The blitzkrieg assault by online job boards has put a dent in newspapers’ help-wanted sections. But not everyone is sold on the Internet as a recruiting tool
Employers haven’t seen a revolution like this since 1436 when Johannes Gutenberg fired up his first printing press and gave employers one of their best recruiting tools — the newspaper help-wanted ad. For more than 500 years, it was arguably the most effective recruitment tool in HR’s arsenal.
But the Internet changed that. When the first job boards started popping up in the early 1990s, not many employers or job seekers took notice. But in less than a decade, online job boards have closed the gap newspapers enjoyed for more than half a millennium. A recent online survey by Forrester Research of 2,884 individuals across North America shows that while 48 per cent cite newspapers as their primary tool in job hunting, 41 per cent now say the Internet is their preferred method when on the prowl. That’s a quantum leap from 1998 when newspapers enjoyed a healthy 82 per cent and job boards struggled to capture double-digit interest.
Many recruiters have jumped feet first into the fray and couldn’t be happier with the flow of resumes coming in from job boards. Others are wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to sift through hundreds — and sometimes thousands — of unqualified applications that come in for every position posted on the Net.
Wayne Ellis, human resources manager at Marwood Limited, a wood manufacturer with about 500 employees in Fredericton, falls into the former category. He’s used an online job board for the last five years and has been mostly happy with the results.
Ellis said he still uses the local newspaper, and posts openings through Human Resource Development Canada’s job bank, but has had the best success recently through the Internet — and it’s costing him less than newspaper ads.
“The most recent experience we had with it was when we hired four mechanical engineers,” said Ellis. “Probably 80 per cent of the resumes came as a result of our online posting. The quality of the candidates was outstanding. The professional job seeker seems to be paying a lot more attention to job boards.”
His board of choice is Career Beacon, an Atlantic-Canada based board. He said he can post a job online for $300. A display ad in the local newspaper would cost about $500, he said.
“The newspaper ad only runs one day, but the posting is online for a couple of weeks,” said Ellis. “So a lot more people see it.”
He said he prefers using a regional job board rather than one of the big national boards, such as Workopolis, Monster or Hot Jobs, because hires from outside New Brunswick don’t often work out — and the bigger job boards tend to attract candidates from a wider geographic area.
“We’ve used Workopolis. It’s good quality candidates, but honestly if we have someone in the immediate area, it’s a better fit,” he said. “If we move someone from Ontario to Atlantic Canada, the culture really is different and they often have a hard time adjusting and it doesn’t work out.”
Stan Doubleday, who is responsible for human resources and administration at The Commissionaires, an Edmonton-based security firm with 2,100 employees that services northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, isn’t sold on the benefits of using an online job board.
Most of his job openings are advertised in the Edmonton Journal, which also puts the advertisement in its online classified section. But applicants can’t apply online.
“It has brought us a lot of good people,” said Doubleday. “We’ve had really good results with it.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s adverse to using technology. He’s planning to use the company’s Web site to advertise jobs in the not-too-distant future. He’s already getting resumes e-mailed to him off the company’s Web site from places as far away as Nova Scotia, even though there are no postings on it and no outside recruitment campaigns have been undertaken. There might even be a time when he stops advertising entry-level positions in the local paper completely, he said.
“That’s really the best advertising tool. Once they get on the site and have a look around, they get a good idea of what the company is all about,” said Doubleday
Cindy Morris, director of human resources for Lifeline Systems Canada Inc., a Toronto-based firm with 160 employees that provides emergency response and support services for the elderly, said she’s torn as to what method works best.
When recruiting in Ontario, she’s had great success using Workopolis and Monster when filling mostly call center positions. But when recruiting staff for the Montreal office, the online job boards don’t cut it — and she’s not sure why that is.
“We haven’t figured that out yet,” said Morris. “In Quebec, we seem to get much broader candidates and better results from the newspaper postings than the online job boards. It’s more costly, so it’s not desirable, but we seem to have much better success.”
She doesn’t always use the online boards for more senior positions, though. For those positions, she often turns to specialized job boards — such as a professional association — or hires a recruiter.
“We just recently filled a vice-president of marketing role, and we posted that through a marketing association,” she said. “It took us about eight or nine months to recruit for that role. I don’t think, in the end, that the candidate came from that site, but those can be useful.”
And while she’d like to see the big job boards become better for attracting qualified staff for senior positions, it’s not something she really expects to happen.
“Job boards are a cold, impersonal process,” said Morris. “But we’re dealing with human beings and you need that interaction. What a recruiter does, you can’t replace with a job board. It costs a lot more money, but when you’re getting in the more skilled or more specialized positions or higher level roles, the job board just doesn’t seem to do it. When you think about it, it’s a very isolating way of even searching for work. There’s no interaction and often nobody replies to your resume.”
She said the position she’s looking to fill will often dictate how the search is conducted.
