With few exceptions, job boards do not charge candidates for services, but every candidate rates your job board’s ROI, as if you’re were charging them a fee. That’s because, unlike customers that invest their money with your enterprise, candidates invest their time.

Time is their currency, if you waste it, they will not come back no matter how many email/text alerts you send them. In fact pushing unwanted job ad alerts to an already frustrated candidate may only intensifies their desire not to use your job site again. One major cause for candidate frustration is the external application process. According to a survey by Career Arc 60% of candidates have a bad experience with the average candidate spending around 3-4 hours preparing a single job application.

An article on Cielo Talent, cited more than 90% of HR managers claim that the better the candidate experience, the better the quality of hire. So if your job is to provide employers with quality hires then it’s in your best interest to provide the best candidate experience possible.

It’s ironic that HR managers are equating a best candidate experience to quality of hire, when the apply processes on their own ATS platforms are major contributors to candidate frustration. Of course, much of the length and complexity in completing an ATS application can be blamed on government compliance and attorney interpretations. Recently however, some progressive employers with better analytics data are beginning to understand the problem, and realize that improving their apply process is a top priority. Even so, improving the ATS apply process doesn’t solve your immediate problem of an ever-shrinking value proposition.

So how do you effectively sell your value proposition? Are you still using over-the-top job detail page view and apply click numbers? If so, how is that working for you? Are your customers relying on your data or on their ATS data which often tells a different story? The bottom line, poor performance, even justifiably explained away by a disconnected apply process is still poor performance, and it’s hurting your business.

So, here we are. Some of us are hanging-in there while others are having banner years, but all of us in the job board space are at greater risk today than last year and the year before.

Finally there is some good news… several job board leaders are working hard to increase their job board’s value proposition by taking control of the ATS external application process.

How?

  • They are investing in integration solutions to improve the candidate experience
  • They are capturing report data that compares with their customer ATS report data.
  • They are building larger and better registered candidate databases.

And it’s working!

By taking control of the external apply process and creating a frictionless application experience, these leading job boards are delivering 100 to 200% more completed applications resulting in more and better quality of hires, happier customers, and increased revenue.

Want to stay in the game? You can do the same!

  • If your job board is powered by a job board platform, contact your customer service rep and ask to be integrated. This is a perfect application solution for a platform provider to build out for multiple job board customers.
  • If you’ve got technical capability, your team can get started by identifying ATS providers that enable API integrations for the apply process.
  • If you have a tech staff, but lack the resources or determine doing this work is not financially feasible, reThinkData may be able to help.

However you solve for this problem, please don’t wait. In my opinion solving for the broken application process is the most important challenge facing the industry, today.