Three ways you maximize job listings on the best job posting sites.
Job postings are a critical part of recruiting, but the way they work can devalue the jobs you need to fill. Understanding the ways that your job posts lose their value, and taking steps to stand out, can help you attract and win more great employees.
The Challenge of Job Postings for Great Companies
We all know that job postings are organized by those who own the online service. They create the market where job seekers find lots of options, and companies that need to recruit can pay for the privilege of appearing in the listings. But they aren't always doing you a favor. The nature of the online market forces you to overcome the way that it damages the value of your job openings.
Here are three ways even the best job posting sites devalue your job openings.
- Force you to compete as a commodity, by focusing only on salary, benefits, location, or schedule.
- Place you alongside job listings from companies that are extremely small so that they appear to be of equal stature or value.
- Provide a venue in which every company can make the same claims to a better work culture (no matter how true) so that jobseekers view them all as meaningless.
How you can overcome negative job marketplace factors
Since almost everyone needs to use every available method to recruit, here are several keys that can assist you in maintaining the value of your job postings:
1. Stop viewing the job marketplace as the best place to win new employees.
We can see this by looking at the realities of one highly competitive employment industry: home care.
- In the 2020 Benchmarking Study, research showed that home care agencies with the best performance were recruiting more employees on their own websites versus job posting boards when compared to less effective competitors.
- In the 2021 edition of the same study, the facts pointed out the reality of what happens with employees recruited from the best job posting sites. Employees from these sites were the most expensive to hire, and they had the highest turnover rates.
2. Find ways to quickly and consistently move job seekers off of the job posting marketplace into a digital environment that you control.
The thinking that an inquiry in the job posting marketplace alone will lead to a good hire is flawed. When a job seeker submits an inquiry on the marketplace we need to view this as a price shopping behavior, because they are doing the same thing with multiple other employers. The answer is not to just race to an appointment, but to intentionally move the job seeker into digital properties that can introduce them to what actually makes your company different.
Instead of a focus on optimizing the job post, work on moving people off the marketplace into your environment.
The faster you move job seekers out of the "shopping aisle" of the job marketplace into your website, the more likely you'll be to win them on the value of working for you. Not all websites can deliver on this process, so a high-performing website is critical. The longer they stay on the marketplace, the more diluted your impact becomes, and the more crowded the conversation becomes with other employers.
3. View the online experience on your career page as something more than a mirror of the job listing site.
Yes, job seekers want to know if you have openings, but you need to win them to something bigger than just salary and benefit levels. Standing out in the mind of job seekers means helping them see that your company is actually different. Given the competition, that requires a lot more than just a list of jobs.
The majority of career pages for U.S. companies are nothing more than a list that looks like the job marketplace. If the career page where you can influence and explain your differentiators offers exactly the same experience as a job posting site (except it has fewer jobs), then why would a job seeker spend any time there at all?
The biggest challenge that companies have in communicating their employment brand and differentiators is that they haven't defined them, or they keep them a virtual secret until an interview. This means that they are not giving job seekers any reason to view them as unique—their jobs remain virtually invisible.
The path to standing out and winning more great employees starts with defining the employer brand story, and then putting that story to work in all of your recruiting activity.
