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Job Boards Still a Leading Way to Fill Vacancies

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Jun 30, 2015
This article is part of a series called News & Trends.

Source of Employment surveyAs more than one survey has pointed out, job boards are far from dead.

The latest survey, from the International Association of Employment Web Sites, shows applying to a job posted on a commercial site is still the leading way some job seekers find work. Compared to the percentage who found work that way in the 2006 survey, the numbers have declined substantially.

As the accompanying chart shows, jobseekers who found work via a job board have fallen almost 23 percent in 10 years. That may not so much be a sign of their declining importance, as evidence of the rise of other search tools and techniques. Referrals, which didn’t make it into the top five in 2006, now account for almost 13 percent of the placements. Attribute that to the emphasis companies have placed on promoting referrals and such tools as Jobvite, which make the process so much more efficient.

Company websites, too, have dramatically improved in quality, becoming a destination for job seekers. Also not among the top five sources in 2006, company career sites are today how 10 percent of the survey’s responding jobseekers found their last job.

One curious result is the 7.3 percent of jobseekers who reported being contacted by a recruiter who found them by searching job board resume databases. With all the buzz surrounding social and business networking, posting a resume on a Monster, CareerBuilder, or niche job board is still effective. Much more effective, in fact, than expecting to be contacted by a recruiter sourcing candidates via social media. Not even one percent of the seekers in this survey said they found their job through a recruiter “who saw my resume/profile on a social media site.”

While some of the results of this survey echo other surveys, including the annual Source of Hire survey compiled by the recruitment consultancy CareerXroads and another from HR software vendor Silkroad, it would be a mistake to read too much into the results. Like most source of hire surveys, the sample size and collection methods make drawing conclusions more art than science.

What can be said is what report author Peter Weddle notes in the conclusion: the “responses strongly refute the conventional wisdom, at least as it has been espoused by some in the recruiting field, that ‘job boards are dead or dying or dinosaurs.’”

This article is part of a series called News & Trends.
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