Every job board should have a reason to post jobs on it. For niche and regional sites that reason is self explanatory. The rise of local and niche job boards over the past 5 years is no accident. They work, and that reason is all about the focus and quality results they deliver. The reason to post on your site should be clearly expressed to potential clients on your home page and reinforced throughout the employer sections of the site.
Here are some reasons why niche job boards are popular:
Forrester Research: “Local Sites Matter. Geography is more important to job seekers than industry focused sites. Monster.com is the most popular career site, but local sites place second and fourth in usage.”
Weddles.com: “These (local) Web-sites offer focused recruiting opportunities within specific geographic areas. Some concentrate on unique metropolitan districts while others have a broader, regional span. In either case, they enable you to reach large concentrations of prospective candidates for positions where relocation support is not available or a local background is important to successful job performance.”
CollegeRecruiter.com: There are several benefits to using niche/local job boards. First, little to no advertising money is wasted targeting unqualified candidates. Because the high profile, general boards target all candidates, the result is that the vast majority of the candidates using those boards will not be interested in the position posted by the employer because it falls outside of their career path, geographic preference or skill level.
By posting the position to the appropriate niche board, virtually all of the candidates using that niche/local board will be qualified for the position. As a result, even if the site has a small fraction of the traffic of the high profile, general board, the number of qualified candidates using the niche board tends to be higher. Second, the cost to post a position to a niche/local board is usually far less.
When listing the benefits of your site to employers, use quotes like this to give the recruiter “piece of mind” that their ad dollar will not go to waste. Remind them constantly that your site is not like Monster or the other big guys. Your site is more targeted, therefore they’ll get more qualified candidates.
