Welcome to the whatjobsite May newsletter

In this issue we look at those times when you might need to use more than one job board in your online recruitment advertising. We also give you the results of our April online poll. Alas, we've got no exclusive offers this month; but if you are hiring do check our website for the latest info.

Please feel free to forward this issue to a colleague, and let us know if there are any topics you'd like to see us cover in upcoming issues. We'd love your feedback.

Editor

When one job board just isn't enough

A successful online recruitment campaign is all about reaching the maximum number of relevant candidates and that is all about choosing the right job board. However, even if you choose the right job board, it is seldom the case that it is the only job board that has all of the relevant candidates for your job ad.

Most of the time you will be able to get away with using just one job board, but sometimes you might have to add some others to your campaign. Let's look at how this might happen:-

Let's imagine that Company X is hiring for a Marketing Assistant with online media experience (the circle bottom left); Company Y is hiring for a Marketing Manager with FMCG experience (the circle middle right).

In the graphic we can see that there are many people working as Marketing Assistants (entry level) but that as you move up the career ladder the number of available candidates decreases.

Also, we can see that FMCG is a more "established" industry sector than Online Media and, therefore, offers a larger pool of candidates at both junior and senior level.

Now, let's look at how three different job boards might cover the roles.

Job board A is a typical generalist site and provides a good number of lower level candidates in the more popular industry sectors. It offers a reasonable audience of FMCG Marketing managers but only a small audience of Marketing Assistants with online media experience.

Job board B is a specialist senior Marketing Jobs job board that is also a good bet for our FMCG Marketing Manager job. However, it is useless for our online media Marketing Assistant.

Job board C is a job board that specialises, among other things, in online media. We can see that job board C offers a small audience for our Online Media Marketing Assistant job but would be next to useless for the FMCG Marketing Manager role.

So how would we combine sites?

In the case of the FMCG Marketing Manager, we can see that there is a plentiful supply of candidates with the skill set we require. Therefore, we might be able to get away with advertising on either A or B alone.

In the case of the Online Media Marketing Assistant there is not a plentiful supply of candidates with the skill set we require. Therefore, we might need to use Job board A & Job board C to reach enough relevant people.

So, how many job boards should you use?

It would be wonderful if every time you were going to advertise a job, you could get a detailed breakdown of what areas job boards cover as in the example above. Unfortunately, that never happens. Using whatjobsite will give you pointers as to the strengths of particular sites but you may still have to decide whether to use one or more sites.

With this in mind, we offer below the "whatjobsite rules of thumb for using more than one job board":-

1. The more "standard" the job and the more transferable the skill, the more likely it is that you will be able to fill your vacancy by using just one good job board.
2. The more specific or complicated the skills or requirements, the fewer the number of available candidates will be. Therefore, you may have to consider broadening your advertising to more than one job board to ensure that you find as many of these candidates as possible.
3. Advertise in stages. That is, start with one job board and then after a week or two, add the other/s. The reason for doing things in stages is that, firstly, you will learn what is working and what isn't and, secondly, you will avoid spending on additional sites until you need to.
4. Give yourself plenty of time. The more complicated the job, the longer it's going to take to fill it. This is a rule of recruitment generally and not just online recruitment. Try to take this into consideration when you are recruiting.

We hope this article is of help to you. To read more articles and guides on online recruitment go to our Recruitment Advice Area.

How many job boards do you use to recuit?

Following on from our article above, in April we asked the whatjobsite website users "How many job sites do you use to advertise a job?" It appears that many of our users are already familiar with the stragegy of combining job boards for recruitment success: a full 54% of our users said that they use up to three job boards to recruit; 8.5% use up to 5 job boards to advertise a job; 5.5% use more than 5 job boards; and 32% of our users use only use one job site to advertise their jobs.