Custom job boards can be a promising revenue stream for your digital newspaper or trade magazine website. Passive and active job seekers are drawn to these types of sites because they expect to see jobs posted that are relevant to either their particular geographical location (in the case of an online local newspaper) or their particular trade or profession (in the case of a trade publication website).
Employers like listing on custom job boards on these types of online publications because they want to reach people who are in the region they’re targeting, or who have specific professional skills and qualifications. Many employers are wary of posting on huge job aggregators because of the potential of receiving a flood of resumes from people who are geographically or professionally unsuited to the jobs listed.
If you’re considering using a custom job board on your website, first have a look at the major job boards and how they handle resumes. This can let you know how easy or difficult it is for job seekers to post resumes, and what employers see when they look at resumes on those sites. Here are 3 ways major job boards handle resumes.
1. Career Builder
CareerBuilder.com gets over 24 million unique visitors every month. The site also operates in 21 countries outside the US. Posting a resume on CareerBuilder is a matter of filling in a couple of boxes and attaching a copy of your resume in DOCX, DOC, RTF, TXT, or PDF format. You can upload the file from a folder on your computer, attach it from Dropbox, or get it off Google Drive:
It’s simple and straightforward for job seekers. Long resume upload procedures can make job seekers abandon their effort without finishing. Resume consultant Susan Ireland posted an image of what a resume looks like to employers when it’s uploaded to CareerBuilder:
It’s a plain format, and it may lack individuality or panache, which employers in some fields (particularly in creative fields) may want to see.
2. Indeed.com
Based in Stamford, Connecticut, Indeed.com is an employment metasearch engine that’s available in 26 languages and 53 countries. As of February 2013, Indeed.com reported reaching over 100 million unique visitors every month. By aggregating listings from thousands of sites, it offers job seekers large numbers of potential jobs and lets employers reach huge numbers of job seekers. Indeed.com lets users upload a resume, or create one on the site:
Having the choice is nice for people who do not create their own resume in Word or on Google Docs, or who use a shared computer where they can’t store a resume.
The resumes that employers browse on Indeed look the way most people expect, as you can see from this example:
3. Monster.com
Monster.com was created in 1999 when The Monster Board and the Online Career Center (two of the first online career websites) merged. It boasts over one million job postings and an equal number of resumes at any given time. Over 63 million job seekers per month visit the site, headquartered in New York City. As with indeed.com, job seekers have the choice of either uploading their resume or creating one on the site:
As with Indeed.com, it’s nice for job seekers to have a choice. If they’re applying for a job that’s slightly out of their area of expertise, being able to tailor a custom resume just for that purpose right on the site is nice. Here is what an example resume from Monster.com looks like:
Again, employers see the straightforward resume type that most people are familiar with.
While these big job boards offer the advantage of sheer numbers, many job seekers and employers find smaller, more targeted job boards to be more effective. Smaller job boards may offer more personal touches like allowing employers to contact job seekers instantly, making it easy for job seekers to apply or upload resumes on mobile devices, and providing more relevant, targeted job listings.
Offering your job seekers the choice between uploading a prepared resume and creating a custom one can be useful for those whose existing resumes need to be fine-tuned for a particular opportunity. But allowing job seekers to upload their own prepared resume is great for job seekers who have added creative touches to their resumes in an effort to make them stand out.
If you choose to add a custom job board to your newspaper or trade publication website, browsing major job search engines can help you evaluate options you might offer and help you tailor your job board to your audience. When crafted and customized with due consideration, a targeted or niche job board on your site can help you build traffic, give users another reason to bookmark your website, and offer employers a better way to advertise job openings than putting them on huge job aggregators that can produce overwhelming and unsatisfactory results.
Photo Credit: Ambro / freedigitalphotos.net