Generalist job sites versus Specialist or Niche job sites

Which are better? Generalist job sites or specialist niche ones? And which type of job site should you use to advertise your vacancies?

Generalist job sites

Generalist job boards are those job sites that cover a broad range of job functions, industry sectors, or locations. These are often the most well-known job sites precisely because they cover all kinds of jobs. Well-known generalist job sites include Totaljobs.com, Jobsite, Monster and Fish4jobs.

Specialist or niche job sites

Specialist or niche job sites are different in that they usually focus on a particular job function, industry sector or location. For example, there are niche job sites that cover accounting jobs; there are niche job sites that cover jobs in the retail sector; there are job sites that cover jobs in London; there are job sites that cover temporary jobs.

For good or ill, that's far from the end of the niche job site story. If there is an area of work you can think of, there is probably a niche job site to cater for it: part-time jobs, contract jobs, jobs for young people, jobs for old people, jobs for ski-instructors, jobs for workers in asbestos, jobs in acting, jobs in property, IT jobs in finance, security jobs in nuclear power, green jobs in construction, sales jobs in digital marketing. The list goes on and on. There are niche job sites for everything.

The difference between generalist and niche job sites

When it comes to posting your job vacancies, there is little difference between generalist job sites and niche job sites. The difference comes, it is said, in the response you get to your jobs. Because generalist job sites cover lots of jobs across many sectors, they attract all kinds of candidates —both good and bad— and, as a consequence, recruiters often suffer candidate spam —that is, too many candidates apply for their jobs.

You might think that having lots of candidates applying for your job would be a nice problem to have. But if you consider that you will have to review, examine and respond to each and every candidate, you will see how being inundated with candidates could become an annoyance —especially if the majority of those candidates are unsuitable. Of course, generalist job sites are well aware of the problem of candidate spam and have introduced increasingly sophisticated candidate screening and filtering processes on their websites to cut down on candidate spam.

Niche job sites, it is said, avoid the problem of candidate spam by focussing on a specialism and, thus, having more suitable candidates. The argument goes that you may well receive fewer candidates, but they will, at least, be relevant.

So, which is the best?

Finding the right person for your vacancy means finding the right job site. And the right people don't particularly care about whether a job site is a generalist one or a specialist. All they care about is whether it has relevant jobs for them.

And, it should be the same for recruiters too. The choice between job sites should not depend on whether one is a generalist or specialist but on the suitability of its audience. Generalist sites deliver good audiences for certain jobs and niche sites for others. Generalist sites, for example, are said to be better at lower level jobs with transferable skills. Niche job sites, on the other hand, are said to be better at higher level jobs with less transferable skills. But this is only a general rule. Every job is different and so is every job site.

As a recruiter part of your task is to find out about the audience of job sites. Using the whatjobsite search engine can help you find relevant job sites quickly, but it is only a starting point. To really know about a job site audience, and be sure of choosing the right one for your vacancy, there's nothing for it but to ring them up and find out. Only then will you know whether a niche site is better than a generalist site.

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