Job boards had their time in the sun, but sadly they need to be sent off to pasture. With the advent of one-click apply—I'm looking at you, Indeed and LinkedIn—people are spamming their generic resumes everywhere and hoping that something sticks. We cannot knock the candidates who are facing hundreds (if not thousands) of competitors and need to up their numbers game to get a shot at landing an interview. I have recommended using LinkedIn for networking, but many say they have tried and it has not resulted in anything meaningful. To correct the situation, the ATS needs to be rewired to accept synonyms rather than specific job skills, duties, and roles. In the meantime, candidates are stuck spending 20 minutes per resume trying to match the job ad, while recruiters are slammed with a never-ending pile of people who forget that they applied in the first place.
We continue to use job boards as a key component of our recruiting strategy. However, in the past few years, we have begun using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to post on job boards. This has been extremely beneficial for us for several reasons. First and foremost, it allows us to post to multiple job boards simultaneously, at a fraction of the cost of what we would pay if we were to post on each of them individually. The ATS also allows us to automate many of our recruiting/pre-boarding functions such as scheduling interviews, email notifications, and conducting employment references. It is also extremely useful for applicant history and data reporting. Overall, many job seekers continue to use online job boards. The toughest part about attracting and hiring the right talent is about having an effective recruiting strategy. Things such as job title, verbiage in the job posting and/or salary transparency can all have major impact on finding and hiring the best candidates. When used optimally, job boards (either individually or through an ATS), can leverage their technological capabilities such as AI integration to screen candidates, mobile-friendly job applications and other automated/user friendly features to increase the candidate pool of qualified and skilled applicants.
Job boards will continue to exist but are less effective today since they have too many unqualified or irrelevant applications. Most difficult is weeding out numbers in order to get to potential candidates who match the job and have real intent to apply. Job boards will need to get beyond keyword matching in order to become effective again and include AI-enabled candidate intent assessment, skill confirmation, and better context on experience rather than relying on resumes.