The Problem With Job Boards
Posted by Mitch on 21st October 2014
Job boards are widely regarded as obvious places to source candidates for jobs under 40K.
But as their use has become more embedded in recruitment culture and more recruiters are chasing a limited pool of candidates, logic dictates that each is going to attract fewer candidates.
But there’s another problem.
They’ve made candidates lazy.
They upload their CV and wait for the phone to ring. Nothing wrong with that in principle – the problem starts when you start engaging with them.
Then, for some strange reason many of them start acting like they’ve been headhunted.
That they have been carefully selected. That somehow they’re special.
It’s possible they’ve acquired this mindset as a result of all the calls they’ve had from young agency recruiters with less than a years experience calling themselves “Executive Search Consultants” or “Talent Acquisition Managers”, when the reality is they’re little more than keyword punters.
I mean seriously, how many times have you listened to a candidate in an interview or read on a CV that they “were headhunted” into one or more of their previous jobs – when the reality is they were culled from a database?
The reality is that job board databases are primarily a way of creating an ad response without running an ad.
I wish candidates realised this.
I also wished they didn’t waste so much time engaging with recruiters who are statistically most likely to waste their time.
So, there’s the impending next challenge for the job board industry.
Find a way of educating their registered candidates into learning how to filter out those phone calls from recruiters that are worth engaging with.
Rather than them putting their feet up and waiting for the interviews to start rolling in just because they’ve had 10 conversations with enthusiastic agencies, nearly all of whom they’re not going to hear from again.
Anyone else feeling this, or is it just me?