As part of Recruitment ADvisor’s ongoing series to help job boards improve their brand to generate more revenue, I sat down with RealMatch Product Marketing Director Bart Bartolozzi to tackle some of the difficult questions from the RealMatch webinar ‘Use Brand to Generate Job Board Revenue.’ This article explores how job boards and staffing agencies compete – or rather don’t – and how it may be beneficial for both to work together. The question that started this conversation was from one webinar participant asking:
Do job boards compete with staffing agencies?
In response, Bartolozzi says, ”There is some overlap to the services that they provide, but I don’t see them as true head-to-head competitors, and primarily because many staffing agencies are some of the most active job board advertisers”. Describing what staffing agencies do and when and how they turn to job boards, Bartolozzi describes the moments ”where they don’t have existing applicant databases through their network or where they look to extend their database, they certainly use job boards as one of the primary ways to expand their database funnels.” So when agencies have jobs but not job seekers, job boards and their job seekers become valuable assets to agencies.
RELATED: Part III: What You Need to Know About Building a Diversity Job Board
He expounds on this action, ”Staffing agencies on many occasions will use job boards to pull in job seekers and then do the initial screening on behalf of the company or enterprise that they are working for. This then becomes more of a cooperation than a competition. It slightly reworks the dynamic – so instead of the employer going directly to the job board, the job board delivers candidates to the agency, who then does the initial candidate prescreening and evaluation. Both the staffing agency and the job board benefit from this collaboration and job boards that are going to be successful will look to work with staffing agencies and show them the benefits that they can provide.”
It’s a Numbers Game
”Job boards that have focused on their core technology can provide additional benefits to agencies through their technology. One example would be a job board that runs true matching technology across its site,” Bartolozzi explains, ”This matching technology can help an agency grade and evaluate candidates as they come in through their funnel providing a time savings that is hugely helpful. Agencies are normally engaged in hiring a variety of different roles across many different types of employers.”
Pre-Screening Is A Value for Agencies and A Product for Job Boards
”Setting up a pre-evaluation matching criteria for each of those jobs, ”Bartolozzi says, ”will make the process easier for agencies to provide employers with the top ranked candidates available in the funnel and instead of spending all the time manually going through each resume, the built-in matching platform that is a part of the job board can parse these resumes in real-time, as soon as an applicant applies. So if you are a job board, you have the opportunity to leverage what you do well – excellent job seeker database, reach, technology, marketing, to partner with staffing agencies, showcasing that technology and letting them know how you could help them in their own recruitment efforts. Not only can you get candidates for their employer funnel, you can help them in other ways.”
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Read the entire series on how to use your job board through branding:
Part 1: Local or Vertical: How Should I Brand My Job Board?
Part 2: 3 Steps to Gain Job Board Market Share
Part 3: What You Need to Know About Building a Diversity Job Board
Part 4: Why Job Boards and Staffing Agencies Should Work Together