Job Board Web Design – What To Look For

Having been in recruitment for over 2 decades, and online recruitment for half that time, I have some very definite opinions on the subject of Job Board Web Design.

Since founding AlljobsUK.com, and the National Online Recruitment Awards 9 years ago, almost every working hour has been spent viewing job boards of all kinds across the UK. I must have registered with thousands in that time, in order to assess what they offer, from a candidate’s perspective. What became clear, very quickly, is that very little will work properly on a job board, if the candidate has not been the primary focus in its design. Whilst the spread of internet ability of candidates is far wider than ever, the basic principles remain the same. Further to a brand that makes sense to candidates, the fundamental requirements of an excellent job board are:

1. Simple, clear, logical, no matter how complex the technology beneath the design.

2. It must offer a personal and individual service, and cater to an “audience of one”.

3. Basic job advertising is not enough. I want a site to interact with me; to save my searches, and report fresh vacancies as soon as they appear.

4. Most importantly, I will put up with a terrible site, if it has the vacancies I’m looking for. The best feature of any job board has to be the vacancies themselves.

The biggest temptation for all job board owners, is to overload the candidate with too much information, in an attempt to be all things to all people. This results in websites with extremely messy pages, full of text and irrelevant client adverts. Joe Bloggs, the accountant, does not need to be seeing banner ads for engineers and call centres. When a job board makes the effort to fit closely around the profile of each individual candidate, it can then efficiently route the job seeker seamlessly to the most relevant vacancies, and therefore satisfy its clients.

For me, the very best current examples are:
mccarthyrecruitment.com
heatrecruitment.co.uk
my.monster.co.uk
armyjobs.mod.uk
innocentdrinks.co.uk/careers

Stephen O’Donnell FREC, Director AlljobsUK.com
stephen@alljobsuk.com

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In 2009 Some Job Boards Will Be Winners… And Some Will Be…

How should we respond to the ‘Doom & Gloom’ virus that is attempting to drag us deep into recession? Cut the marketing budget? Not a wise move. There are far too many of your competitors out there waiting for you to do just that. Don’t letup in your marketing activity to your existing and new customers.

What about your customers? Are they cutting their marketing budget? Possibly, but the more likely scenario is that they are looking for better value for their money to justify their budget.

Job board customers will invariably pay more attention to measuring the number and quality of applications they receive against the cost of each advert. They will home-in on the boards that produce the best results.

The market knows that there will be more candidates out there so there is a natural expectation that application rates will improve. If your job board is failing to produce the candidate applications levels that they are expecting for their money and that they need to make hires, they will surely look for a cheaper deal from you or (the unthinkable) go elsewhere.

Job Boards that do provide improvements on the number of applications they send will be the winners, both retaining existing customers, and gaining new ones. The UK has thousands of Job boards and as job advertising spends tighten, clearly job boards that are second-rate in providing large volumes of good applications are unlikely to survive in 2009.

Now is a good time to maintain or increase your traffic acquisition spending to ensure your board is one of those that does provide the highest level of good applications. Spending on Googles’ adsense pay-per-click side adverts can help drive candidates to a job boards site but vertical job specific search engines often provide far better value. This is not only because click through costs are lower than Google, but also because the candidates sent through are a pre-qualified fit and arrive directly at the specific job adverts that interest them.

Like price comparison search engines for shoppers, candidates from job search engines are pre-qualified and are more likely to act and apply because they have previewed a summary of the job advert and seen the job title, location, salary and part of the job description.

It’s easy to try out a job search engine and to compare the results you get against the generic search engines Google and Yahoo etc. Just ask for a free trial for a couple of weeks with a job search engine or two and monitor the effectiveness of their candidate traffic.

It could change the way you think about acquiring applications for your customers and save your hard-pressed budget. Most importantly though it will help you increase the number of applications your job board sends to your customers job adverts.

In 2009 there will be no more important time to meet and exceed your customers expectations.

http://www.1job.co.uk/ – The UK’s no.1 jobs vertical search engine

*ABCe audited figures

1Job.co.uk is the UK’s no.1 jobs vertical search engine. 1Job sends over 1 million candidates directly to its clients job adverts every month*. Job boards that use 1Job want to provide as much exposure as possible to their customers’ job postings. They want to get job application rates up and they want to help build their searchable CV databases and keep them fresh.

For more information and a trial contact Mark Cary:
E: mark@1job.co.uk
Tel: 0870 3500 230
or visit: www.1jobsignup.co.uk to start your free trial today.

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