I recently did a Q&A with the folks at Cachinko about the future of job search. You may find it interesting – check it out here!

If you hire people, at some point you will have to hire for a position about which you know absolutely nothing.  Perhaps you’re hiring a chief technology officer, but your background is marketing and sales. Or you’re hiring a new accountant, and you only understand coding.

What do you do? Perhaps you turn to friends and colleagues who are more knowledgeable than you about a particular skill set. Or you figure out which certifications a ‘perfect’ candidate should have. Maybe you rely on a recruiter who specializes in that particular field.

Well, over the past decade, sites have sprung up (and disappeared) to solve your problem. I call them ‘skills testing’ sites, because that’s essentially what they do: they present the candidate with a series of questions, problems, and tests in order to evaluate their skills. Most have been targeted to technical folks.

The granddaddy of these sites is Brainbench. It’s been around since the late 90s and concentrates primarily on technical subjects (although it has tests for English comprehension, marketing, etc.). You earn a Brainbench certification, which you can promote publicly. As with many certifications, the value is often in the eye of the employer – some will care, some won’t.

Several new sites have launched over the past couple of years, including Gild, which (not surprisingly) focuses on technical skills testing. It’s set up with a social component, so that you and your friends can take tests, share results, and insult/brag at the end. Then there’s CodeEval. It has a more explicit link between your test results and the possibility of getting hired. It’s free for participants to get tested, but recruiters are charged to search the database. As with Brainbench, you can have a public profile – but you also have the option to set up competitions. Oh yes – it targets IT folks as well.

WorkForPie has a bit of a twist: it lets you build your own profile, show off your coding skills (yep, the site targets tech people – but just open source people), AND get scored on your proficiency. No money changing hands that I could see – just a bunch of open source developers showing what they can do.

Finally, there’s InterviewStreet. They say they’re the ‘best way to screen programmers’. Recruiters buy a certain number of tests; they send invitations to take the test to their job candidates; and then they get the results, along with comparative data. The site also includes job listings that candidates can apply to – using the tests, of course.

I believe there is value in these services – I could have certainly used them in my hiring days! But they still beg the question: if I don’t know anything about coding, how do I know if the tests are any good? I’m guessing that for that answer, I would have to turn to my friendly sysadmin or IT director.

Whoa – deja vu!

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I’ve worked with dozens of job boards over the years, and I often take a look at what the job seekers are saying to them. Since the onset of the recession (and honestly, before), it goes something like this:

“Why don’t you have any jobs in my area?”

“I’ve had my resume posted on your site for months and you haven’t called me.”

“I’ve been working in my field for twenty years but you don’t have a single job for me??”

There are lots of things going on here – whether a job seeker knows how to actually look for a job, whether they have the skills and training, if they will consider relocation – but a theme runs through many of the comments: job seekers often think job boards have the jobs. Not employers – job boards.

It doesn’t make much sense if you’re in the industry – but step outside for a second. Let’s suppose that you’re a somewhat educated but previously indifferent person who just lost their job. Where do you go first? Probably a job board – most likely one of the big ‘brand names’ like Monster or CareerBuilder. You see lots of jobs, you apply for lots of jobs – and you don’t get a response. Who do you blame?

The job board.

Now, let’s say that some of the job ads don’t list the name of the company, or even any contact information. It’s entirely possible that you might think that the job board actually posted the job.

Or…say that you’re looking and looking, but can’t find any listings for your town – even though you know the local manufacturing plant is hiring. Maybe, you think to yourself, the job board is hiding the jobs. Or failing to post them. Or worse.

A little nutty? Yes. But logic does not seem to play a big part in the public discourse these days. Why should job hunting be any different?

Getting back to my original subject, though: job boards are tools. At their best, they can enable job seekers to find jobs much faster and more efficiently than any other means (and yes, I’m including referrals, social media, and the like).

But job boards don’t create jobs – employers do. And employer don’t create jobs in a vacuum – they are part of an enormous (and enormously complicated) ecosystem that includes buyers, sellers, governments, trade, demand, and….job boards. I wanted to write about this because I understand the job seeker’s frustration – and I think it’s completely understandable that some of them become confused during the emotional, tense, and taxing process of looking for a job.

But if you’re a job seeker, please, take it from me – job boards don’t create jobs. They just communicate them.

It’s that time of the year – leaves are falling, frost is threatening our gardens….and I’m knocking on your door about the online recruiting survey. Despite the Job Board Doctor name, lots of different folks read this blog: HR and recruiting pros, job seekers, and yes, even job board operators and employees. So I’ve created surveys for each group – and of course, if you take the survey, I’ll be happy to send you the results! The survey takes about 3-4 minutes max, and you’ll finish knowing that you’ve helped the industry learn a little bit more about itself. So how about it?

• If you’re a HR or recruiting pro, click here
• If you’re a job board operator/employee, click here
• If you’re a job seeker, click here

(And when you’re done, forward the links to a friend in the industry!)

Thanks!

The more things change, the more they stay the same – except when they don’t. Now how’s that for equivocation?

