The Job Board Doctor, Jeff Dickey-Chasins, once wrote, ”authenticity is all the rage.” While he goes on to describe the search for ”authenticity”, it is also possible to read this through the lens of a brand. For many job board providers, brand is key – it may even be the difference between them and their competitors.
Voice as Brand
Dickey-Chasins continues, highlighting that one way to identify authenticity and brand is the ”voice” of a site. Voice is the attitude, the visuals, the text. It is the cohesiveness of the site, with all content speaking as one voice. With a cohesive voice, a brand is able to convey itself as a professional resource for both job seekers and employers.
RELATED: ‘Using Brand to Generate Job Board Revenue’ Webinar Recording with Jeff Dickey-Chasins
Yet many publishers completely ignore the concept of branding when it comes to recruitment advertising. Possibly a hold over from the days of print classifieds, job board specific branding can be completely overlooked when developing a job board. Some publishers use third party providers who offer co-branding. While this can help to identify a brand, it usually does nothing to develop the publisher as a leading job board.
More Than Just A Logo
Instead, publishers need to think of brand beyond a logo and URL because a consumer’s relationship with a brand is not just purely about visuals or voice. Instead, brand represents the imagined moral standing of not only the job board provider but the job seeker as well.
As academic Grant McCracken puts it, ”Brands, at their best, are, among other things, bundles of meanings, some of them robust, some of them delicate, all of them poised to speak to one or more segments and to deliver an understanding of not just what the product does but what it means – its cultural meaning.”
Branding Is Essential To Success
For brand to be so important in the adoption process, it can be a huge misstep for a job board to ignore a brand strategy. It can be essential to success and generating job board revenue, something Dickey-Chasins will be touching upon on his November 4th webinar, ”Using Brand to Generate Job Board Revenue”.
