Many talk about the death of the job board, but they don’t appreciate the varying recruitment cultures across industries. If you work as an in-house recruiter for a tech company, chances are you gave up on job boards many years ago because your potential candidates did.
In other industries and professions, lots of companies still get a good return from advertising on job boards as their jobseekers are still using them. They could achieve a much better return on their investment if they used some engaging, persuasive ad copy, but we’ve covered that already.
In countries such as the UK, there are quite a few specialist job boards that cater for health, teaching and construction jobs, for example. They would tend to be more productive than the generalist boards. Here in Ireland, there are a few, but the scene is dominated by a small number of generalists. So if you’re going to use a job board for your next recruitment ad, what should you consider?
If you’re not aware of specialist job boards for a particular role, double check with a Google search e.g. “marketing jobs”. If you find one or more, type the job title you are targeting into their search function. Count the amount of jobs listed, compared to what you’ll find on the generalist job boards. The site listing the most jobs will most likely be the most successful.
A lot of job boards have a preview section. This is the couple of lines that come up after someone has inputted your job title. You need to stand out from the rest and draw the jobseeker in. Write something really compelling that will make people want to click into your ad before any others.. I’ve seen lots of ads where people don’t even use the preview section. Madness!
Some job boards allow you to insert keywords into their uploading system. Don’t ignore them. The job board uses these like Google, to rank the most relevant job. You could risk being at the bottom of the search.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, use a job title most people search for, not an internal title, otherwise you won’t get found.
Speaking of job titles, the advice in number 4 is equally as important to help you get found on Google and places such as Indeed. Mentioning your job title three times in your job ad will make it more attractive to Google and Indeed, which is the most Google friendly job board. However, mentioning the job title more than 5 times can be considered spam by Google and your job ad will be punished. SEO, the tactics for getting found on Google are as straightforward as rocket science!
This is the online world, people have a decreased attention span. Just copying a long job spec is lazy and will put people off. Write a great job ad using the minimum amount of space.
Speaking of job specs, don’t have your ad looking like a shopping list with bullet point after bullet point. You should be trying to converse with the the reader. Use compelling sentences and paragraphs to inspire, excite and persuade your candidates to apply.