We’re seeing it every day in the unfilled job orders that never seem to leave the ATS. We hear it from frustrated clients who can’t find those qualified workers today, let alone the past three weeks when they were needed. We’re in a candidate shortage. It’s times like these we all wish we had a recruiter with seemingly magical abilities to attract the remaining active job seekers and pry those passive job seekers from thin air. This person would be able to fill those open jobs and restore order and sanity to both your business and your clients. But that’s the problem, what if it isn’t a person you should have been looking for? It’s your website, and specifically your job board, that has been the answer the entire time.
Not all job boards are created equal, so we’ve put together must-haves you can use to evaluate the products out there and see if your job board is pulling its own weight and performing as the all-star recruiter you’ve been wishing to hire.
Get found and aggregated. This one is obvious, but let’s go further than just getting your jobs from your ATS onto your company’s website. Your job board should be able to help you get found on search engines through strategic use of SEO and Google For Jobs optimization. It can also get your jobs onto other job boards and aggregators. And yes, job boards can do this without requiring any additional work from your recruiter. We know they’re busy enough, already!
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Ease the application process. Speaking of reducing workload, a great job board can help you recruit by making the application process as easy (and quick!) as possible. Most staffing companies have secondary full applications with credentials or skills testing needed, so there’s no need to scare away candidates with long and tedious applications on your job board. If it takes longer than 15 minutes to fill out (and I hope you’ve tried applying on your own site before), then you’ve identified a bottleneck in getting good candidates to apply for your jobs.
Expanding opportunities. Do not let your application be the end of your job board’s usefulness, either. There’s one crucial page on your job board many of you aren’t using, and it can turn those applicants into even more value for your company; it’s the Thank You page. We’ve all seen them, and the “Thank you for applying with XYZ Staffing, we’ll reach out to you in a few days” isn’t helping drive more candidates to your site or engage your current applicant. Your job board can work for you by adding more jobs to this page that the candidate can apply to, opportunities to refer one of their friends (you know the one that’s been looking for three months and can’t find that perfect job) or encouraging that applicant to like your social media pages (where you’ll be posting new opportunities as well).
Automation. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though! Besides posting your jobs to other job boards and aggregators (and optimizing for SEO and Google for Jobs), your job board can help you stay in front of those active candidates, and reactivate those passive ones, too. Job boards now include the ability to send out automated job alerts to candidates when new jobs meet their criteria. Those candidates that applied six months ago (one or two years, even) and are still in your system can get these types of alerts. They may even apply to a new job on your job board.
It is important to take the time to learn about the full functionality of your job board and make sure you’re using it to its fullest capabilities. You may be missing out on some great new features and missing out on its full potential. It’s time to make your website’s job board pay for itself to become your company’s newest recruiter.
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