Staffing Insider Issue 2 - Job Board Recruitment

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Despite all the noise about online social networks and Twitter, job boards will continue to be the primary medium for recruitment advertising for many more years. Recruiters want everybody to see their advertisements but only want the most qualified candidates to apply. We disburse over 30,000 job postings to dozens of Canadian job boards each year. Here are a few things we’ve learned about Recruitment Branding, Target Marketing, Key Word Use, Recent Trends and a helpful list of Canadian Job Boards.

Online Recruitment Branding

When posting jobs online, it’s just as important to pitch your company as it is to describe your employment opportunity. Consistent corporate branding that promotes your company’s mission, vision, values and attributes will eventually create a lasting impression in the minds of your target audience. Great companies attract great people.

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

Like any form of internet advertising, consistent messaging, frequency of impressions, eye catching animated graphics and Web 2.0 concepts are all necessary to develop a corporate brand and increase advertising response. The virtual nature of the internet in allows small companies to appear big or new companies to appear established. A practically unknown company can seem very popular when branded correctly. A simple text based recruitment advertisement will probably underperform on a stand alone basis, but can be very effective if there are other branding techniques in play that create candidate confidence.

Impressions

Advertising frequency or “impressions” is the first step in developing an online recruitment brand. You will get much better results on a per posting basis if you have many jobs posted simultaneously.

Hyperlinks

Imagine the difference between a big party at a popular public venue and a party hosted at your house. You are the centre of attention at your house party. Now imagine a job seeker who finds you on a big commercial board compared to visiting your website. Always use multiple hyperlinks on the big commercial job boards to reroute job seekers to your website where you are the host and centre of attention. A job seeker on your website is not distracted by competitor jobs and other job board features. Make every effort to get job seekers focused exclusively on your company and your brand.

Text is Searchable

Put standardized company information within the text of every job posting. Many companies make the mistake of placing some of their corporate branding information within the graphics of their brand design template. The words contained within graphical images or within a flash animation are not captured by search engines. For example, an advertisement that says “The Global Leader in Auto Parts Manufacturing” must display these words within the text body of the posting rather than within the logo graphics, or the job will not appear in any search results for the words “Auto Parts or “Manufacturing”.

Target Marketing

Your sales and marketing team lives and breathes target marketing, and recruitment advertising should be no different. Select the correct internet medium that appeals to your desired audience. If you broadcast your opportunities on targeted job boards, you will probably discover your candidates with less time and effort. For example, Craigslist is no place to attract a Chief Financial Officer, but it’s free and it might be a great place for a small company to advertise locally for a part-time bookkeeper.

Jobboom.ca is the commercial job board leader in the province of Quebec. Jobboom’s broadcasts send your posting directly to the email of qualified candidates.

Working.com is a great source for professional management, product management and media/communications candidates in BC and Alberta. It’s a national job board that has increased popularity as you move westward across the country. As a regular advertiser on Working.com, you can create an employer corporate profile known as a Home Page Feature to help promote your corporate brand.

Of course, you can’t really go wrong with Workopolis.com and Monster.ca. These recruitment blue chips will eventually yield your desired candidates, but you may have to work hard to differentiate your brand in an overly cluttered space. Workopolis boasts over 90,000 active job postings, so it’s obviously the place to be. You may think that a job posting on a big board will generate too many responses to suit your fancy. You can manage this challenge with a well worded posting allowing job seekers to take advantage of the job board’s sophisticated job search and notification tools.

Later in this article we provide a list of Canadian job boards for various niche markets and locations.

Using Key Words

Job Boards are specialty internet databases that use search engines to match key words within job listings and candidate records. Understanding how these search engines work should influence the words you use. Careful selection of key words can make a dramatic difference in your advertising investment.

Repeat Text - Every job board functions differently. Some job boards index job titles only, while others index the entire body of text. It’s important to repeat the job title in both the Title field and the Text body (job description field), so that your job can be found regardless of the job board technology.

Fill Every Field - It’s important to complete every field when posting a job to an online job board. Blank fields play havoc with database sorting, searching and displaying.

Commonly Used Terms - Describe your jobs with commonly used job titles and business terms that are most likely to be used by the candidate when searching for a job match. For example, if you are recruiting for a “Director of Human Resources”, avoid using titles like “Chief Talent Officer”. Also refrain from using internal lingo like Int-CLK-WP2-B which means bilingual intermediate administrative support with level 2 Word Processing skills within the government. It’s best to just describe the job for what it is.

