Job boards are the go-to place to find candidates and fill roles – if you’re following recruitment 101.

However, in such a competitive environment, to be a top biller you need to expand your search to find the best talent.

We’ve shared some tips on where to look for candidates elsewhere.

 

Why use other tools?

There are a lot of job boards to choose between, potentially too many. And it’s getting harder to work out which are the best ones to invest your time and money in. Research by Digitalist Magazine found that 79% of the people they spoke to feel it’s a challenge to identify the right job boards.

 

The challenge to find the right job boards

The result the above is that many recruiters are posting the same job on multiple sites, making them an overwhelming environment for potential candidates to navigate. This means:

  • your roles will get lost amongst the crowd
  • a good candidate might be more likely to leave the site without applying for your role
  • you might get multiple applications from the same candidate across multiple sites, and they might not be suitable for the role – so it’s wasting your time

What’s interesting is that, it wasn’t job boards that were the fast-growing means of recruiting, attracting and finding new hires in 2017 – it was social networking.

HireRight’s 2017 Benchmark Report found that engaging prospective candidates via LinkedIn, Twitter and similar social media platforms rose 10% in popularity. Job boards, which were traditionally the most popular digital means of reaching new candidates, fell 3%.

Alternatives to job boards

So, what are the alternatives?

To start, you should be continuously expanding your use of social media for sourcing. As well as the obvious choice of LinkedIn, these include:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Glassdoor
  • Quora
  • Pinterest

You should also make sure you have a presence on sites such as Geeklist, Experts Exchange and Talentbin.

Check out this list of places to source candidates.

Finally, you should be taking advantage of Facebook Jobs, as the application process is easy for candidates, as well as Google For Jobs.

 

Rising use of social media to reach candidates

As we already discussed, there has been a surge in the popularity of social media for recruitment.

The research done by Digitalist Magazine also found that social networks are the #1 source of quality hires, followed by internet job boards and employee referrals.

SHRM interviewed HR professionals whose role it is to recruit, and found that 84% of them were already choosing to recruit through social channels, with another 9% planning to use them.

More research, done by OnRec, found the following about the way recruiters are choosing to find new talent:

  • 61.5% use LinkedIn
  • 30.7% use Facebook
  • 23.1% use Twitter
  • only 7.7% use job boards

To further cement the increasing popularity of social media as a recruitment tool, research from Robert Walters found that 13% of recruiters would post available roles on social media, whereas only 12% would do so on job boards.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg – you can see just how successful recruitment via social media has become by checking out these other stats.

We’ve shared some effective social media and SEO tips to help you create a strong brand presence online.

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We’re not trying to say that job boards are obsolete, not by any means. They are still popular, and so you must still maintain a presence on them. However, to attract the best talent make sure your roles stand out, you need to expand your digital presence – and social media is a great place to start.