Job Boards vs LinkedIn: The yin and yang of recruitment advertising

The bat­tle between the two major job plat­forms con­tin­ues to rage! With many won­der­ing if LinkedIn or Job Boards are king, where has this heated debate sprung from? Search for “death of the job board” and you will dis­cover hun­dreds of results — that’s a lot of pes­simism sur­round­ing an indus­try that employs many tens of thou­sands world­wide and helps many mil­lions find their dream jobs. Let’s dig a lit­tle deeper…

In a recent sur­vey by JobBoardDoctor.com (Jan­u­ary 2015) respon­dents high­lighted that niche job boards receive 5–20 appli­cants per advert, with gen­er­al­ist job boards receiv­ing 11–30 appli­cants per advert. With 81% of respon­dents stat­ing that the qual­ity of appli­cants is crit­i­cal to employ­ers, this demon­strates that not only are job boards still incred­i­bly rel­e­vant, but that the niche job boards are receiv­ing excel­lent apply rates for every posted vacancy. This is vital in a recruit­ment land­scape where niche recruit­ment is start­ing to dominate.

Pro­fes­sional social media plat­form LinkedIn, has been the sup­posed go-to place for recruiters research­ing assign­ments. Can­di­dates love the flat­tery reaped by their LinkedIn pro­file, and if a can­di­date has a good pro­file, why shouldn’t they be flat­tered? Does flat­tery lead to a new job? Not per se. As Face­book is a great place to gain peer accep­tance for per­sonal lifestyle, LinkedIn has become a great place to gain career recognition.

It is the seri­ous social net­work, with 300+ mil­lion users and two users sign­ing up each sec­ond. LinkedIn has set its sights high with a tar­get to achieve three bil­lion mem­bers world­wide. Started in 2003, the plat­form has devel­oped into the pub­lic online CV data­base and per­sonal show­case accessed by recruiters and employ­ers world­wide. To com­pli­ment LinkedIn’s evo­lu­tion, in 2014 they launched Resume Builder — a quick mech­a­nism to cre­ate a CV directly from a LinkedIn pro­file — pick a tem­plate, edit the info, and share. But, can any­one stop the march of LinkedIn?

What many seem to for­get is that there is a work­force that doesn’t quite fit the LinkedIn mold, leav­ing mil­lions of peo­ple from across the globe look­ing in from the out­side and won­der­ing how they can get noticed. As you would expect, the smart job boards took notice.

They are becom­ing more mar­ket savvy. Many are now imple­ment­ing a pay-per-click mod­els, offer­ing a more sus­tain­able finan­cial model that means the job board must work harder to make rel­e­vant appli­ca­tions on behalf of their clients. Job boards are, almost, entirely mobile-friendly — another vital inno­va­tion in the mod­ern world. Far from stag­nat­ing, job boards across the globe are inno­vat­ing and adapt­ing to a quickly chang­ing environment.

As long as there are can­di­dates and recruiters, job boards will never cease to lose their, undoubted, use­ful­ness. Their value is proven time and time again and, although the world has seen the rise of LinkedIn (and, through acqui­si­tions and inno­va­tions, it will con­tinue to rise), its dom­i­nance will not exist in per­pe­tu­ity. Not with­out fierce com­pe­ti­tion, job boards still reign as the go-to place for job seek­ers, with LinkedIn often the research tool to view a candidate’s pro­file once they have applied for a posi­tion. Per­haps we should have titled this arti­cle the yin and yang of recruit­ment adver­tis­ing, for as we see it, job boards and LinkedIn are oppos­ing but com­pli­men­tary forces.

Source: http://www.idibu.com/extras/blog/2015/05/job-boards-vs-linkedin/