Written by Lauren Mackelden, Features Editor, Onrec
Multiposting put simply is about distributing job adverts to as many online channels as possible, in the fastest and most efficient way, states Clair Bush at Broadbean Technology. “The reason for multi-posting technology is to enhance efficiency and to create the fastest route to candidate attraction for recruiters.” Bush reminds us that when job boards disrupted the recruitment process, recruiters soon learnt that by advertising their vacancies online meant greater reach, increase in applications and ultimately leading to faster placement success. However, Bush explains the implications: “Great news for the industry, not so great news for the administrators or recruiters having to duplicate their job ads, a number of times… and then once the applications started to pore in, how did they manage the replies and shortlisting?”
Luckily this is where multiposting technology comes in. Most job boards have developed their own, bespoke platform, which relies on data to enable the candidate to search and find the most relevant job for them. Although similar data is asked for, the order or description tags can be all over the place. “Behind the scenes, we have worked to integrate over 6000 global job boards and social channels, matching their requirements to a single form, which the recruiter can complete once, and post to the relevant subscribed channels in one, simple process.” says Bush.
Bush continues: “Besides time saving, multiposting technology can directly save recruiters money by enabling them to direct advertising spend to those channels that deliver the highest quality candidates for their business, as every application is 100% source tracked. From a performance perspective, there is an inbuilt reporting suite, which measures every part of the application process enabling recruitment managers to measure performance at a channel, company, team and individual level. Finally, Broadbean includes a dedicated candidate management system, allowing recruiters to review, rank and contact candidates.”
From secure databases to intelligent search engines, the recruitment industry relies heavily on technology these days, comments Arran Stewart, Chief Technology Officer of Opinio Group – a suite of digital recruitment businesses. Stewart says the technology itself is pretty straight forward - XML-based data going from one site to another - so there hasn’t been any drastic improvements in the industry. However, he does say products have been introduced that allow multiple ‘mining’ of CV databases from one point; an extremely time saving service.
Stewart offers Onrec his insights into the world of multiple posting and where it’s heading: “Personally, I see the model changing in the end. Working in and around online recruitment, I have seen first-hand the costs associated with ‘multi-posting’. I think that the market could be open to a change in what drives people to use multi-posters. For example, should it be the job board incurring the multi-poster cost, rather than the hirers? Since a job board is the one receiving revenue for the advertising of jobs, they should include a minimal overhead per job for the cost of a multi-poster to get it to them. Without a multi-poster, a hirer could chose to go elsewhere due to the inconvenience, so it makes sense that a job board should incur the cost and allow hirers easy posting for free? It’s just a thought.”
Joe Sweeney at Vacancy Poster tells Onrec that they offer industry standard multi-posting functionality, but also have some additional features such as ‘online’ and ‘country screening’ that can assist recruiters in identifying positive applications in a more timely manner. They have developed a number of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in the last twelve months enabling global clients to utilise the multi-posting software using country specific languages and job boards. Vacancy Poster feels that as the job boards are evolving the technology used to post into these boards is evolving too. An example of this would be things like GEO Locations, which are still relatively new to some job boards and are helping to pin vacancies to an exact location.
Looking to the future development of multi-posting technology, Martin Bramall, the Managing Director of idibu believes we may see more focus on real-time feedback of market data going back to the user. “This kind of information would help them identify the optimum route to the best matched candidate for that role. Over time we’ve seen multi-posters really help companies find candidates through volume, but I think we will see it evolve to also offer a system that can help drill down and identify as well as filter and reduce noise. If you consider the amount of data that multi-posters are collating on a daily basis, there is a depth of information to tap into and it gives multi-posters a great ability to offer on the spot feedback as to where and when and how similar roles have had success in attracting successful candidates."
