The Best Job Boards Value Employee Candidates
A far too common mistake among job board startups, according to Job Board Doctor Jeff Dickey-Chasins, is too much focus on attracting employers and not nearly enough on reeling in job candidates. While it’s understandable for a service to focus the bulk of its time and resources on attracting paying clients — in this case, employers — the fact of the matter is that what employers are paying for is the opportunity to find and connect with potential employees.
SEE ALSO: For Job Boards, Knowing Your Candidates Often Equals Success
Without a good pool of candidates, your job board is worthless to employers. The best job boards succeed by valuing their job candidates and providing value to them in return. Here are a few things to consider when it comes to how you treat employee candidates.
The Value of Employee Candidates
Traditional job boards, job listing aggregators and recruiting websites all rely on job candidates as their stock in trade, according to Jeff Dickey-Chasins. Candidates are not only your product; they also make up the bulk of your website traffic, providing clicks and demographic data and answering calls to action. Candidates are the ones who populate job board with the resumes that attract employers in the first place and drive employer action. Without candidates, you have nothing of true value to offer employers.
Don’t Alienate or Undervalue Job Seekers
Some job boards attempt to draw in candidates with gimmicks and trickery, such as bait and switch and fake job postings, according to Jeff Dickey-Chasins. Rather than building a pool of quality candidates for your employers to choose from, this type of behavior tends to have the opposite effect. Candidates who visit such sites often end up leaving the site feeling annoyed, alienated and undervalued. Treating candidates in such a way is a surefire way to drive your job board into the ground.
Attracting and Retaining Candidates
Want a better way to recruit and keep quality job candidates? Provide value for them, advises Jeff Dickey-Chasins. The best job boards spend time and effort to make their job boards at least as valuable to employee candidates as to employers.
The simplest and most straightforward way to make your job board valuable to candidates is to provide relevant job postings and useful content to aid them in their job search. Other tools and resources to help candidates and draw them to your job site include a user-friendly but sophisticated search tool to help match them with relevant jobs and desirable employers. Some job boards also provide a community forum or blog for job seekers to commiserate and aid one another in their search.
The bottom line — you can’t run a successful job board without candidates. If you want your job site to succeed, follow the example of the best job boards out there by making candidates a high priority. The more candidates you can draw in and retain, the better able you’ll be to help your employers fill their positions with qualified workers. And the happier your employers are, the more likely you’ll be to bring in revenue and experience real growth.
Sources:
http://www.jobboarddoctor.com/2014/06/24/its-always-about-the-candidate-really/