The results are in for the 2011 Online Recruiting Survey, and they are intriguing. We had a record 323 completed responses (a 15% increase from Fall 2010!), from three categories: HR and recruitment professionals, job board operators and employees, and job seekers.  We used many of the same questions from the 2010 survey, so it was relatively easy to track changes over the past 9 months. Here’s a sampling of what we found:

• For employers with 250 or more employees, ATSs (85%) and social media (85%) were the top recruitment channels; for employers with less than 250 employees, social media and referrals led the list

• .jobs continued to draw meager interest from employers, with only 6% having purchased a domain

• Job boards saw the recession (40%), LinkedIn (40%), and price erosion (31%) as the top problems for their businesses; LinkedIn had risen in threat level since the 2010 survey

• Both the quality (72%)and quantity (46%) of candidates produced by job boards remained important to HR and recruiting professionals

• The top problem for HR and recruiters? Lack of qualified applicants

As one job board respondent said, “I think the only constant is change. New and existing job boards must adapt to changing technologies and customer behavior.”

Truer words were never written. Get the full survey results here (free registration required).

Any job board operator will tell you that one of the toughest things about keeping your site running well is ensuring that you have a steady flow of the right kind of candidates. What exactly is the ‘right kind of candidate’? Well, this would a candidate that is qualified for a particular job AND responds to that job. If you have enough of these candidates, your employers will be happy and they will pay to use your site.

Problem is, finding these candidates is easier said than done. The time-honored technique of driving up your site traffic in hopes that a percentage of visitors will be the ‘right kind’ is – at best – wasteful. It wastes your resources (why bring janitors to your site when you wanted aerospace engineers?), and it wastes your employers’ resources (by having cull unqualified candidates). Niche sites in particular have been more inventive, promoting themselves wherever they find their candidates gathering – or even creating a gathering place for the candidates (i.e., the proverbial ‘career hub’). Some partner with professional associations, or appear at industry trade shows. These are all good techniques. But I recently saw two examples of a new method for finding the ‘right kind’ of candidate.

Top Prospect tackles the problem by focusing on the friends of candidates. You sign up (using their LinkedIn and/or Facebook login) in order to: a) help your out-of-work friends by finding them jobs, and b) making some cold hard cash when one of your referrals is hired. Top Prospect conducts some behind-the-scenes technical work to match your LinkedIn and Facebook friends to various open positions – then they tell you about the match. You decide if you want to make the referral. The hiring party doesn’t know you referred the candidate – just that it came from Top Prospect. If they’re hired, you get money.

This has the potential to work well if: a) there are enough open positions that at least a few of them will match up to your friends; and b) if your friends are the kind of people an employer might want to meet. If your personal network is loaded with buddies from prison and the fast food place you worked in during high school, you may not get your referral dough.

A similar model is being used by Job Fox with its Boost service. It allows recruiters to build ‘networks’ of contacts based on their specific criteria – but if you’re lazy, JobFox will ‘autobuild’ a network for you from its database of 7 million candidates. Boost includes a ‘spiff’ option that lets recruiters offer cash for referrals.

In a way, you could say that Top Prospect and Job Fox have tackled ‘job matching’ by using the most powerful software available – the human brain. If you have a big enough network and are willing to spend some time, you can earn a little spending money for matching your friends to their jobs. Wait - did I say ‘a little spending money’? Ahem. Top Prospect talks about $20,000 a match. Even if you take that with a shaker full of salt, I’m betting that the average fee is at least a few thousand dollars.

Greed (and of course the desire to help friends) can be a powerful focuser.

There have been a lot of blog posts here over the years – 120, to be exact. Some faded quickly, and some didn’t. So I thought it might be useful to have a roundup of what I consider to be the most interesting and useful (if not always successful) posts. Hope you like them!

• People, Balance & Technology: The future of job boards: Very popular, very insightful – and I didn’t write it! Felix Wetzel of Jobsite UK did, and it’s a provocative read.
• Will Job Matching Ever Take Off?: As I say in the first line, “Job matching is the AI of the job board world.” And who knows how many job matching products have launched since I wrote this?
• 5 ways to screw up your job board: As Recruiting Animal has often ranted against ‘number in title’ blog posts, I thought I had to contribute to the genre – and it was popular.
• How to make money – Revenue models for job boards: Not surprisingly, this post about how to increase your job board’s revenues has been popular.
• Are job boards dying…or evolving?: Tackling the ever-popular theme of dead job boards – guess which side I come down on?
• .jobs: Who does it benefit?: The .jobs ‘Universe’ is kind of like an old fashioned zombie – every time you think it’s down for the count, it rises up again. Will I be writing about them in 2012?
• How branding protects against commoditization: Branding is a topic near and dear to my heart – and judging from the feedback, also for my readers.
• The dangers (and benefits) of backfilling job listings: Since their inception, aggregators have been both a threat and a blessing to job boards. Here’s why.
• What makes a job board suck? (Jobseeker edition): Dumb things that job boards can do to upset their primary customers.
• Results of the Job Board Future Survey 2010: In which we discover some interesting things, like job seekers want their job boards easy to use.

Why do job seekers go to job boards? Ahem – to find a job.

