Internet job boards are increasingly saturating the recruitment market so how can recruiters ensure that their vacancy receives sufficient billing in order to attract the right candidates? Angela Fagan, consultant at online recruitment specialist www.jobbroker.co.uk looks at how employers can make the most of their web recruitment efforts.

There are a number of key factors that recruiters should consider when choosing which job board(s) to advertise their vacancies with:

• Ascertain your best estimate of the likely number of vacancies your organisation will advertise over the next 12 months.




• Decide whether your vacancies are likely to be focused on a specialist sector, such as financial services, or will be more generalist in nature.

Consider your previous 12 months recruitment activity to indicate your projection in terms of budget, numbers and type of vacancy. When you are armed with this information, only then can you go forward to ensure that you get the very best circulation and results for your organisation.

Dealing with recruitment job boards directly can be very time consuming as well as confusing. As recruitment sites jostle for pole position, it becomes hard to distinguish which is the best, so who do you choose?

Selecting the right one
NORAS is the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (www.noras.co.uk). They provide recruitment advertisers with comparable information on the users of job boards to help them make informed advertising decisions to get a more targeted response to their adverts.

Currently 17 of the UK Top Job Boards participate in NORAS surveys, which although covering only a small percentage of the online job market, can greatly assist recruiters to choose the Job Board which best fulfils their needs.

NORAS provides two important types of information:

• A comprehensive demographic profile of each job board’s users.




• ABC E audited unique user figures for each participating job board.

Combining these two pieces of information can tell you how many candidates (that match your specific requirements) each site can deliver.

Job posting and CV searching

Once you have decided which job board to advertise your vacancy with, the next key element in getting it right is to ensure that the jobs are posted in a particular manner to ensure that they receive top billing and attract the right candidates.

Each job board has very specific criteria to enhance their billing and recruiters are advised to read up on the information pages provided by the recruitment website at the point of posting.

CV searching is an excellent method to proactively source suitable candidates for your vacancy. Instead of posting your job and waiting for the response, recruiters can take advantage of the many thousands of CV’s posted by candidates actively seeking new positions.

At this point, it is important to consider a small range of factors which can hold the key to an effective posting, relevant response and ultimately job vacancies that are filled by the right candidates:

• Try to use your keyword(s) as many times as possible in your written advertisement to ensure a high level of keyword saturation. Advertisements which have a higher matching ratio against keyword searched will normally appear higher than those with a low saturation level. For example, SALES EXECUTIVES, £45k basic, uncapped SALES commission. Are you a top performing SALES EXECUTIVE? SALES professionals for a top UK SALES organisation. Fantastic opportunity for high achieving SALES professionals…
• Check the duration of your Job Posting. Each site differs in the length of time the vacancy will be displayed, normally ranging from seven to 28 days. As new jobs are posted it is likely that your vacancy will make its way down the list of matches. To ensure top billing check your vacancy every couple of days, and if necessary repost using a new description to attract attention.
• Ensure that your vacancy is attractive. One of the most common mistakes made by recruiters is to focus on the list of organisation needs and wants without paying enough attention to candidate attraction. Why would the candidate want to come and work for you? Use at least one third of your advertisement to inform the candidate of the benefits and increase your chances of attracting the best.
• Use Boolean Logic when conducting keyword candidate CV searches to find more accurate results. The Boolean logic ensures that you can search for specific keywords which are likely to appear in your target candidate CV’s. For example: searching for a Sales Professional in the Pharmaceutical Industry would be “Sales” and “Pharmaceutical”. You can screen matches in and out by the use of linking words such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’ etc.
• Monitor to the end results. To ensure that your organisation is getting good value from your chosen job board it is vital to monitor the end results. Many recruiters find that the response levels from internet job boards are far higher than found through traditional methods including newspapers and trade magazines, and this is expected to increase as more and more jobseekers take their search online. With an overwhelming response recruiters can very quickly find themselves swamped by applicants taking the focus away from the desired end result of placing a candidate.
• Use screening criteria when conducting keyword candidate CV searches to increase quality matches. With hundreds of thousands of CV’s posted on to many of the job sites, recruiters can find themselves very quickly overwhelmed by the responses to both their candidate searches and job postings. To ensure a higher level of accuracy many job boards provide screening criteria which candidates must answer correctly in order to apply for the vacancy.
• Take professional advice when choosing your job board(s). Use the knowledge provided by the online recruitment industry and specialist providers when deciding on the best job board for your business. Conducting research into the best job board(s) for your vacancies can be a very time consuming business, putting further stress on internal resources.
• Use free job boards. Many organisations take advantage of the free job boards available online in the UK. Free boards cost your organisation only the time it takes to post your vacancies online and are an extremely effective method of advertising, especially for first time users. An example can be found at www.cvmonkey.co.uk
• Consider outsourcing your vacancy responses. Outsourcing parts of your recruitment campaign to a third party is becoming more and more popular within the UK. Whether you have single or multiple vacancies to advertise, using a job board together with a specialist outsourcing organisation can provide a real cost effective alternative to traditional bricks and mortar professional recruitment organisations.
• Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. With literally thousands of job boards to choose from, finding the right one(s) for your vacancies can take some time without some specialist advice. Whether you recruit within a specialist field or across a range of vacancy types there will almost certainly be a number of providers to choose from. Try out single vacancy postings across a selection and closely monitor the results from each, only then will you be in a position to ascertain where your target audience resides.

Following this type of guidance can make the difference between a web-based recruitment drive that is a ‘hit and hope’ affair and one which is well planned and effectively executed.