Brett Minchington explains the importance of promoting a consistent employment brand message across all touch points

With the increasing fragmentation of communication channels used to express, ‘What it’s like to work for this organisation,’ and ‘What’s in it for you,’ it pays to ensure the employment experience you promote to potential employees through a job board is matched by what you can realistically deliver upon in the employment experience – and in many cases this experience starts at a job board.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from job seekers is that job boards are too static, boring, impersonal and it’s like finding a needle (job!) in a haystack. The successful job boards will be those which clearly understand their client and customers needs and strategically evolve their service offering to connect them. Where many job boards have become irrelevant is in attempting to innovate and grow revenues and margin they have simply bolted on additional offerings. Along the way they have lost touch with their core business offering – matching candidates to jobs.

A central focus of your job board strategy should be the accurate reflection of your company’s employer value proposition (EVP). In its simplest form, the EVP is a set of associations and offerings provided by the organisation in return for the skills, capabilities and experiences an employee brings to the organisation. It sits at the heart of your employer brand strategy. Unfortunately not enough organisations have taken a strategic view with their EVP and it shows. Just visit a job board and take a look at the company profiles section. The moment of truth for companies is to ask, “Does this authentically reflect what it’s like to work for our company?

The key is to ensure your EVP messaging is consistent across online touch points such as the job boards you use. It should adapt to the particular role but should always reflect your brand essence. If I’m viewing openings at Microsoft or Deloitte my perception of what it is like to work at these companies should be endorsed or enhanced through my interaction at the job boards, not diminished.

A job board is not the only part of a company’s communication mix, so the company’s presence here needs to be considered as part of their overall employer brand strategy.

In the online space size does matter but the trend is towards integration, customisation and openness and this is where companies who understand the benefits of employer branding will leverage their job board investment. Companies like Starbucks have a global community of over 6 million on Facebook that can support their job board strategy! When their target candidates visit their job board postings it is likely they have already linked positive brand associations in forming a positive brand image of working for Starbucks. You can hear them say, “If I’m looking for a job in a coffee house, Starbucks is the one I want to work for!” The same can be said for Zappos, Goggle, FedEx and Electronic Arts (EA).

The challenge ahead lies in the ability for HR and recruiting managers to drive the strategic agenda to ensure collaboration with the marketing and communication functions to arrive at a coordinated brand strategy that builds competitive advantage over time and which is felt in places at a granular level such as when job seekers visits a job board.

Brett Minchington MBA, Chairman/CEO of Employer Brand International is an International employer brand strategist, author and educator. Brett has delivered employer branding key note addresses, executive briefings, masterclass events and chaired Summits in more than 30 cities in 20 countries. He has consulted to Global and National brands and has been published globally in HR, Marketing and Management magazines including ‘The Economist’ and ‘Business Week’. His most recent book is ‘Employer Brand Leadership.’

(PS: The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Job Board Report 2010. Register to get your free copy here)

By positioning themselves as gatekeepers to job boards, job posting software (JPS) providers are cementing their position as critical players in the acquisition of talent.  JPS lessens the administrative drudgery of posting jobs, saves time, increases the ability to distribute jobs to a wide network and provides metrics to measure and manage job posting activities.

I caught up with Brett Iredale, MD of Job Adder, to discuss a range of issues including  the value proposition of JPS, measuring the worth of job boards, social media and the company’s progress.

 
DT. JobAdder is a uniquely Australian take on the job posting space, can you tell us a bit about your history and how JobAdder came about?
BI: My background is in IT consulting and sales. In 2001 I started an IT recruitment agency and soon after started developing job boards as a way to attract hard to find candidates. The job board business soon took on a life of its own so we stopped recruiting in order to focus exclusively on job boards. JobAdder came about as a result of frustrations and road blocks experienced as job board owners. In particular we faced 2 major hurdles.

(1) Recruiters would buy a membership and then not list their job ads because of the extra effort required. This was very frustrating. So we realized early on that we needed to get integrated with the leading recruitment and job posting systems in order to get content.

(2) This proved to be very difficult because the system providers at the time could not be bothered integrating new job boards. The final straw was when the then MD of Adlogic told me to come back when I had “a worthwhile client base” and then they might consider integrating us. That was an important day in our history. The next day we had a spec drawn up and started cutting code for JobAdder a few days later.

DT. What is the ROI on using job posting solutions? Some providers offer their solutions for free. Why must companies or recruiters use JobAdder?
BI: The benefits and returns of using a job posting solution are numerous. The most obvious one is time and money saved through dramatically reducing the time it takes to post job ads. A typical annual saving for a medium recruitment agency is $50,000 – $100,000+ in labour alone.

