The Smart Consumer’s Dilemma

Employment Web-sites have been the greatest advance in the field of recruiting since the creation of the resume. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. In the fifteen years since their first appearance on the World Wide Web, job boards and career portals have connected more organizations to more talent more efficiently than any other single medium in existence. Both employers and recruiters now consider these sites a critical component of their sourcing and recruiting strategy. They are not a replacement for traditional methods, of course, but they are an essential addition to them. As a consequence, the employment Web-site industry is now recognized as one of the most vibrant segments of the e-commerce marketplace.

That development, however, has both positive and negative implications. Job boards and career portals provide much needed support for today’s all too frequently understaffed, under-budgeted and under-resourced recruiting teams. Their success, however, has also attracted a crowd. With virtually no barrier to entry, more than 40,000 sites have opened their doors online, and additional sites launch all of the time. Today, employment Web-sites are operated by:

stand-alone companies,
newspapers and magazines,
professional associations and societies,
college and university placement centers and alumni organizations,
radio and television stations,
large and very small affinity groups, and
sole proprietors.

This diversity of choice is a benefit tied up inside a dilemma. It’s a benefit because robust choice enables you to focus your sourcing and branding strategies on those sites that are most likely to reach the specific talent cohort you want to recruit. It’s a dilemma because there is no easy way to know which sites offer the best combination of capabilities and which deliver best on the capabilities they say they have. In effect, you can’t capture the benefit if you can’t resolve the dilemma.

Think of it this way: the benefit of choice represents potential; it is what sites say they can do. To win the War for the Best Talent, however, we need to know reality–what they actually can do. We have to identify the sites that produce what they proclaim. Said another way, the key to using online employment Web-sites effectively is to be a smart consumer.

How do you become a savvy consumer of employment sites? By educating yourself in two dimensions:

Design.

First, it’s important to acquire the information that will enable you to determine the which, what, where, who, and how of alternative job boards and career portals. Which sites should be considered for a specific requirement, what are their services, where are the services delivered geographically, who do they reach, and how do they reach them. The answers to these questions might include the following data elements:

The site’s traffic, expressed in unique visitors/month;
The site’s appeal, measured either in elapsed time or in the number of pages of information each person typically views;
The demographics of the site’s visitors (e.g., what are their skills and skill levels);
The site’s capabilities, including whether it offers a job database, a resume database, a forum for peer-to-peer networking, and the kinds of features that attract passive prospects (e.g., a job agent and confidentiality protection in the resume database);
The cost to use those capabilities; and
The site’s content, including the quality and uniqueness of the information that is provided for those who are looking for a job (i.e., active job seekers) and for those who aren’t (i.e., the passive prospects we’d really like to recruit).

Operation.

It’s also important to acquire the information that will enable you to gauge each site’s ability to deliver the design features it says it has. In other words, what is a site’s actual performance and what are the standards by which it operates as a business? These factors determine the reality of a site’s capabilities and thus the likelihood that it will actually help you. They are the answers to such questions as:

Does the site provide accurate data about its performance (e.g., the traffic it attracts and the number of resumes in its database);
Does the site deliver the capabilities it claims to have according to the standards expected of a reputable business operation (e.g., if a site says that it collects the resumes in its resume database directly from candidates, does it actually do so or does it collect them from somewhere else by using an automated program of some kind); and
Does the site fully disclose what will happen to candidate information that is provided to the site (e.g., if the site sells the contact information it acquires through on-site registration, does it inform individuals of that practice up front).

Historically, employers and recruiters have been able to acquire research data (from published guides) to determine what sites are designed to do. To assess the operation of those sites, however, they have had to rely on experience–their own and that of their colleagues. While these perspectives remain helpful, there is now an additional way to gauge a site’s performance. It’s called the International Association of Employment Web Sites (www.EmploymentWebSites.org) or, as it’s often referred to, the IAEWS.

The IAEWS is the first and only trade organization for job boards and career portals and the companies that serve and support them. It’s important to you because it has published a Code of Ethics which requires that its members adhere to the standards listed above and much more. Does that make the companies in the association perfect? Alas, probably not. It does, however, create an expectation of performance that you can count on, and there is no other place on the Web with that kind of consumer protection.

How can you tell if a job board or career portal is a member of the IAEWS? Look for the association’s logo on the site. It’s not yet the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” but it is an effective way to resolve your consumer’s dilemma.




Affiliate