Job Board Contracts: What You Don’t Know Could Cost You A Lot!
Ms. Pomerantz has served as the Chief Executive Officer of Mary Pomerantz Advertising for the past twenty five years. She was formerly the Chief Executive Officer of Pomerantz Staffing, which grew to be one of the largest privately-owned staffing companies in the US under her leadership.
Job board contracts can be a vital tool in achieving your employee recruitment goals. However, before signing any type of contract, you always want to perform your due diligence to ensure that you understand all of the details and ramifications associated with it. This fact is definitely the case when considering which job board contracts might be appropriate for your company’s recruitment efforts. Mistakes in this area can prove costly – both in terms of the cost-effectiveness of your recruitment advertising and in the quality of the candidates you bring onboard your organization. So, how does one go about assessing the relative value of a given job board contract or choosing the right mix of contracts with different job board sites? The short answer is: turn to the experts, like those at Mary Pomerantz Advertising. For a more in-depth answer, you need to consider all of the factors below.
Choosing the Right Job Boards
Not all job boards are created equal, and the first step in negotiating the best job board contracts is determining which job boards will work best for you. From our experience there are few job boards that tend to perform best, regardless of the position for which you are recruiting. These “big boys” tend to be national or international in scope and provide you with a huge audience of potential job applicants at a reasonable price. Almost any job posting strategy will include one of these sites, such as Indeed or CareerBuilder, making them a good choice to form the core of your online recruitment strategy. And, since these sites have such broad applicability for many types of jobs in different locations – and they tend to offer substantial discounts for clients who sign up for job posting contracts – negotiating job board contracts with one (or more) of these sites almost always makes good financial sense. However, that doesn’t mean that you want to place all of your recruiting budget into a massive contract with only one of these sites. To follow the old adage, “don’t put all of your eggs into one basket” even if that basket is a job board that will produce good results for most of your needs.
Location, Location, Location
For some regions of the country, the big job boards aren’t the only game in town – and may not give you the most “bang for your buck” for your recruitment advertising expenditure. Sites such as NJ.com in New Jersey and surrounding areas or Boston.com in the Boston metropolitan area a great examples of regional job boards that have a large viewing audience in their respective areas. These kinds of regional job boards can be a great component to your online recruitment efforts and can sometimes outperform the larger national or international sites in terms of results. Depending on your location, you may or may not have one of these “heavyweight” regional job posting sites to turn to, but, if you do, you should strongly consider negotiating job board contracts with them if you have a number of positions in the geographic areas they cover.
Taking Advantage of Print/Internet Combinations
Many of the top regional job boards are also affiliated with the local newspaper powerhouse in the region, making it possible to sign up for job board contracts that also have a print component as well. This option can often be a cost-effective choice that expands the audience for your open positions by including a print audience into your recruitment reach. For certain positions in specific fields or industries this print audience may not overlap with the online one, giving you brand new “eyeballs” for your job openings that you wouldn’t gain using online options alone. As many newspapers adjust to the new reality of declining “paper” readers and increasing online content consumption – job board contracts that include print and Internet components can provide good value as newspapers make the transition to a more “online-centric” business model. However, as these papers and their online presences are still in a state of flux as they navigate this transition, the array of packages and contracts available can sometimes be overwhelming, making the job of negotiating the best contract for your needs confusing (even when you have experience in the field). This is yet another reason why having an experienced partner like Mary Pomerantz Advertising in your corner can help you before you commit to “signing on the dotted line.”
Finding the Right Niche
Although niche job boards by their very definition are not for every company, some businesses have a regular need for candidates who fit into very specific niches such as technical professionals in various fields. If you are recruiting these types of candidates frequently, it may make financial sense to sign up for job board contracts with niche sites that target specific fields or professions as part of your recruitment strategy. These sites, however, can be very tricky to evaluate on a cost/benefit basis, and there are many “pretenders” among them who promise much more than they actually deliver. At Mary Pomerantz Advertising we have worked with many of these sites and can help you identify which ones are cost-effective and which ones are not worth your time and expense. This holds doubly true when you are considering signing job board contracts with these sites, as many of them offer a variety of flexible options to consider.
Judging the Value of Add-Ons and Extras
When negotiating job board contracts add-ons and extras are often thrown-in to “sweeten the deal” of your potential contract with the job board in question. Some of these can be quite effective in terms of improving recruitment results while others are merely “window-dressing” that does little to improve the quantity or quality of applicants you receive. Figuring out which of these “boosts” or “enhancements” actually add value to a job board contract is a difficult task, making it difficult to judge the savings of a contract with these extras included. The representative at the job board in question may “upsell” you on a variety of extra features that in actuality have little impact on job posting performance; in fact, this is an unfortunately common occurrence if you are not familiar with what each component is and how it functions. When evaluating the value of these add-ons to your job board contract you need an outside opinion from someone with “no skin in the game” but your overall recruitment success. That’s why partnering with a company like Mary Pomerantz Advertising can be so helpful.
Casting a Wide Net
At Mary Pomerantz Advertising we have found that “casting a wide net” with your recruitment advertising dollar is often the best approach. This means carefully evaluating which job posting contracts to sign and which to forgo as you piece together an overall recruitment strategy. Some sites may make sense to completely avoid while others are best used sparingly without a contract in place. Other job posting sites may be core pieces in your overall strategy, meaning that the right job board contract with them could prove extremely cost-effective over the long term.
Turn to MPA Before You Sign on the Dotted Line
Don’t get cajoled or bullied into signing job posting contracts by individuals who may or may not have your best interests at heart. By partnering with Mary Pomerantz Advertising you’ll gain the advantage of our decades of recruitment advertising experience and expertise – and the counsel of an independent voice whose profitability relies on your recruitment results. We have many years of experience negotiating job board contracts for our clients, and we can put that experience to work for you, getting you the best return on your recruitment investment and helping you avoid the pitfalls of signing job board contracts that don’t fit your unique needs as a company.
Make sure you have the right job board contracts your company’s recruitment needs by calling MPA at 732-214-9600 today!
