Finding the Best Sources of the Best Talent

A growing number of surveys suggest that hiring managers and corporate executives do not believe that their organizations have the high caliber talent they need to prevail in increasingly competitive domestic and global markets.

What’s behind this shortfall of top performers? While there are undoubtedly a number of factors at work, one stands out above the rest: recruiters often do not know how to evaluate alternative job boards and career portals effectively. There are more than 40,000 of these sites in operation, so success depends upon recruiters being able to select the ones that will work best for each of their recruiting requirements. It seems like a fairly straight-forward exercise, and it is … if you use a methodological approach.

Selecting a job board for a specific requirement is a lot like buying a television set or a CD player. It’s not enough to know about certain sites, you have to know enough about them be able to identify the specific sites that will work best for you. And, there’s the rub. The only way to make a rational choice is to compare one site to another using a common set of data. That data should detail their capabilities, services and fees.

WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Websites, for example, is an annual publication that provides 21 different data elements to describe the recruiting capabilities of a job board. They range from when the site was founded (because the longer its track record the more information you have on its reliability and performance) and the fee to post a job to the number of people who visit the site each month and how long they stay on the site (because the longer they remain there, the higher the probability that they will see your job posting).

These 21 data elements can be organized into a single formula that captures the essence of each site and enables you to compare one site to another:

(Reach + Outreach + Customer Service)Persistence ------------------------------------------------- The Price of the Site’s Service + Recruiter Input

This fraction represents the return on investment you are likely to achieve from any one job board. The denominator, of course, indicates your investment: the money as well as the time and effort you must devote to use a site’s services (e.g., posting a job, searching its resume database). The numerator consists of the elements that determine the value of those services. They are:

Reach Reach is used here to mean the site’s traffic in your target demographic. The greater a site’s reach among the population of candidates you seek to recruit, the more qualified your yield is likely to be. For example, if you’re recruiting engineers, it may be useful to know a site’s total traffic, but what you really need in order to assess its potential utility for your requirement is its traffic in engineers.

Outreach Outreach is used here to mean the steps the site takes to attract passive job seekers. These steps typically include on-site content and/or features and activities that are specifically designed to appeal to people who aren’t looking for a job. For example, a site might offer peer-to-peer discussion groups or thought-provoking articles to promote individual development and enhance on-the-job performance.

Customer service Customer service is used here to mean the experience the site provides to employers and recruiters. It encompasses everything from the site’s willingness to provide all of the information you need to evaluate the potential utility of its services to the actual range of the services, themselves (e.g., does the site offer assessment instruments or a networking feature). In other words, the more a site can (and does) do for you, the better its customer service.

Persistence Persistence is used here to describe how long you have access to the site’s reach, outreach and customer service. It is the duration of the services for which you pay. Some sites, for example, limit job postings to a week, while others post them for 30 days; some offer a one-time search of their resume database, while others permit searching for a month or more at the same price.

Recruiting online is now more than a decade old. Back in the early days, it almost didn’t matter which job board you used: there were few of them and almost all offered the same array of services. Today, however, the employment Website population is large and getting larger, and the range of their services and levels of performance is wide and growing wider. To be successful, therefore, you must become just as expert at shopping for job boards as you are at shopping for any other consumer service. Be rigorous and methodical in your evaluation of sites and fully informed when you select those in which you intend to invest. That’s the best way to be in charge of your online recruitment advertising rather than its victim.