“If it’s an information technology position, I’m going to go online,” said Morris. “I’m going to get 1,000 resumes, but if it’s technology-based, that’s where you need to go.”
While she’s a big fan of online postings, she’s not a fan of letting job seekers send resumes in with one click. Many job boards allow people looking for work to store resumes online and apply for a position just by clicking a button. By not letting people do that, it cuts down on the amount of unqualified resumes coming in.
That’s one way to filter out “resume spam”, said Margaret Riley, author of The Riley Guide, an online directory to employment and career resources based in Rockville, Md.
“I get a lot of complaints from HR people who are overwhelmed by candidates who are really not qualified for the jobs,” she said. “They’re getting applications from people who want to relocate or emigrate. They’ll list a set of eight skills that you must have and will get resumes from people who might have three of them and nowhere near the level of experience.”
She said there are a lot of ups and downs to job boards, and there are a lot of changes going on right now in the marketplace.
“I am seeing a lot of smaller boards falling by the wayside,” said Riley. “These are the sites not run by people who are actually in the recruiting industry. We had a lot of upstarts who had no background in recruiting at all — or even careers — and they decided to jump on the bandwagon. But HR wants to see valid returns for their money. They’re talking with dollars, and the bad ones are falling off.”
But the good job boards have a strong role to play in recruiting. There’s no doubt they’re cheaper than newspaper advertising or a recruiting firm and their reach can’t be matched.
“It’s essentially worldwide because anybody can see those job announcements,” said Riley. “You’re not just limited to those who pick up the paper and read it.”
If a firm is posting online, it really should give applicants the chance to apply online, she said. But there are a lot of things organizations are doing wrong on that front. Many firms don’t specify how the resumes should come in.
“A lot of seekers will try to send resumes as a Word or WordPerfect attachment, but now because of viruses your company may not allow that document in,” she said.
Employers should let applicants know the resume has been received, even if it’s just an auto-response that is triggered when the application is e-mailed.
Small businesses are also warming up to online recruiting, which was once more of a playground for large organizations. Some boards — like Hot Jobs — are offering incentives to small businesses.
“We’re still getting a little more growth in small business than we are in our major employers,” she said. “So making it cost effective is a pretty good idea. A small business will not have a dedicated HR professional, let alone a dedicated recruiter, in the company. That role falls to the company president, who is also the bookkeeper, the recruiter and the broom pusher.”
But Gutenberg can sleep soundly in his grave. The newspaper advertisements are not going to disappear, she said. Nor will there be so much consolidation online so that only five or six job boards survive.
“I just can’t see that,” said Riley. “I can’t see the death of newspaper classifieds, and I don’t see Monster taking over the world.”
But the Internet changed that. When the first job boards started popping up in the early 1990s, not many employers or job seekers took notice. But in less than a decade, online job boards have closed the gap newspapers enjoyed for more than half a millennium. A recent online survey by Forrester Research of 2,884 individuals across North America shows that while 48 per cent cite newspapers as their primary tool in job hunting, 41 per cent now say the Internet is their preferred method when on the prowl. That’s a quantum leap from 1998 when newspapers enjoyed a healthy 82 per cent and job boards struggled to capture double-digit interest.
Many recruiters have jumped feet first into the fray and couldn’t be happier with the flow of resumes coming in from job boards. Others are wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to sift through hundreds — and sometimes thousands — of unqualified applications that come in for every position posted on the Net.
Wayne Ellis, human resources manager at Marwood Limited, a wood manufacturer with about 500 employees in Fredericton, falls into the former category. He’s used an online job board for the last five years and has been mostly happy with the results.
Ellis said he still uses the local newspaper, and posts openings through Human Resource Development Canada’s job bank, but has had the best success recently through the Internet — and it’s costing him less than newspaper ads.
“The most recent experience we had with it was when we hired four mechanical engineers,” said Ellis. “Probably 80 per cent of the resumes came as a result of our online posting. The quality of the candidates was outstanding. The professional job seeker seems to be paying a lot more attention to job boards.”
His board of choice is Career Beacon, an Atlantic-Canada based board. He said he can post a job online for $300. A display ad in the local newspaper would cost about $500, he said.
“The newspaper ad only runs one day, but the posting is online for a couple of weeks,” said Ellis. “So a lot more people see it.”
He said he prefers using a regional job board rather than one of the big national boards, such as Workopolis, Monster or Hot Jobs, because hires from outside New Brunswick don’t often work out — and the bigger job boards tend to attract candidates from a wider geographic area.
“We’ve used Workopolis. It’s good quality candidates, but honestly if we have someone in the immediate area, it’s a better fit,” he said. “If we move someone from Ontario to Atlantic Canada, the culture really is different and they often have a hard time adjusting and it doesn’t work out.”
Stan Doubleday, who is responsible for human resources and administration at The Commissionaires, an Edmonton-based security firm with 2,100 employees that services northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, isn’t sold on the benefits of using an online job board.
