It has been common practice throughout the job board and ATS worlds to make jobs easily shareable with social media buttons. The thinking is people will share them and help drive traffic.
But it doesn’t work.
Job listings are inherently not designed to be shared. Cute puppy videos yes, but not drab job text.
Instead more vendors should be doing this. Replace the social shares with ‘Forward to a Friend‘ functionality. I recently helped JobsInTheUS.com with this very task. We removed the social buttons and replaced with a form at the bottom of each listing.
The idea stems from Facebook actually. On local job search groups people tend to “tag” their friends to alert them to opportunities. Forward to a Friend is the web version of that tactic. They have to know their friends email but it’s a better use of space then trying to get them to randomly share it with their entire social media following. That’s just job spam.
More job boards and applicant tracking systems should follow this lead and think of better ways to get people to share jobs only with people who fit the job. That would be a win-win for all involved.
