I recently had the privilege of hosting #HFChat – the HireFriday Tweet-fest organized by @HRMargo and @CyndyTrivella.  HireFriday is all about helping job seekers find work. Recruiters, HR professionals, and the occasional job board doctor pose and answer common questions about the job hunt. It’s a wonderful event for all involved.

My subject – surprisingly enough! – was “Making job boards work for you”. The conversation ranged from the basics (setting up job alerts, using job boards…

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If you hire people, at some point you will have to hire for a position about which you know absolutely nothing.  Perhaps you’re hiring a chief technology officer, but your background is marketing and sales. Or you’re hiring a new accountant, and you only understand coding.

What do you do? Perhaps you turn to friends and colleagues who are more knowledgeable than you about a particular skill set. Or you figure out which certifications a ‘perfect’…

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I’ve worked with dozens of job boards over the years, and I often take a look at what the job seekers are saying to them. Since the onset of the recession (and honestly, before), it goes something like this:

“Why don’t you have any jobs in my area?”

“I’ve had my resume posted on your site for months and you haven’t called me.”

“I’ve been working in my field for twenty years but you don’t have a single job for me??”

 

There are lots…

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It’s that time of the year – leaves are falling, frost is threatening our gardens….and I’m knocking on your door about the online recruiting survey. I'm trying to include everyone in the online recruiting industry: HR and recruiting pros, job…

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The more things change, the more they stay the same – except when they don’t. Now how’s that for equivocation?

The results are in for the 2011 Online Recruiting Survey, and they are intriguing. We had a record 323 completed responses (a 15% increase from Fall 2010!), from three categories: HR and recruitment professionals, job board operators and employees, and job seekers.  We used many…

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Any job board operator will tell you that one of the toughest things about keeping your site running well is ensuring that you have a steady flow of the right kind of candidates. What exactly is the ‘right kind of candidate’? Well, this would a candidate that is qualified for a particular job AND responds to that job. If you have enough of these candidates, your employers will be happy and they will pay to use your site.

Problem is, finding these candidates is easier…

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There have been a lot of blog posts here over the years – 120, to be exact. Some faded quickly, and some didn’t. So I thought it might be useful to have a roundup of what I consider to be the most interesting and useful (if not always successful) posts. Hope you like them!

• People, Balance & Technology: The…

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Why do job seekers go to job boards? Ahem – to find a job.

I might add that’s why they network, Tweet, post profiles on LinkedIn, and troll through company career sites. They just want a job. Right?

Well, no. Not exactly. They want a lot more than a ‘job’. They in fact have an entire laundry list of desires:

• work that fits their skill set
• work that pays well
• work that lets them…

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Back in the dark ages, when the Job Board Doctor was first learning the mysteries of sales and marketing, he was told that he should “sell benefits, not features.”

Fast forward, umm…many years. I’m still telling clients (and myself) to focus on the benefits, not the features. You think I would’ve learned by now!

It’s a tough lesson to learn. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to list the new, snazzy, ‘gee whiz’ features that your job board has:…

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Every day we are deluged with images, sounds, sights, smells….and…

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Is social recruiting a symptom of larger problems in the world of recruitment – or is it a solution to recruitment woes? Let me argue both sides of this…

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In August, I began gathering data from job seekers, HR professionals, recruiters, and job board employees and operators on the future of job boards and the methods for finding jobs and candidates. Now, 275 responses later, we have some results.

Each survey respondent identified him or herself as a job seeker, a HR or recruiting professional, or a job board employee or operator. Based on their response to that question, they then answered a series of questions specific to…

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If you follow my Twitter stream, you no doubt noticed I spent last week at #truManchester. It was a great experience – I listened to many recruiters and HR pros talk about how they use social media in their recruiting (or hope to), and what they think about job boards. (I also learned that the British have switches on their power outlets, are extremely hospitable, and don’t open their pubs until noon).

A few observations:

• Company attempts to outlaw or…

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The future is alluring – nothing bad has happened yet, you haven’t made any dumb mistakes yet, and anything could happen. In fact, the future is so much fun to write about that I am going to write about it (with my job board industry goggles on, that is).



So, let us finish the following phrase in as many interesting and contentious ways as we can, shall we?



The future of job boards is…



1.… Continue

The formula for the extremely popular reality series “Extreme Home Makeover” is simple and compelling: find a family (or sometimes an individual) who have done good works in their community but have been beaten up by bad luck luck; add the Extreme Home Makeover crew and local supporters; create a new home for the family. All in the space of 7 days.



So why can’t we apply that to the job board world? Well, in fact, we can. I don’t have the resources (or sex appeal) of Ty, but I do know… Continue

You know what gets a job seeker truly steamed? Clicking on a link for a job posting – and discovering that it’s exactly the same job he looked at a few seconds earlier. Same job, different listings = unhappy job seeker.



How does this happen? Well, any job board that allows 3rd party recruiters to post their open positions runs the risk of duplicate postings. Let’s say that ABC Company has an listing for a mechanical engineer. The HR person posts it on their company site and also… Continue

Matt Alder published a fascinating piece last week about ‘job clouds’ and why he thought Twitter could be the future of job boards. It was one of those “I wish I had written that!” moments for me, to be honest.



In brief, he posits the creation of a ‘job cloud’ created by multiple employer Twitter feeds of their jobs. This cloud would be much larger than any individual existing… Continue