recruiting
August 11th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Well, let me give you one tip for getting the most out of job boards; don’t use them. Really, the differences between job boards and recruiters — the other form of online hiring — are thought of as primarily price-oriented. With a job board you pay less but have a MASSIVE pool of resumes to wade through pretty much on your own (depending on the job board, some have pretty good search functions). In my opinion it goes even deeper than this, because a recruiter can get to know applicants one-on-one and play to their strengths; by the time the candidate reaches you he or she has “connected” with another person (they’re more than a resume). But, in terms of investment, at my company we had to switch to a recruiting system because the time suck on our HR crew was ridiculously costly (they also couldn’t write a decent job ad if they were being mauled by cougars and the cougars agreed to stop mauling if they would simply compose a decent job listing for a new cougar start-up). It takes a lot of energy to create those connections with candidates you think are worthwhile; recruiters sort of do that for you, which is worth the 25% year’s salary (and actually recruiting marketplace sites like Dayak, who we use, take less than that, which is what tipped the scale for us in the end).
But, I’m being pretty negative and I admit that the last two jobs I’ve gotten were off job boards. Does anyone out there use them to their advantage?
August 12th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I am sitting here today because I found this job on our local newspaper’s job board. The online posting comes free with a paid print ad-but I wasn’t looking in the paper, I had the new job alerts sent to my email everyday. So, they can be very useful in my opinion!
August 12th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I work for a small Non-Profit Agency and I have had a lot of success with job boards - specifically CareerBuilder. The last 7-8 hires have all been candidates from CareerBuilder. We saved money by striking a deal with a much larger for profit agency to “buy” some of their job posting slots. I would post the job online and in some instances also advertise in our local papers as well. I liked using the boards because I could go into much greater detail about the job - requirements as well as duties - that helped to bring in much more qualified candidates then did the newspaper ads. I have good writing skills - I write all the copy for all the ads as well as update our internal job descriptions. I did get a tremendous number of responses for some of our postings (upwards of 300 in less than a month) but have become very adept at wading through them.
That being said, I did find that when I used the resume search it was cumbersome and something I had to spend time tweaking to get the type of candidates I wanted. I also found that very few people responed to my emails about open positions.
Certainly boards are a work in progress. I would not use them exclusively, but have found them to be a valuable addition to my recruitment arsenal.
August 12th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I am HR at a large non-profit. We don’t deliberately use the for-pay boards, choosing the state free service instead. We get more than enough applicants that way. We also post on our website, school sites, and local papers. I’ve encountered a problem with one local paper where they require that we also post on Monster if we run the job ad in their paper. This has increased our “reach” but we really don’t need the national exposure through Monster. Still, we pay for having it on Monster since we need to have it in that local paper. The paper won’t drop that income stream. My time to hire, from when it hits the ‘Net to hire, is usually less than 2 weeks.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Like everyone else, I track where the resumes come from and the % of hires from each source. And yes, we do use online job boards with some success. But I don’t necessarily worry about eliminating “useless” resumes from flooding my inbox. Overshooting for jobs is a fact of life and millions do it. Targeted boards help for the specialty jobs. On the whole, I guess I’d rather have more resumes than fewer resumes since I recruit for different positions.
As far as improving the ad content, I specifically went back to managers and asked what they were REALLY looking for, minus the generic answers they all give (work ethic, organizational skills, ability to multi-task, etc.) Most of them gave me their answers, not by responding to my question, but by the feedback they gave me after each interview.