Use Many Words AND Abbreviations - Search engines don’t know that AR or A/R means Accounts Receivable or that HR means Human Resources. Try to use several variations of descriptive words when writing your job profile. A person looking for a Human Resources job may search using any of the terms HR, H.R., H/R, Recruiter, Recruitment, Personnel, Compensation, Benefits, etc. Adding a laundry list of Key Words at the bottom of every job description will help your posting show up in the results list when the candidate performs a search.

Recent Job Board Trends

A job board’s effectiveness is a function of its ability to attract traffic and then keep visitors engaged. The most successful job boards drive traffic from a variety of interconnected internet properties. Content and functionality influence the visitors’ engagement, which ultimately affects the number of candidate applications. When selecting a job board, research each board’s traffic strategies, related properties, content and functionality.

It was April 1995 when the recruitment advertising agency TMP Worldwide made the risky decision to purchase The Monster Board and became the 454th commercial website in the world. Today, Monster.com is the world’s most popular job board and www.monster.ca is #2 in Canada. Monster does a great job keeping candidates engaged while on their site by offering a variety of high quality resume writing tools, career development information and advice to job seekers.

Workopolis is a purely Canadian monster in its own right. www.workopolis.com overshadows the Canadian job board marketplace in number of job postings, unique visitors and active registered job seekers. Workopolis boasts over 2.5 million visitors per month and over 90 thousand active job postings. Workopolis has relationships with Bell Sympatico, The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Campus Connections and several niche job boards through their purchase of Brainhunter’s job board platform in 2008.

The current trend is for various online services to cross reference, integrate, co-own and joint venture as much as possible. Collaboration seems to be more effective than the destructive forces of competition. www.working.com is the Canadian Job Board underdog with all the right ingredients to compete head to head with the two biggest players. Owned by Canada's largest media company and largest publisher of Canadian English language daily newspapers, Canwest Global Communications Corporation has web integrated paths and cross marketing through 14 newspapers and 22 television networks and news outlets. Canada.com, also a Canwest property, provides a central point on the internet where every Canwest business is integrated. Every Canwest media outlet including the National Post, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen uses working.com for their online recruitment advertising.

Social Media

The world is a buzz with social media. The internet offers us several robust business networking sites like LinkedIn with over 40 million users. LinkedIn is rapidly becoming an employment networking site more than anything else. Indeed, there may come a day in the not too distant future when a LinkedIn profile will replace traditional resumes.

The immensely popular social networking site Facebook has over 200 million users and can be used in a low key way for job postings. Know your Facebook etiquette before you risk your brand by unintentionally offending hardcore Facebook users.

Twitter and the Blogsphere are fabulous platforms for budding journalists and info-marketing. Video sharing on Youtube is a great place for demo videos. There is nothing wrong with an HR department Tweeting new openings or creating a corporate video profile that is posted on Youtube.

An interesting online recruitment development is emerging within the buy/sell internet sites like Craigslist and Kijiji. They offer low tech, high traffic, free employment advertising sections. GenNext job seekers lean toward Indy-bands, Indy-movies and also tend to stray away from the corporate mainstream job boards and follow the text grassroots job marketplace.

New Media and Social networking sites, by their nature, are not the place to systematically broadcast your postings through a fully integrated end-to-end HRIS process. They all require some form of individual intervention. Most large job boards are trying figure out how to integrate with these popular new formats. It probably won’t be long before your job postings are automatically sent by Twitter to the job boards’ databases of matching candidates. There is one thing for certain; mainstream job boards will leverage new media and social networks. The successful job boards of the future will take the view that if you can’t beat’em – join’em.

A List of Canadian Job Boards

There are five broad categories of job boards, each with a different revenue model.

1. Government run, free to employers.
2. Content sites that want traffic to generate revenue from clicks and other forms of advertising. Usually free to employers. They often copy job postings from commercial and corporate job boards.
3. Commercial mainstream boards generating revenue by selling job posting and database services to employers.
4. Professional industry associations and educational institutions providing employment and recruitment services to their members.
5. Others including social networks, internet groups and buy/sell sites such as Kijiji and Craigslist.

Click here for a list of over 50 Canadian job boards.

While social media sites and Twitter are evolving as new recruitment advertising sources, job boards remain the best place to generate predictable results. We’ll offer more detail on social media advertising in a future issue of the Staffing Insider. We would encourage you to subscribe to our electronic newsletter if you are interested in joining the discussion about HR issues and solutions in the upcoming recovery.


This issue of the Staffing Insider was written by Steve Jones, President of The People Bank, with content contributed from Shelley Trenouth, President of Placement Group. The Staffing Insider is a regularly published insider’s view of human resources issues and staffing industry best practices, trends and success stories. Aimco Staffing Solutions, Allen Professional Search, La Banque de Personnel, Placement Group and The People Bank are all specialty divisions of Design Group Staffing Inc.