Other major benefits are opportunity costs. If a consultant has an extra few hours a week as a result of faster job posting then that is time that can be spent making placements. As all recruitment managers know, time spent writing job ads is time that can’t be spent conducting interviews and making placements. JobAdder also has a host of management tools that allow businesses to more effectively manage things like ad spend, job board effectiveness, ad writing effectiveness, best times and days for job posting for their industries and so on.

DT. There are close to 150 job boards in Australia, is this far too many, or do you think variety is something to be welcomed. Where do you see the industry heading?
BI: I think there is room for plenty more yet. We know from speaking with recruiters and job seekers that there is still a need for highly specialised niche online communities. For example the medical recruitment sector still find it incredibly hard to find good people online.

DT. JobAdder is a web-based solution for both employers and professional recruiters. Does the way the two groups use job boards, and therefore JobAdder, differs widely?
BI: They do differ in terms of the pains they are solving but the way they use JobAdder is quite consistent. For example a corporate advertiser may be attracted to JobAdder because they can access more job boards and have a centralised online resume database. Recruiters with high volumes are generally looking to save time and money and to access better management reporting.

Q. What’s your stand on the generalist vs niche boards debate? Is there a best-practice method to choose which job boards to advertise in? Does JobAdder help clients in making decisions?
BI: Choosing job boards is very business-specific. There are no hard and fast rules about it. Our advice is generally to try the ones you think might work and to closely measure results. Nothing speaks louder than tangible evidence.

Yes JobAdder does assist advertisers choose job boards but our advice is generally the same as above. E.g. “here are the ones we recommend trying”. JobAdder then measures results applicant by applicant and allows them to slice and dice the information various ways so that they can effectively compare apples to apples.

Q. JobAdder handles around 180,000 jobs a month. What does the numbers reveal. Can you share some insights on the behavior of job seekers or advertisers? What are the biggest mistakes your clients make when dealing with job boards?
BI: The biggest area for improvement with most advertisers is that most still can’t tell you scientifically how their job boards are performing. They are still making decisions on consultant straw polls and gut feel.

Online advertising is often a recruiter’s largest non salary expense so clearly they should be able to accurately understand the effectiveness of this spend. JobAdder solves this problem and many of our clients report that this alone is more than sufficient ROI to justify implementing JobAdder.

We also spend a lot of time help advertisers understand how to write better job ads so that they get the full 30 days of value from their job ad rather than having to re post it every week or 2.

DT. We have come a long way from say ten years ago, today a job board can be built or bought off the shelf, and in a matter of minutes jobs can be distributed to hundreds of job boards. What do you see recruitment technology heading, is JobAdder investing in anything new?
BI: Yes we definitely invest heavily in new technology – our own. The biggest problem with many recruitment systems is that they don’t keep up with technology – they just keep patching up old software. Eventually you end up with patches on patches on patches. We like to pull everything apart and put it all back together again every 12 months so that we can continually improve the architecture of the system and take full advantage of new technology where appropriate.

You are right about job board technology getting less expensive, but as I have always maintained, you get what you pay for. If you pay a few thousand dollars for a piece of job board technology then expect it to be junk.

DT. Lately, social media and networking tools like LinkedIn are the talk of town. You are a keen blogger too, what are your thoughts on social media in general, and has it in anyway affected JobAdder operations or long-term strategy?
BI: Social media is exciting and it will be an important part of everyday life over the next few years. It can also be a big time waster so we are careful to closely evaluate such emerging technologies, understand their potential impact and usages in online recruitment, and quickly move on from anything that does not add clear and present value. To date that is most of them.

Our long term strategy is to continue to build recruitment solutions that add value, that do what they say on the box and that people love to use. Social media will play a part in this but at the end of the day it will just be a part of the overall solution.

DT. Looking ahead, what are the main challenges or priorities for JobAdder? Is tackling overseas markets in the plan?
BI: Overseas markets are a possibility but for now we have plenty to do in our own market. I have worked with too many software companies that have attempted to go overseas before owning their own market. We won’t be going overseas until we have achieved a lot more of our domestic goals.

The economic conditions are exciting for us as recruiters and corporate advertisers look for ways to save money and increase efficiency. January 09 was our biggest month since launching so we are confident we are on the right track.

Our other main challenges remain the same as they have for the last 2 years. Growing a business out of cash flow is something that needs careful management. We are very proud of this achievement and will continue to grow within our means for the foreseeable future.

