Since their very beginnings job boards have been largely straightforward in their revenue model and pricing. In general, job boards operate on a classified ad model. That is, advertisers pay to put their job vacancies on the job board.

There are a variety of ways this works. Most job boards ask a client to pay for each single job they post on the website. So if you have a vacancy, you upload your job ad and pay for it by credit card or something like that. Of course, the more job ads you post the better deals you’ll get on the price.

Some sites, however, operate a slot model, where the client pays for an advertising slot and can run different ads in the slot for the duration of the contract. For example, a client might buy one slot for 4 weeks. In the first week the client posts a first job. In the second week it replaces this job with another. In the third week it does the same. So, there are three jobs advertised in the one slot. While this differs from pay per post it is still, effectively, a classified model.

The truth is that it is rare that job boards move beyond these kinds of pricing approaches. In recent years there have been a number of new and interesting pricing models proffered — though it must be said that none have truly “caught on”

Pay pay click

In this approach, the client pays not for the job ad but rather for each click that the advertising site delivers. This tends to be a very popular advertising model for job search engines (aggregator job boards) and is generally aimed at volume recruiters like recruitment agencies and job boards. While there have been a few job boards that have tried this model for small volume recruiters like direct employers, few have kept it as an ongoing pricing approach. Indeed, from what we can see, most have reverted to the classified model.

Pay per engagement/contact

With this method, clients generally advertise their jobs for free but then have to pay to engage or contact the job applicants. That is, whether the candidate applies for the job ad or the client downloads a CV, the client can’t “engage” with the client unless they pay a fee. Typically, contact information is blacked out and paying releases this information.

Over the last number of years we have seen quite a few companies try this approach but again, this hasn’t really caught on as a standard pricing approach.

Pay per placement

In this case advertising is free but the client pays when the placement is made and accepted by the applicant. Again, a number of sites over the last number of years have launched this approach but none have been able to maintain it as a viable business model.

There are no doubt other job boards out there doing different things but none have really changed the market. In many ways, the challenge facing new job boards with new engagement and pricing models is inertia. The job board industry is long established. People know what they are getting and it bumbles along nicely, thank you very much.

What’s more, most of the quirks and annoyances of online recruitment and job board advertising have been addressed by the online recruitment eco-system. Too many sites? Get a job posting service! Too many applicants? Get a filtering service! Too many emails? Get an ATS.

It is for this reason, inertia, that there have been so few truly exciting developments in the online recruitment and job board sectors over the last number of year. Job board kind of work. And people kine of like what they do and don’t want to change it. The old saw may apply: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Whatjobsite.com was launched in 2007 with the specific objective of providing help and advice on online recruitment and job board advertising.

As part of our continuing and widening goal of providing help and advice in all matters recruitment, we will shortly be launching a new website, whatrecruiter.co.uk, a site that will, we hope, become the definitive directory of recruiters and recruitment agencies in the United Kindgom.

We’ll be sharing more information about this exciting new website in the coming weeks. But if you’d like to stay up to date about whatrecruiter.co.uk, then head on over to the website and sign up for email alerts.

http://www.whatrecruiter.co.uk

Every week at whatjobsite, new job sites ask to be listed in our database of job boards. Most of the time we are happy to include new job sites on whatjobsite. Indeed, we include nearly all sites in our A to Z directory.

However, we do not include all and every job board in our front end home page search engine. In fact, we only include a small proportion of the many thousands of job boards in the UK. We hover between a total of 100 and 120 job sites in our front end search engine.

The reason for our not including every site is that our goal at whatjobsite is to drive recruiters to quality job boards. While there are many thousands of job boards in the UK, the vast majority of them are, sadly, of marginal recruitment effectiveness for employers. For this reason then, we try to limit the job boards we profile to market leaders in their sector.

We are lucky that when we approach most leading job boards they are happy to be included on whatjobsite. Most of the time job boards see the value of what we are trying to do with whatjobsite — point recruiters to quality job boards.

So, most of the job boards in our search engine are either whatjobsite approved websites or our advertising partners. You can spot the approved sites by the approved website image on their profiles. You can spot our advertisers because they have logos and lots of information on their profiles.

But sometimes job boards don’t want to pay to include their site on whatjobsite. That’s unfortunate for us but it could be more unfortunate for our employer users. Just because a job board doesn’t advertise on whatjobsite doesn’t mean it isn’t the best job site at what it does. What do we do then?

Well, the truth is, we do sometimes include such sites in our front end job search database. Clearly, if we didn’t include them on whatjobsite we would not be presenting the best possible online recruitment advertising options for employers.

For this reason then, from time to time, you you will see an ‘unverified site’ in the search results on whatjobsite. Although these sites have not submitted their information to us for verification, our research (and our industry knowledge) suggests that they are the best at what they do. It’s our view that they should be considered as a job board advertising option.

So, when you search our database of job boards for job boards by location or job role or industry sector, you can be sure that while you are not getting every job board you are getting the best!