As 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, with nearly 25 percent saying they “responded to an ad posted on a commercial job board” to find their last job.
But, compared to the percentage who found work that way in the 2006 survey, when 31.7 percent listed a job board as the way they found a job, the numbers have declined substantially.
Referrals are rising
As the chart shows, job seekers 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. You can 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 have also dramatically improved in quality, becoming a destination for job seekers. Not among the top five sources in 2006, company career sites are today how 10 percent of the survey’s responding job seekers found their last job.
One curious result is the 7.3 percent of job seekers 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.
Don’t read too much into the numbers
It’s much more effective, in fact, than expecting to be contacted by a recruiter sourcing candidates via social media. Not even one (1) percent of the job seekers in this survey said they found their job through a recruiter “who saw my resume/profile on a social media site.”
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.’”