Job Boards: Ten years on and millions of jobs later

In the fall of 1995 I attended a seminar on technical recruiting. The last hour was devoted to the internet as a potential recruiting resource. The presenter got us all excited about what the future held ñ there would be this great meeting ground between candidates and employers. Vast clearing houses of information that ensured candidates were matched with the right jobs, no matter where they might be. Recruiters would go online and find candidates for any job that came open (albeit slowly ñ 56K modems were just beginning to be available). The presenter told us about a website called the Online Career Center that was to be the genesis of this revolution ñ best of all, it was free. It sounded like a lot of hype but I was enthralled by the potential. At the time I worked for a small software company that was desperately in need of talent but had no money to pay search firms or even for recruitment ads. We were lucky to make payroll every month so the possibility of having this great resource sounded like manna from heaven.

Fast forward to 2005 and the revolution has fizzled, if it ever was a revolution to begin with. As with most things, the hype was far from the reality. Jobs boards have advanced marginally at best in their ability to match candidates with jobs. Estimates of the percentage of jobs filled through major job boards put them in the single digits (CareerXRoads Sources of Hires Report). At that level of success in filling jobs and given that some boards have about 25 times as many candidates in their resume databases as jobs listed, the probability of a candidate finding a job through a job board are less than a quarter of one percent! Thereís a reason all those Super Bowl ads never mention the success rates. Perhaps they should get their own blimp, since itís all so much hot air.

Of course itís not a numbers game and probabilities are just that. Even a high probability is no guarantee of results. Still, such low numbers suggest that posting a job on a board is a poor investment for employers and largely a waste of time for candidates. How did we get to this sorry state of affairs? For starters we never left it ñ job boards today are no different than they were at their inception ñ just an electronic version of the classifieds. Yes, they do offer some bells and whistles not available to the print ads ñ such as the ability to search, store resumes, etc. but those features are not productivity multipliers for either employers or candidates. For employers the situation has been made worse by job boards. The ease of applying to multiple jobs results in postings generating masses of responses. Most recruiters are familiar with the adage ñ Boards are great at generating resumes, poor at filling jobs. Given the low odds of finding a job through a board itís not surprising that candidates apply to just about anything they see. If youíre going to play the lottery your odds of winning go up with each ticket you buy.

For candidates a job board (and to some extent the entire recruiting process fostered by the web) is a particularly frustrating experience. First, locating an appropriate job on a board is predicated on being able to come up with the right search terms. Since the vast majority of people have no idea how to search, they end up casting a wide net, and catching a lot in it ñ some useful, mostly useless. The search features provided to assist candidates in their search are some help, but these, by necessity cannot narrow searches much either. The terms used have to be generalizations to keep the lists small and usable. And the number of criteria cannot be large if the searches are to be manageable by candidates. So for a candidate the choices are to either wade through large numbers of jobs or just apply for as many as possible. Obviously, the path of least resistance is the one most often followed. Failing this approach a candidateís only other recourse is to leave her resume in the boardís resume database and hope that some recruiter, that manages to come up with the right search terms, will land on it. Either way, this is a very inefficient model.

Whatís even worse for candidates is that they get absolutely no feedback on their efforts. They have no way of knowing why they did not meet with success. Again, this fosters a need to apply for as many jobs as possible. The usual arguments advanced to defend this are that a) employers are not obligated to provide feedback to candidates; b) providing feedback opens employers up to potential litigation; c) its too much work; and d) employers pay the bills for the boards and not candidates ñ ergo they have all the power. This line of reasoning, especially d), is exactly why the job board model has not advanced in ten years, and shows no signs of doing so either. The litigation excuse is the typical boogie-man logic employed by HR and Employee Relations departments that so endears them to the rest of their organizations. Think how much better a relationship an employer would have with candidates if it provided them feedback on where they fell short. Of course, some curmudgeon is bound to use it sooner or later to sue, but this is not a likely occurrence. There were only 393 lawsuits related to discriminatory hiring practices filed by the EEOC in 2003, from 20,615 complaints brought before it.

The value of providing feedback cannot be overstated ñ candidates would then be in a position to apply for jobs they are better suited to or work at making up the limitations that kept them from getting the job they initially applied for. Documenting and providing this information to candidates is a lot of work, but feedback can be restricted to information that was generated from automated screens and assessments, without providing exact scores. Anything would be better than the situation today.

Whatís harder to get around is the view among employers that they are in a buyers market. They pay the bills and have no obligation to candidates. The fact that employers shoulder the entire expense of job boards, or most aspect of the staffing process, is self-evident. But this view of the labor market is incredibly myopic and assumes that the supply of labor will always exceed the demand. The last few years have erased the memory of the late nineties when jobs were hard to fill. The current treatment of candidates seems like retaliation for those years when the news was full of stories like the one about a company giving every hire a new car. Demographic trends indicate that we are on the cusp of a labor shortage that will make the late nineties look like a time of plenty, so treating candidates like so much cattle can come back to haunt employers when the going gets tough.

This is another aspect of bringing candidates and employers together where job boards have fallen woefully short. The job board model is focused on the here and now. Jobs that are open today and candidates that are looking today. The most desperate in search of the most desperate ñ what a great combination. Most people, unless they are out of work, are not on the prowl for a new job. A majority of Americans are satisfied with their current employment situation (WSJ article). These are not the elusive ìpassive candidates.î People have career aspirations over the long term and the better ones look at developing relationships that will help these aspirations be met. That requires a mechanism to develop these relationships. The mechanism can certainly be electronic such as Linked-in or other social networking sites. Job boards would do candidates, and their clients, a world of good by helping foster these relationships than sticking with the current model. A relationship is a two-way street and involves trust and open communication. These are precisely the elements missing from job boards today.

About the author: Raghav Singh is an HR Technology expert based in Minneapolis. He has held marketing and product management positions with several leading Applicant Tracking Systems providers including Taleo, PeopleClick, and Kenexa. He writes and speaks on subjects related to HR technology and is a presenter at several conferences. Raghav is adjunct faculty in the Human Resources program at the University of Minnesota.