Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses whether you should be spending time in your job search with job boards.
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Today, I want to talk with you about whether or not you should be applying for jobs using job boards.
There is an article that I saw online that poses the question, whether job boards matter anymore. The article includes data from the corporate perspective using this 1 firm’s model. What they say is that people found their job listings, 38% found them through corporate websites, 35% through social media links, 23% through an email campaign, 4% throughout the links. Interesting data if you are trying to hire. Let’s break down the data.
They talk about how 61% of social media visits and 95% of social media applications were in the 1st 7 days. In other words, they were able to get out the message a lot quicker using social media. They got more applications more quickly using social media.
Social Media
From the job hunter perspective, social media is a great way to find out about “stuff.” It’s a great way to find out about jobs and companies….It is a great tool when you are job hunting
.
However, I also want to say the job boards are a terrific tool, too. You can call that job board Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice or whatever! You can call it LinkedIn because that has because LinkedIn certainly advertises jobs in a variety of ways and I’m talking about a job board feature here.
All these job boards are going to be morphing fairly soon and aggregating jobs like Indeed and SimplyHired do.
The relevance to you is that despite all the hype in the recruiting world is around LinkedIn, the fact of the matter is that people are ship finding jobs to job boards. They are finding jobs through networking too much higher level. But, yes, they are finding jobs for job boards.
Yes, it is a tedious process. There are a few things that make it better. For example, I did a quick demo with someone at monster.com for a little utility that they have called BeKnown. That operates on Facebook. Once you register on monster and come over to Facebook to look for jobs, what you will notice is that on some of the jobs a picture starts to appear on someone that you are connected with on Facebook who works for that firm or has worked for the firm.
This is the idea of using your network to finesse your way into an organization, having an advocate supporting you in order to get interviewed. They obviously can’t get you hired, but may be able to get in touch with the hiring manager and provide an employee referral that might result from the introduction and earn a commission and, you, an interview and the job.
The Data o Networking is Overwhelming
My advice to you is to use all the tools that are available to you. After all, they all work. As Dave Opton of ExecuNet said on “Job Search Radio,” the statistics are very overwhelming, that the way that 70% of people find jobs is through networking. 70% of the 70% find jobs as a result of introductions to people that they didn’t know at the beginning of the search.
Catch that one. 70% of the people find jobs through networking. 70% of the 70% (or 49%) found a job as a result of someone that they didn’t know at the beginning of the search.
Anything that you can do is going to help you find work. Networking. Job boards. Friends. It all works. Don’t drop anything from your arsenal because job boards and recruiters fill a certain number of jobs, even though networking feels far more.
Just keep working the job boards. Keep working. The technology that’s available to you to find out about leads (like the agents that will deliver leads from job boards to your inbox).
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Do you think employers are trying to help you?
You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
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