I might add that’s why they network, Tweet, post profiles on LinkedIn, and troll through company career sites. They just want a job. Right?

Well, no. Not exactly. They want a lot more than a ‘job’. They in fact have an entire laundry list of desires:

• work that fits their skill set
• work that pays well
• work that lets them advance over time
• work that means something
• work with great co-workers
• work with a great company

Yeah, so, no big deal, right?

As a job board operator, you know that most of the job seekers visiting your site are going to leave disappointed - and there’s nothing you can do about it. Seriously – with a list of needs and desires like the one above, you’ll be lucky to make one out of a thousand happy. (This is not unique to job boards, by the way – it’s true of any channel, venue, or site where job seekers congregate to find work).

So, what’s to be done?

1. Be as honest as possible: Focus on what’s true (i.e., your niche and your employers), not on what’s iffy (‘your perfect job awaits!’).
2. Up the odds: Do everything you can to connect each job seeker with the best fit jobs. Give them ways of promoting themselves. Have job alerts. Train employers to use resume search tools effectively.
3. Listen: Give job seekers an obvious and direct way to communicate to your job board. Act on the best ideas.
4. Educate: As much as possible, show the job seeker how to use a job board effectively. Keep their expectations realistic.

Many job seekers simply don’t realize that their expectations are unrealistic – or they don’t know how to increase their odds of getting hired. It’s a job board’s responsibility to help them out, both because it’s the right thing to do, and because it will improve results for employers.

Now, as far as unrealistic expectations, I’d really like a SawStop….

Back in the dark ages, when the Job Board Doctor was first learning the mysteries of sales and marketing, he was told that he should “sell benefits, not features.”

Fast forward, umm…many years. I’m still telling clients (and myself) to focus on the benefits, not the features. You think I would’ve learned by now!

It’s a tough lesson to learn. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to list the new, snazzy, ‘gee whiz’ features that your job board has: “Integrates with Twitter! Saves 16 versions of your resume! Reaches over 3 million employers!”

To which the job seeker says: “Yeah? So? What’s in it for me?”

This is a perfectly legitimate question. Why should I, as the job seeker, care if you integrate with Twitter? As far as I’m concerned, you can cohabitate with Twitter and produce a thousand little Tweets – that doesn’t help me get a job, does it?

Ultimately it all comes down to this: what does this feature do for the customer (whether she is a job seeker or employer)? For instance, instead of the afore-mentioned resume feature, how about: “Create a targeted, persuasive resume in seconds for every job. No more one-size-fits-all!”

Look hard at how your job site talks to potential and current employers as well. Are you simply besieging them with lists of features – or really breaking out how your site can benefit them?

Another trap that we can stumble over: failing to repeat and restate our benefits. Remember – your prospects are overwhelmed with messages. To break through, you must be persistent, delivering the message at least 5 to 10 times before expecting that your prospect actually heard you. Don’t jump from one set of benefits this week to another set next week. If you do, you’ll end up with no one hearing you.

Bottom line: Always answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Always.

Every day we are deluged with images, sounds, sights, smells….and words. Some lodge in our brains and some don’t.

If you’re in the recruiting biz, your primary tools (at present) are words – spoken or written. Yes, some employment advertising has moved into visuals (think glossy employer videos, job seeker video resumes, and stark ‘branding’ ads in major magazines). But the vast majority of open positions are filled through the use of spoken and written words.

That’s right. Print ads. Job ads. Twitter ads. Talking on the phone. Talking in person. Words, words, words.

Of course, you’d never guess that by perusing the ads on any given career site or job board. To wit:

“No Experience is Necessary! Due to expansion, we’re currently providing training! (Name removed to protect the guilty) is the state’s newest, most innovative, promotional marketing firm that works with a variety of clients from different industries from National Retailers, major product suppliers and national restaurants as well as companies from the Entertainment Industry.”

Huh? What the heck is this job about? If it isn’t communicated up front and clearly, why should the job seeker keep reading?

Another problem: what I call the ”invasion of deadly dry HR prose’. Here we go:

(Company name hidden again) is seeking energetic, ambitious, career-oriented Marketing Consultants – Inside Sales (Telephone) to connect businesses and consumers through its broad portfolio of interactive and search engine marketing and print solutions. Small and medium-sized businesses look to our team of experienced marketing consultants to help them grow their companies by delivering qualified, ready to buy customers.

Boy howdy, am I excited now! Not. As you can see, many seemingly active verbs were used to create very little movement. Words can create pictures and motion. Really.

Effective use of language can make your job ad stand out – and get better and more qualified candidates.  Don’t believe me? Try an experiment. Run your typical job ad (let’s say a bit similar to the ones mentioned above) and also run an ad like this:

“You:

You are best described by a story:

You think the current look and feel of our site sucks. After 10 minutes of thinking and sketching, you have three simple changes to help make it cohere. In 20 minutes, you have put together a PSD file with three different versions of your changes.

Other things about you:

• You think about branding and design constantly.
• Your natural workflow includes making many versions, selecting the best, then making many more versions…”

Ok, I’m interested! Now where was that apply button?