Company Effectiveness with Job Boards

I find myself very interested in the reasons why things are happening the way they are during my job search.  I spent some time investigating this weekend on the effectiveness of the job boards at placing people.  I think the numbers might shock you.  I found that the number of people getting a successful job placement from a job board couldn’t even break 10%.  Most of the research I found put the numbers around 5-7%.  What’s worse is the remarkable high numbers of large firms that have have accounts with the job boards.  Based on the information in my last post, we know that most of job board’s services are not cheap.   Companies on average are spending 60% – 70% of their recruiting budgets on contracts with job boards for these services. 

Being generous for a minute, an average company spends 60% on a job board services to get 10% back.  That’s not really great return on investment.  So why do companies spend so much to get so little?

Additional research shows that the #1 way (at 20-25%) was to be referred by another employee, followed by another 20% via a company’s website.  So 50% comes from either someone knowing you or you reaching out directly with the company.  But that’s only half the hires and the other half needs to come from somewhere.  Apparently part of that is the job boards combined with recruiters/staffing agencies to try to fill the gap.  Knowing what recruiters charge and combining that with the cost of the job board is why most of the money is being lost here.

My question here is why are companies spending so much to get so little?

How Much Is My Information Worth?

So I started digging into the fees for the different “features” of some of the larger job boards. OMG! Are you kidding me? My information comes with a pretty high price tag. Companies/Recruiters have to pay quite a price just to view my information. Here are some of my findings…

To view the resume database:

Job Board #1:
- 2-weeks ~$600.00
- 1-month ~$1000.00

Job Board #2:
- 1-week ~$400 (within a certain mileage radius of your company)

So a company can pay up to $1000.00 a month just to look at resumes. This means that if it takes a company 3 months to find someone they could pay close to $3000.00 just for searching. So what about the smaller companies that don’t have an extra $1000.00 a month just to look for talent? This means that the larger companies (via recruiters mostly) are getting the pick of the litter and the smaller companies with less resources are getting what is left over. What if the smaller company is offering my dream job? If I wait for a call from them I could be here for a while.

Ok, so maybe I’ll just go out and find my dream job on these job boards. If they can’t find me, I’ll find them, right? They can post the job and wait for me to find them for much cheaper, right? Wrong! There’s also a fee on their end to post the job, “decorate” the job (add company logos, etc) and profile their company. And once again the price tag is higher than you think…

To post a job on a job board:

Job Board #1
- 1-month post ~$400.00
- To add a company logo add ~$50.00 per post
- To have this job board post to other boards add ~$100
- Premium Features (Additional job posting features) add ~$150
- To profile their company on the job board add ~$400 a month

Job Board #2
- 1-2 month post ~$200 – ~$400
- Hourly job postings ~$100
- Advertise your company ~$150

So companies can pay up to $1100 a month just to post 1 job! Wow, well maybe I’ll just put my resume up there and let it speak for itself. I’m pretty confident in my skill set, right. Then I find out I can pay to have my background checked, upgrade my resume and….get myself higher on the results listing. That’s right! I can pay money to the job board to raise my “match rating” so I show up before others that didn’t pay. The cost for all of this…

Mixture of job boards:

- Background Check: $30.00 for basic (up to ~$120.00 for full check)
- Resume Upgrade (to get higher “match rating”): ~$30.00/month

How is this helping anyone? All this does is make me look like I match jobs that I may not match. Then the company wastes time trying to talk to me (via the recruiter) and the company is getting matches they really shouldn’t get because that person paid to get on their list.

This entire thing is getting kind of ridiculous if you ask me.

What do those job board settings do?

The flood of emails, some useful and most useless, continue to bombard my email inbox.  I’m now getting emails from recruiters that are interested in placing me in contract to hire positions in different states.  Pretty good right?  Well I suppose it would be good if I had selected that I wanted to be a contractor and that I was willing to relocate during the profile setup. 

My last blog post indicated that I suspected that the job boards were selling my information and after some research my suspicion is correct.  Most job boards have a “public” and “private” visibility setting.  The private setting allows for you to post your resume, without anyone else seeing it, and apply for a job.  The public setting allows the same, but additionally allows employeers to see you.  The enticing thing about the public setting is that it allows for a potential two way communication channel (which is why I picked this option.)  Looking deeper at one of the sites, they have a “resume database access” option that they offer for a pretty sizable fee to companies.  When I set my profile to public, my name and resume information goes into this database and becomes available to anyone willing to pay the fee. 

