Job boards and recruitment go hand in hand. No question, it’s a great way of providing recruiters with Candidates and CVs quickly – but, as with anything in life, it comes at a cost! And using multiple different job boards trying to score a candidate isn’t always the best way to go (especially if the reason is simply that it’s what you’ve done in the past). During a downturn and in a candidate-short market, one of the biggest issues that recruitment agencies struggle with is the constant spending on job boards.
It might be obvious that choosing the right job board or monitoring the quality of applications is important, but you’d be surprised at just how many agencies continue to use job board credits as the first port of call. In fact, you could do a few other things to ensure you’re getting the right ROI and potentially reducing your job board spending and usage completely.
So, I’ve decided to share a few tips on how to get a little more bang for your buck:
Link your job boards to your recruitment CRM
Firstly, it removes the requirement and the cost of a job board multi-poster. Apart from saving substantial amounts of time, it’s simply smart – you can control how many credits each recruiter can use as well as pull all your Candidate CVs back into your database, reduce admin work by a ton (again!), and ensure you aren’t paying for the same candidate details more than once - which happens, A LOT!
Controlling your job boards from within your CRM has a lot more perks – you can monitor closely how much you’re spending on each board and how much return you’re getting. If you notice that the numbers don’t add up, you can resign from one of your boards – which you probably wouldn’t realize you should do if not for the data in your CRM!
Monitor the source of your candidates
Or better yet, have your Recruitment CRM do it for you. Knowing where your successful candidates come from is crucial to determining which job boards are bringing you quality candidates (instead of just bringing you a number of candidates that don’t fit your job profiles). So many agencies will continue to spend with job boards due to the sheer volume of applications they receive but when you start to dissect the number of applicants placed you see a true reflection of ROI. Based on that data, you can make decisions on which job boards to keep!
Never post your job on a job board first
If you have a job to fill and your first action is to post it on a job board – it’s clear that you aren’t footing the bill. Remember that similar vacancy you had on a few weeks back? You received 20 applications and placed one in the job (£££). Where are the other 19? They should be sitting in your database! Some might even be screened and ready to go.
Adding your job to your CRM should be your first action - not only does it keep all the communication for that job in one place, but a good CRM should bring all your relevant candidates to the surface as potential matches (*cough* like Firefish). After all, you just paid for these candidates a few weeks ago via job board A - if you place another advert on job board A, you’ll find a handful of the same candidates will apply (-£££).
Why not try:
Create Job in CRM > Shortlist potential matches > Share to your website > Share across Social > Screen your potential matches > Post to job board IF you need to top up your database.
Set up your watchdogs
If you are going to use job boards, you want to receive candidate CVs as soon as they land in the job board database. You can do this by setting up CV watchdog alerts. This means you don’t have to keep running the same searches every day to keep up to date with new candidates. You can save a series of search strings and as soon as a candidate matches your criteria you will automatically be sent that candidate’s CV.
For a full guide on recruiting in a candidate-short market, see our eBook below!
