Can New Media and Job Boards Coexist to our Benefit?

Despite a constant stream of articles proclaiming their demise, job boards and job postings have yet to go quietly into that good night. Should we be surprised? Job boards will remain vital to the recruiting industry by doing what they have always done: providing candidates to recruiters.

They can also serve to highlight the attributes of an organization, drive traffic to corporate sites, and even act as an advertisement or marketing tool. This potential marketing function was illustrated by the buzz generated last week when a wave of Apple job postings for “an exciting project” set off speculation that the iPhone 5 release had been slated for mid-August. Job boards have also demonstrated a remarkable willingness and ability to adapt to the ever-improving technology and ever-changing recruiting trends. But tools are no better than their user and, despite the myriad of upgrades and updates offered by these boards, it is the ability and the creativity of the recruiter using them that will ultimately determine their viability. And a good recruiter can make any site into a job board.

The exploding popularity of social media recruiting is a great example of this. As major social networking sites incorporated their own job boards (Facebook’s BranchOut service, LinkedIn Jobs, etc.), recruiters started turning social networking sites into job boards themselves, utilizing their profiles and social networks to reach out to candidates (passive and active), network for referrals, and move job opportunities through the online social sphere. For the WilsonHCG recruiting teams, job boards are a starting point – a research database, a direct sourcing tool – that we use in conjunction with our social networks, Boolean search strings, and tweets. It is often a combination of these tools and networks that help us source candidates and, in the right hands, even MySpace can be relevant when burrowing into the recesses of the internet to target a stellar candidate. We dig through job boards, incorporate our job postings into our social media, spread the word through Twitter, we network in relevant LinkedIn groups to generate referrals, and we pick up the phone to direct source. Job boards, social recruiting, face-to-face networking – sourcing methods old and new – no tool needs to fade to irrelevancy if it can deliver the information our recruiters need. It’s all in how you use it.

Job boards are not dead but their definition and the focus of the industry is evolving. In fact, an increased presence of niche boards serves to make it even easier for recruiters to target the type of candidate they need by honing in on a specific industry, skill set, or geographic location. Instead of fading with the times, it seems there are now more job boards available than ever before. They will continue to exist as long as they provide recruiters with thousands of resumes to sift through and job opportunities for candidates to apply to but, by being creative and utilizing new technology and trends, recruiters are able to use job boards for so much more.

As boards continue to evolve and/or specialize with the introduction of new tools, social media, and other recruiting trends, how will their services affect your recruiting methods?