Social media sites have organically achieved the goals that publishers have worked hard to crack for decades: high-levels of interest, shareability, and visibility. Employers who are seeking the widest reach with their jobs are looking for the job boards that have tapped into those same thought processes. Job boards can increase the success of postings, drive up revenues, and attract more candidates for each position by using the best practices learned from social media sites. Here’s a closer look at three tips every job board should implement.
Become a hub for a particular industry or career stage
Dice.com is a great example of a job board that focused on a particular niche and developed a reputation as a go-to board for technology oriented job seekers. Whether your job board has a specific industry focus or not, developing content resources that help people in their job search is a wise idea. LinkedIn offers a great example of how resources that are related to particular fields or to particular career stage can draw in users. Consider developing your content library to make your website a more valuable asset to people during their job search. Display these assets as a resource library.
Make it easy to find related content and positions
Social media sites do a great job of aggregating content by user interest. If you love cat videos, Facebook makes it easy to find and share those with your friends. If you’re an agribusiness professional, LinkedIn suggests groups, contacts, and discussions that could enrich your professional life. Job boards can take a hint from this by using features that suggest related jobs. For example, a candidate browsing a digital marketing manager position would likely be interested in seeing other jobs in that are targeted toward the same candidate profile. It might also be helpful to suggest on-site articles that relate to the field, such as “Common interview questions for engineers” or “Tips for a compelling administrative assistant resume.” Leverage technology to help your users easily make these associations.
Simplify sharing and saving
Social media sites make it incredibly easy to share and save content. Job boards should feature the same functionality. Job searchers often want to share jobs with themselves to apply for later, after they’ve had the chance to develop customized cover letters or tweak their resumes. In other cases, a specific job might be a great fit for a colleague or friend. The ability to send a link to that person in a single click is very valuable. In other cases, groups of colleagues such as LinkedIn career groups often share opportunities with each other. The simpler it is for job searchers to save jobs they’re interested in or promote those to their friends, the more popular your job board will be.
Job boards can learn a great deal from social media sites. From increasing the ease of content discoverability to simplifying sharing, implementing these improvements will help your job board achieve its goals.