The question is WHO is paying this amount of money to look at my resume.  Based on the calls I’m getting, it’s not employers, it’s recruiters.  Additionally the recruiters are either not looking closely at the other settings in the database (the type  and location of work) or those settings are not available in the database.  Either way the amount of emails that I’m getting has increased and it’s because the job boards don’t really care who they sell the information too.  Just make sure you can pay up the $1000.00 a month to search.

UPDATE (7/19/2010): Bill Grunau has posted a similar blog with much more detail behind this behavior.  Please check it out: http://blog.careerxl.com/2010/02/01/whos-buying–selling-your-resume-resumes-posted-on-job-boards-are-for-sale.aspx

I’m qualified for what?

I opened up my email this morning, and after sifting through the recruiter’s “call me back” emails, I found that I’m now, apparently qualified to be in sales, real estate, and finance.  I wasn’t even looking to expand my horizons beyond my current line of work.  But there they were, automatically generated and personalized with my my name at the beginning of the statement.  How nice that a server that can read a database can choose me from all those other talented individuals to work in these fields.

It is now apparent to me that my resume upload must have been used, by several of the job boards, to distribute my personal information around.  Obviously advertising profits weren’t enough, now that they have everyone’s personal information, they can sell that too.  The job board is starting to look like a beast that can’t be fed.

Ads Everywhere

So yesterday I go to check job listings from one of the numerous automated emails that generate from the job board.  When I clicked on the job link, I get an advertisement for one of those online colleges.  At first it took me off guard because when you click on a job link, you have an expectation…the job description.  For a moment, I thought maybe it was a job with the online college, but then reading through it, it was for me to sign up to “sharpen my skills.”  Give me a break.  I scrolled down to the bottom of the page so that I could  click decline before I get to see the job description. 

So I guess the advertisements that are at the top, bottom, left, right, and those that scroll across your screen so that you need to try to keep your mouse up with the “close” or “x” button to get it out of your way as quick as you can, isn’t enough anymore.  We now need to interrupt expected flow of getting a job description with an advertisement.  I understand the need to get money from advertising, but I think it’s become a little ridiculous.

UPDATE (7/13/2010):  It’s not only limited to clicking on job postings.  I recently logged into one of the job boards and found myself having to dismiss an advertisement before it took me to my profile.  Annoying.

Companies and Job Boards

I did some research out on the web last night to try to find the answer to my question of why companies seem not to be calling me when I posted to the job board.  It seems to be a variety of reasons.  The first reason seems to be that the traditional job board seems to be too expensive for companies to post and retrieve results.  There seem to be monthly fees for everything – searching resumes, putting your company’s logo on a post, and increasing the relevance of your posting.   The fees, IMHO, don’t seem to be in line with the value they return.  Why exactly should posting a company’s logo cost $50.00 a month?

Also, it seems like the company gets overwhelmed with job postings to sort through.  I’ve read stories of thousands of resumes flooding in for one job.  This has to put pressure on the company that is doing the hiring to find the best candidate. 

In the end, I think companies are turning to recruiters to find the candidate because the recruiter can then shoulder the expense of the job board and the work of sifting through thousands of resumes.  The problem that this creates is that the job seeker no longer has direct interaction with companies.

The Shock

Recently my employer decided that for “budgetary reasons” that it would be a good idea to lay off a large contingent of people in my department.  Seeing my colleagues be called into a room one at a time and then marched out by security with their boxes jolted those of us that remained pretty badly.  Even as I type this the nerve that was exposed is still pretty raw.  That evening, I went home and basically decided the job I called stable for a good portion of my adult life was no longer guaranteed and that it was time to take action.  It was time to find a new job.  The good news was that I’ve been keeping my resume up to date over the years and felt very prepared to enter the job market with that very crucial step completed.  My first task was to post my resume on a very popular job board and a local technology council.  I figured that was the best mix of “big” and “small” I could get.  The last time I used this particular job board was as my college career was coming to a close during the .COM boom.  The job leads I got from the board and the subsequent calls I received from companies were pretty good back then as I remember. 

So I filled out all the information on the board and posted my resume.  The next day my cell phone started ringing off the hook and I started getting messages from companies with names I didn’t recognize.  I also got emails from them as well.  As I started to return these phone calls I realized very quickly they were recruiters looking to place me with a company.  By the time the day was over I had just over 20 some recruiters that I had made contacts with.  An army of people keeping an eye out for jobs for you can’t be a bad thing, right?  But as the week went on, I expected a mixture of recruiters and companies to call and I quickly found out that the companies themselves weren’t calling.  Being a person that is pretty curious of how things work, I decided to do some investigation…