The number of job boards seem to keep growing. Monster and Careerbuilder were the first to impact the job search market and now aggregators like Indeed, Glassdoor and Google Jobs have an immense number of listings. Then there are the more targeted sites for your particular career niche. Yet, Job Boards have a 2-4% effectiveness rate in helping the individual candidate find a job. Why don’t they work better?
Black Hole
As efficient as the algorithms are to get your resume to the right jobs, the applicant tracking systems of the hiring companies are just as effective in eliminating any resumes that don’t perfectly match their needed skills, experience and keywords. With each job getting an average of 400 resumes these systems eliminate 90% of applicants without any human even looking at the resume.
Cold Listings
The sheer volume of listings is hard to maintain for the posting companies and harder still to penetrate for the job seeker. The best aggregators update their listings multiple times a day, but there are many job boards out there that just copy from other aggregators and don’t go back to the original source to clear out closed orders. With the strong economy the sheer magnitude of open jobs makes it difficult for a company to keep their own career website up-to-date….much less other job boards.
Unlisted Jobs
The ease with which a job seeker can respond to a job posting has actually hurt the job search process. Some companies, and even some recruiters, don’t want to be overwhelmed with resumes, so they don’t even list their open jobs on job boards. They work with external recruiters or hire in-house contract recruiters to do the reaching out to potential hires.
Recruiters and hiring managers are effectively using LinkedIn. The reason this board is more successful than others is the profile/resume of the potential candidate is updated and maintained by that individual. Updating “old” resumes used to be one of the most time consuming jobs for recruiters. Now candidates do it themselves in an open source database. You may not like being inundated with recruiter inmails but when conducting a job search there is no better way to quickly and effectively get your information in the hands of the right people.
