I think a lot about the future of job boards. As the online recruiting landscape shifts to new tools and technology, these new tools (social, video, etc) are eating away at the job board marketshare. Now employers have more tools than ever to find talent. So its more important for your site to evolve into a must use platform. Here are five ways to make your job board more memorable.
employers have more tools than ever to find talent…. -Chris Russell
STATISTICS: more job sites need to provide statistics about their job listings. They need to give clients better feedback as to how their job is doing, in real time. Check out what I do with my JobSpeek listings. I collect referral information with location and websites that tracks people on the site. This gives an employer (or anyone who looks at the page) instant feedback as to where the clicks are coming from. You can also do things like starting a podcast (audio or video) and start educating your job seekers about everything related to job hunting in your niche. This is a great strategy also for SEO.
UNIQUE CONTENT: If your job board serves a niche industry or is a regioanl play, you need to provide unique content related to that niche. When I started GreenJobSpider.com I began doing email interviews with people who had green jobs and how they got them. This was great content that offered real practical advice for the target audience.
COMMUNITY: Build out a community portion of your site. Let your job seekers interact with each other. Let them create content. Use a service like Ning.com to easily add this to your job board. I recently bought back Jobs in Social Media which uses a ning interface on the front end. I started it in 2008 and now it has over 2,000 members and averages 5 postings per month. If you nurture and grow your community it will pay you back in spades over the long term. And it will make your business more valuable overall.
PRE-SCREENING: Employers need more QUALIFIED applicants. They currently get too many unqualified leads with job boards. If you want to remain relevant add some kind of pre-screening tools for employers. Let them craft questions to add to the job description that job seekers must answer in order to apply. This will help cu down on unqualified candidates.
MOBILE APPLY: Its coming. Check out what Jibe and iMomentous are doing with the mobile apply issue. Make your own version or ask your job board provider to start working on the issue.
