“Where should I post my job opening?”
Six HR tips for using job aggregators.
I hear this question weekly from HR colleagues and clients. Assuming the people asking this question are specifically targeting active candidates (pursuing the estimated 80% of talent who aren’t actively checking out new positions on job boards is a completely different type of discussion which I’m happy to have), I often direct them to a job board aggregator (sometimes referred to as vertical job search engines) to help them conduct a bit of research to answer their question.
My favorite job board aggregators for years have been Simplyhired.com and Indeed.com. Recently, I discovered a new favorite, Linkup.com, thanks to a blog postby Laurie Ruettimann on Punk Rock HRbefore she signed off on that forum. For a list of other job aggregators, including European and Asian sources, take a look at Eric Shannon’s post on the topic. 
Job aggregators are terrific tools to drive visibility for your job postings but did you know that they can also deliver HR and recruiting value in other, unexpected ways? It’s sort of like what happened when surfers turned their long boards into stand up paddle (a.k.a. SUP) rides. They took their tried and true tools to the another level. Think beyond just posting jobs on these sites and you’ll be surprised by a new sourcing experience.
To me, the biggest difference between SimplyHired, Indeed, and Linkup are the sources for their job posting search results. The first two cull postings from company career sites and other job boards while Linkup purely searches and reports from company career sites.
As you’d expect, most people using these aggregators are job seekers conducting job searches and setting up posting alerts. As a recruiter, I like to tap into these sources regularly for different purposes. Here are six tips to introduce recruiters, HR, and business leaders to the benefits that job board aggregators bring to the recruiting table…beyond just posting jobs to these sites.
1) Identify your talent competitors. Say you are recruiting for a Microbiology Medical Technologist in Denver and you want to know who else is hiring for that type of position and has posted those jobs in the last 15 days. Yesterday I typed those parameters into Indeed.com, and found five other labs in Denver hiring Microbiologist lab techs. So, now you know against whom you are competing for talent and where you can presumably find employed diagnostic microbiology passive candidates.
2) Benchmark job descriptions. It’s common for HR professionals to compare and contrast job descriptions when developing new positions or calibrating pay considerations for external market equity. Aggregators are a great research source to find benchmark job descriptions by industry, credentials, or company size. Simply search for comparable jobs posted to aggregators by your competitors or industry leaders. Extract the descriptions that match your needs. By sharing your research when requesting job description samples from colleagues, you’ll develop a reputation as someone who shares value when networking.
3) Gather competitive intelligence. Say you want to know to whom (e.g., CFO, Controller, VP Tax, etc.) the Tax Managers report at your competitors which have between $100 – $500m in revenue. Go to SimplyHired.com’s advanced search function, type in “Tax Manager” in the [within job title] box, type in “reports to” or “reporting to” in the [with the exact phrase box], and use the revenue parameters in the [company revenue] special filter. When I ran this search today, 119 results returned.
4) Find specialty recruiting agencies. When the need arises to partner with an external recruiting agency with specialty experience, doing a job search for the open position in your target city on a job board aggregator can help you identify boutique agencies. For example, today when I typed in “NICU RN” in the [what] search box at Indeed.com then typed in “San Francisco, CA in the [where] search box, I found six agency posted jobs for NICU nurses within the first ten results listed. (Tips: Don’t use Linkup for this exercise since they report job posting results only from company career sites. For best results, use third party recruiters who aren’t exclusively relying on job postings to identify candidates.)
5) Help trailing spouses. Share job search aggregator sites with newly hired employees whose spouses will be leaving a job due to a relocation. It’s a nice way to help a trailing spouse jump start a job search.
6) Conduct Market Research - Simplyhired.com and Indeed.com both offer free tools that illustrate job posting trends and report high-level salary survey data. Click here for SimplyHired.com’s salary tool and click here for Indeed.com’s salary tool. For example, go to Simplyhired.com, scroll to the bottom and click on [trends], type in “social media” in the [key words] box, and you’ll see that since December 2008, the occurrence of social media-related job postings has increased 77%. This is helpful data to reference when setting timing expectations with hiring managers on social media searches.
How have you surfedsourced using job board aggregators?