Most of his job openings are advertised in the Edmonton Journal, which also puts the advertisement in its online classified section. But applicants can’t apply online.
“It has brought us a lot of good people,” said Doubleday. “We’ve had really good results with it.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s adverse to using technology. He’s planning to use the company’s Web site to advertise jobs in the not-too-distant future. He’s already getting resumes e-mailed to him off the company’s Web site from places as far away as Nova Scotia, even though there are no postings on it and no outside recruitment campaigns have been undertaken. There might even be a time when he stops advertising entry-level positions in the local paper completely, he said.
“That’s really the best advertising tool. Once they get on the site and have a look around, they get a good idea of what the company is all about,” said Doubleday
Cindy Morris, director of human resources for Lifeline Systems Canada Inc., a Toronto-based firm with 160 employees that provides emergency response and support services for the elderly, said she’s torn as to what method works best.
When recruiting in Ontario, she’s had great success using Workopolis and Monster when filling mostly call center positions. But when recruiting staff for the Montreal office, the online job boards don’t cut it — and she’s not sure why that is.
“We haven’t figured that out yet,” said Morris. “In Quebec, we seem to get much broader candidates and better results from the newspaper postings than the online job boards. It’s more costly, so it’s not desirable, but we seem to have much better success.”
She doesn’t always use the online boards for more senior positions, though. For those positions, she often turns to specialized job boards — such as a professional association — or hires a recruiter.
“We just recently filled a vice-president of marketing role, and we posted that through a marketing association,” she said. “It took us about eight or nine months to recruit for that role. I don’t think, in the end, that the candidate came from that site, but those can be useful.”
And while she’d like to see the big job boards become better for attracting qualified staff for senior positions, it’s not something she really expects to happen.
“Job boards are a cold, impersonal process,” said Morris. “But we’re dealing with human beings and you need that interaction. What a recruiter does, you can’t replace with a job board. It costs a lot more money, but when you’re getting in the more skilled or more specialized positions or higher level roles, the job board just doesn’t seem to do it. When you think about it, it’s a very isolating way of even searching for work. There’s no interaction and often nobody replies to your resume.”
She said the position she’s looking to fill will often dictate how the search is conducted.
“If it’s an information technology position, I’m going to go online,” said Morris. “I’m going to get 1,000 resumes, but if it’s technology-based, that’s where you need to go.”
While she’s a big fan of online postings, she’s not a fan of letting job seekers send resumes in with one click. Many job boards allow people looking for work to store resumes online and apply for a position just by clicking a button. By not letting people do that, it cuts down on the amount of unqualified resumes coming in.
That’s one way to filter out “resume spam”, said Margaret Riley, author of The Riley Guide, an online directory to employment and career resources based in Rockville, Md.
“I get a lot of complaints from HR people who are overwhelmed by candidates who are really not qualified for the jobs,” she said. “They’re getting applications from people who want to relocate or emigrate. They’ll list a set of eight skills that you must have and will get resumes from people who might have three of them and nowhere near the level of experience.”
She said there are a lot of ups and downs to job boards, and there are a lot of changes going on right now in the marketplace.
“I am seeing a lot of smaller boards falling by the wayside,” said Riley. “These are the sites not run by people who are actually in the recruiting industry. We had a lot of upstarts who had no background in recruiting at all — or even careers — and they decided to jump on the bandwagon. But HR wants to see valid returns for their money. They’re talking with dollars, and the bad ones are falling off.”
But the good job boards have a strong role to play in recruiting. There’s no doubt they’re cheaper than newspaper advertising or a recruiting firm and their reach can’t be matched.
“It’s essentially worldwide because anybody can see those job announcements,” said Riley. “You’re not just limited to those who pick up the paper and read it.”
If a firm is posting online, it really should give applicants the chance to apply online, she said. But there are a lot of things organizations are doing wrong on that front. Many firms don’t specify how the resumes should come in.
“A lot of seekers will try to send resumes as a Word or WordPerfect attachment, but now because of viruses your company may not allow that document in,” she said.
Employers should let applicants know the resume has been received, even if it’s just an auto-response that is triggered when the application is e-mailed.
Small businesses are also warming up to online recruiting, which was once more of a playground for large organizations. Some boards — like Hot Jobs — are offering incentives to small businesses.
“We’re still getting a little more growth in small business than we are in our major employers,” she said. “So making it cost effective is a pretty good idea. A small business will not have a dedicated HR professional, let alone a dedicated recruiter, in the company. That role falls to the company president, who is also the bookkeeper, the recruiter and the broom pusher.”
But Gutenberg can sleep soundly in his grave. The newspaper advertisements are not going to disappear, she said. Nor will there be so much consolidation online so that only five or six job boards survive.
“I just can’t see that,” said Riley. “I can’t see the death of newspaper classifieds, and I don’t see Monster taking over the world.”
