What are Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators?

Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators are online recruitment websites that offer something to both candidates and recruiters.

They offer candidates a single place to find jobs from many job boards, recruitment agencies and employers. To recruiters they offer another viable job advertising channel.

What is a Job Search Engine or Job Board Aggregator?

Traditional job boards work by allowing companies and recruitment agencies to post vacancies onto their websites. Recruiters pay to post their jobs and candidates generally apply to those jobs via the job board website.

Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators are different in that they list jobs from many job boards, recruitment agency websites, employer careers sites and other places. Indeed, they don’t actually “advertise” jobs as such but, rather, republish jobs that they have “pulled” from these other sites. In this way, then, they act as “Google-like” search engines for jobs.

Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators also differ from traditional job boards in that they don’t require users to login or apply via their own websites. The Job Search Engine lists jobs and then redirects candidates to the original website to apply for the job.

Clearly, by bringing jobs from multiple sources together into one place, Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators offer real benefits for candidates. Rather than having to search national, local,generalist, niche and trade job boards, candidates can simply go to one Job Search Engine and find all the jobs from all these job boards and recruiters in one place.

Types of Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators

To get all these jobs from multiple sources into one place takes some effort. How they do this is where Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators differ from each other. Some Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators simply “scrape” jobs from other websites. That is, they go to the websites, copy the jobs and then republish them on their own site. (These job boards tend to make their money by running google ads on their sites and hoping that candidates will click on them.)

Another type of Job Search Engine or Job Board Aggregator works on a paid-inclusion basis. That is, job boards, websites or recruiters pay a small fee to have their jobs included on the Job Search Engine or  Aggregator. In addition, recruiters can often pay to have their job ads “enhanced” or “featured” or in some way “promoted” in search results on the Job Search Engine.

Another type of Job Search Engine or Job Board Aggregator works by listing jobs for free on their site but charging recruiters every time a candidate clicks on a job listing.

Recruiting with Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators

Whatever way the jobs are collected and the service priced, Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators are only successful if they work for recruiters. And that means they have to work for candidates. Firstly, Job Search Engines or Job Board Aggregators have to ensure that the jobs they list are actually real live jobs (listing out-of date jobs is a significant issue for many Job Board Aggregators.) Secondly, with so many different ways of structuring job data on so many different websites, Job Search Engines have to ensure that they present their job listings in a simple and efficient way for candidates. Some Job Search Engines struggle to provide accurate working links back to original live jobs.

With all this in mind, it is clear that Job Search Engines and Job Board Aggregators succeed or fail depending on how well they meet these challenges. While they do offer compelling advertising options for recruiters, they still tend to be favoured by professional recruitment businesses rather than employers.

Next step? Check out these articles

• When is a job board not a job board?
• What is a niche job board?
• Job board advertising for employers
• An Introduction to Job Sites and Job Boards