I find your article totally on the money and well done. I applaud you in your decision to remove all jobsearch/board functions from your website.

Nothing would impress a jobseeker more than that personal touch and caring approach. I experience this on a regular basis by sending out my resume – I have sent out my resume over 200 times and have only ever received ONE phone call.

That call was from Andrew Turnbull, CEO of nt3.com.au, I was so impressed with his approach I bought half the company.

Recruiters offer a fantastic service but the traditional approach to the game has to change or else something is going to give. And as you know many firms have had to close their doors. I feel that the traditional approach,ironically, might have had something to do with their demise.

Whilst we are of the opinion that it is still very early days for “social media” we have made a concerted effort in our business approach to embrace it and bathe in it. It is an integral part of the nt3 product offering and will always be.

I look forward to the day that personal interaction is brought back to be the very backbone of the recruiter and recruitment process.

One needs to look at the behaviour of todays teenagers – they would rather sms or email or tweet to find out what their immediate neighbour is doing. SAD.

Are we becoming more and more reclusive and comfortable hiding behind our big 22inch monitors. As the BCF ad goes “thats not living Barry”

Thank you once again for the article and I hope that everyone picks up on this. Well Done.

Best Regards

Marc van Vuuren
Sales Director – http://www.nt3.com.au
nt3 Digital Resume Database

I just wanted to mention how much I appreciated your article, Job Boards don’t find people jobs. People find people jobs, November 2, 2009 .

My background is originally in product development / marketing and when I joined the recruitment industry just 18 months ago, I was further acquainted (previously acquainted as a candidate) and shocked with many of the recruitment industry’s practices as well as lack of discipline with methodology and strategy.

Thank you for your article – we have shared this with our team and hopefully, they will get as much out of it, as myself and our General Manager did.

Lisa – Business Development Manager

1. Job boards with initiative will thrive in niche areas. By engaging with social media and being malleable enough to embrace change (not just technological) sector-specific sites can develop fantastic communities, attracted by real-time, visual information.

2. Traditional recruitment consultancies will continue to provide a service provided they a) work in partnership with innovative job boards and b) act more as ‘consultancies’ than body-shops and learn to attract the passive jobseeker, not people they’ve pulled from generic ‘talent pools’. The days of mainstream recruitment agencies with average recruiting staff, are dead.

3. Social media is a brilliant channel for attracting talent to the main hub. It is not, in itself, a viable recruitment tool, for whilst the engagement is clearly transparent and authentic it remains too difficult to police.

4. 2010 will see the [re]-birth of the in-house recruiter. SME’s & corporate businesses will pay big bucks to experienced talent attractors, give them a budget and allow them to get on with it. A successful in-house recruiter will need to use all above mentioned talent-attraction channels for different purposes. However, without question the most obvious ROI will come from niche job boards. Provided they are not just a reactive space on the web job boards provide the best guarantee/cost ratio.

Here’s one back at N. Jones:

“I applied for 100 jobs across 70 job boards 2 weeks ago”

– In a climate (albeit, improving) where jobs are supposedly hard to find, well done for managing to identify so many positions relevant to you. However, I can’t help but suspect not all the jobs were applicable to your skill-set. Are you sure you weren’t ‘chancing your arm’. There are a number of jobseekers in the market ‘having a go’. Applying for roles not entirely right for you only heightens your expectations so you get annoyed when the calls don’t come in.

“I did not receive one single phone call or email”

- Supposing for a moment the 100 jobs you applied were all relevant to your skill set I would take a look at your CV and cover letter. Clearly you are not submitting the appropriate applications.

“A lot of recruitment agencies post fake jobs to collate CV’s through job boards”

- Yes, this can be the case. But I doubt it is in the current climate. Short of renewable energy and certain Governmental departments there are not many sectors short of jobseekers. I can assure you the last thing recruiters need right now is more candidates flooding through the door. The recruiter’s lot is already a minefield of admin and protocol, without adding fake job postings to the mix.

You suggest ‘90% of jobs posted on job boards by recruitment agencies are fake’: I’d be interested to see where you got this figure from. It costs recruiters money to advertise jobs on job boards. You’re suggesting they are happy to waste 90% of their marketing budgets on speculative talent attraction. I doubt it!

“In my opinion it’s better to apply directly to companies – that way there is no mass competition.”

- What planet are you on? Recruitment agencies are assigned by direct employers (so the recruiter’s client) to attract, select, then submit the best candidates for a specific role. The reason [most] recruitment agencies exist is for their expertise in doing this. The client is assured that they might only receive, say ten, candidates for their vacancy instead of the hundred’s they would undoubtedly receive if they advertised themselves. (This point takes ATS out of the equation).

Imagine Nike advertising a role directly. Do you REALLY think the competition for a job with them is less than a role you might apply for via an agency?

N. Jones: take stock of what you’re applying to and which channels you’re using. Ask someone to look at your CV and cover letter and realise that recruiters and recruitment media are there to help you. By viewing them as an enemy rather than an ally you will make your job search more difficult than clearly it already is.

If you want to read more about my thoughts on recruitment and getting back to work check out my blog http://recruitmentwaters.com

The internet is about empowerment, you no longer rely on a travel agent to book your holiday, nor an estate agent to find your house, why should you solely rely on a 3rd party to find your job or hire your staff?

With the correct use of job boards, social media and a robust ATS, direct hiring managers can build and manage their own talent pools without a primary need for traditional introductions, whilst applicants can research and engage with companies directly.

Certainly, there will always be a need for highly skilled recruiters who build and “re-sell” their niche talent pool, particularly in the temp/contract sector. But the majority of recruitment today is managing large volume responses to job board advertising and effective CV database mining, coupled with the utilisation of relevant social media to create and manage talent pools.

Who are we? http://www.NetNatives.co.uk are a recruitment company, but we take a different approach to developments in technology (not just job boards & social media, but open and social web sourcing tools), enabling clients to directly engage with passive and active candidates (and vice versa) to build their own talent pools, not ours. We advertise, search (job boards and open web), contact and manage candidates applications for our clients – in one case hiring 10 people (average salary £25k) for a campaign that cost £575. All the time, feeding back responses to EVERY candidate and providing clients with effective management reports on which methods were successful, encouraging them develop their own strategies. Why do we do this? Well, why shouldn’t we?

I, naturally, hesitated posting this on a “traditional” recruitment company’s blog, but thought it important to highlight that recruitment IS about people, but, thankfully, it’s no longer just about recruitment consultants…

Client visits and phone calls are a good idea too – let’s stop sheltering behind e-mails and get back to what we are good at – the people business.

But alas no? You still use job boards

It is true that technology has developed to handle the ever increasing burden of applications as they have increased over the years but whilst this seemed like a good idea all its done is to undermine the whole process.

We have been talking about communities in our business for years but its hard to change opinion sometimes but @mervyndinnen is doing his best to change that! If you ‘own’ the community you own the market as you say. Yet so many in our industry have no concept of that.

I agree with this article…

I applied for over 100 jobs across 70 job board 2 weeks ago.

I did not receive one single phone call or email.
As a lot of recruitment agencies post fake jobs to collate CVs
through job boards.

90% of jobs posted on job boards by recruitment agencies are FAKE and used by cowboys agencies to source Cvs from job boards databases.

Its’a Scam
These rogue agencies are toying with job seekers lives -careers.

In my opnion -its just better t apply direct to companies – that way there is
no mass competition.