Some nine companies, both local and international, compete in the job aggregation space in Australia. Aggregators, unlike job boards, do not own the jobs listed on their website. Like search engines, they merely act as a platform to redirect job seekers traffic. Some job boards depended on them to increase their own traffic, while some sees them as a threat. Aggregators offers employers another channel to net talent at a very attractive price-point, including the increasingly popular pay-per-click services.

An early innovator, and one of the first companies to introduce vertical job search technology in Australia, Recruit.net is currently the leading player in Asia-Pacific. I recently caught up with CEO Maneck Mohan and he shared his views on the job board industry, SEEK’s reluctance to have their jobs aggregated, and glimpses into the future of Recruit.net.

DT: Maneck, can you shed some light on your background and recruit.net’s history?
MM: My career started in investment banking and then moved into technology recruitment where I’ve spent the better part of 15 years working with Fortune 100 companies. Part of the initial motivation to build Recruit.net was the need for an in-house tool that could systematically gather and analyze job data from the hundreds job sources across internet. From a recruitment perspective there was immense value in being able to track and monitor job postings, industry trends and job supply across various sectors. We were also eager to launch a service that catered to the needs of job seekers in general as opposed to corporations which had been our focus for so long.

Upon launching Recruit.net quickly established wide spread appeal among job seekers largely by word of mouth. Today we do close to 1 million job searches and receive more than 800 new job seeker registrations per day.

DT: Where do aggregators add the most value? How do you differentiate the value you offer from the rest of the job board community?
MM: Recruit.net is a vertical search engine or aggregator that provides jobseekers an easy way to search job boards, agencies and corporate job postings from one site. Recruit.net currently lists around 250,000 live vacancies, making it the largest resources for jobseekers in Australia.

We are different from job boards in that we are not a content site. We don’t host any job data. We display summary listings of data in our results and direct the job seeker to the content sites (such as job boards) to view and apply for a job. We work much in the same way Google works, basically we drive high volumes of targeted job seeker traffic to job sites.

Our place in the online recruitment eco-system is different from job boards. We complement each other and job boards are some of our most loyal customers. Our corporate tag line is “Job search starts here.” We’re only the starting point for the job seekers search, the destination is the job site that is posting the job and the place where the job application takes place.

DT: There are about ten job aggregators operating in the Australian market. Do you think the market can accommodate such a number? Is consolidation in this space likely to happen?
MM: We were the first to launch in Australia and we’ve set the bar pretty high. However, I personally don’t give too much weight to being the first mover in a market. It’s far more important being the best mover Google was late to the web search business but they quickly won market share and took over the market because of the quality of their service.

The internet public does not need to be loyal to any specific web service. We tend to use the product that serves our needs best. So yes I think there will be consolidation in the Australian job search market. Companies need to focus on innovation and the quality of their product. Competition is good. It’s keeps us all on our toes!

DT: There has been lots of talk that aggregators don’t have a long-term future in Australia, largely because SEEK do not allow their jobs to be aggregated. What are your thoughts on some job boards’ reluctance to participate and open up their jobs?
MM: I compare it to the New York Times or other online newspapers that previously restricted access to their content to protect paid subscription fees. Recent history has shown that subscription fees cannot possibly outweigh the dramatically higher ad revenue that comes from increased traffic on a free site. SEEK are well aware of this and it’s just a matter of time before they embrace similar changes taking place in the online recruitment landscape. Content is free and the internet is flattening. Almost every ASX listed company now has their job listings posted on their corporate web site. The online recruitment landscape has changed and there is no turning back.

With regards to aggregators not having a long term future in Australia. Let me put it this way: What is a more compelling option for a job seeker, to search a proprietary database of paid job listings or a web wide search of job listings from hundreds of sources across the internet? By excluding themselves from job aggregators SEEK is just losing free job seekers traffic to their competitors.

DT: Pay per click is a relatively new model as opposed to pay-per-post in the job board arena. What do you think are the benefits and what has been recruit.net’s experience?
MM: We provide pay-per-click and pay-per-application recruitment solutions, wherein an advertiser only pays per visitor or CV received. This is performance based, measurable advertising which provides advertisers a transparent return on their investment.

We typically work on a consultative approach with our new clients who are usually more familiar with the old pay-per-post model. We set up performance monitoring; we integrate with their existing applicant tracking system (ATS) and then provide a completely free trial period for the client to evaluate the campaign performance. Advertisers assess for themselves the volume and quality of the applications they receive. We’ve found that results speak louder than words.

(P.S: The above is an excerpt from the forthcoming Job Board Report 2009. Register now to receive your free copy)