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Advice for Employers and Recruiters

Why niche and general job boards should buy candidate traffic programmatically

Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Steven Rothberg AvatarSteven Rothberg
April 28, 2022


We’ve all heard the criticism of niche and general job boards, most of which was started or amplified by third-party recruiters (headhunters) and consultants whose livelihood is threatened by the very job boards they feel compelled to criticize:

  • Job boards are dead.
  • Job boards are dinosaurs.
  • Job boards are like zombies: they’re dead and they don’t realize it.
  • No good candidates use job boards.
  • Job boards generate a lot of applications but they’re all of poor quality.
  • They’re expensive.
  • Posting and praying for results is idiotic.
  • They only work well for higher-level roles.
  • They only work well for lower-level roles.
  • The lack of innovation is astounding.
  • They were on the grassy knoll in Dallas when Kennedy was shot.

So, what’s the reality? The reality is that every industry has pros and cons and every organization within every industry has pros and cons. If you had a bad or great experience with one job board, that does not mean that you’ll have a similar bad or great experience with another.

Job boards, depending on how you define them, have existed since the early 1990s. College Recruiter went live in 1996 and was one of the first 200 or so job boards globally. As its founder, trust me when I say that a lack of innovation is not the reality in our industry and certainly not with respect to our organization. We just went live with our seventh major release or version of our site. Now, seven may seem like a lot and perhaps prompt people to say that means that the other six were all crap. None were crap during their era, but each has been a substantial improvement of its predecessor and we see the same with our direct and indirect competitors. This is a highly dynamic industry in a double-sided marketplace where both efficiency and effectiveness are prized.

What’s a double- or two-sided marketplace? It is one where you have two different customer groups whose interests are not aligned. When you buy a meal in a restaurant, that’s a single-sided marketplace as people buying food are its only customers. If your company manufacturers widgets that you sell to restaurants, you’re in a single-sided marketplace. If you serve those customers well, you should prosper. But job boards have two customer groups: candidates and employers. Generally, only employers pay but the candidates need to be treated like customers too and that creates a dilemma for job boards: care too much about the candidates and not enough about the employers and you end up with a site that has lots of candidates but almost no employers. Similarly, treat candidates poorly and employers well and you end up with a site without many candidates but lots of employers. Neither is good. You need balance or you’ll have too few candidates applying to too many jobs, or too many candidates applying to too few jobs.

In addition to needing to balance candidate and employer interests, job boards also need to balance the needs for efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency typically means getting a lot done with little effort. Effectiveness typically means getting great results. It is almost impossible to deliver a product where the customer sees great efficiency while also seeing great effectiveness, yet that’s what job boards are asked to deliver every single time to both the candidate and employer customer groups. Candidates and employers want to spend as little time as possible searching and posting ads, which means that job boards are under pressure to deliver an efficient experience. But candidates only want to see jobs for which they’re well-qualified and interested and employers only want to see candidates who are well-qualified and interested, which means that job boards are under pressure to deliver an efficient experience. Job boards that claim to provide a Tinder-type experience (simply swipe to apply) or apply to dozens of jobs at once create a highly efficient experience for the candidate that is also highly ineffective as it is unlikely that the candidate will be a good match for most of those jobs and, therefore, highly unlikely to be hired.

Programmatic job advertising is an unusual feature for job boards in that, when done well, it provides both customer groups with an efficient and also effective experience. Programmatic job advertising occurs when employers and other customers of the job board use software to decide, at scale, which jobs to post to which job boards for how many days and at what cost. Instead of advertising a role on a job board because you saw an ad for the job board or its salesperson convinced you that they’ll have the right candidates for you, the software makes that decision for you. What the software typically does is post the job to many sites until those sites have delivered a certain number of applications or candidates clicking through to your site to, hopefully, apply. Good, programmatic software will also make adjustments multiple times a day so if one job board is delivering a lot of candidates to your site but they’re not applying, the software will infer that the job board’s candidates are not a good fit for your role — they’re of poor quality — and the software will automatically inactivate your posting on that job board so that more of your budget will be spent driving candidate traffic from the sites that are delivering candidates who are of high quality.

So, why is programmatic job ad buying and selling efficient? It takes almost no time from humans to decide, at scale, where, when, and how best to run hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of job posting ads. Yet it is also highly effective because the ads and their budgets are automatically allocated to the sites that are proving to deliver the highest quality candidates, meaning those most likely to apply, be interviewed, and be hired.

Some job boards feel threatened by programmatic job ad buying because it allows a customer to do things like run 30 different ads over a typical month with each ad running for a day instead of one ad for 30 days. For job boards depending on traditional, duration-based pricing such as $X for Y postings, selling only one ad in a month instead of 30 ads for the same month sounds awful. But what those job boards often don’t grasp is that’s not the choice that the customer is likely to make. Instead of running one ad for 30 days or 30 ads for a day each so that you only have one of their ads running at any given time, the customer is more likely to run dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of ads on your job board at any given time. Instead of selling one job ad slot for say $200 and that slot being used for the one posting for 30 days or 30 ads for a day each, the customer will likely pay you something like $1 per click. If you’re running even 100 postings at any given time and deliver only 10 candidates per average posting to the customer’s website over the course of the month, that’s $1,000. Wouldn’t you rather generate $1,000 from that customer than $200 even if that means running 100 instead of one posting?

As much sense as it makes for employers to programmatically post their job ads to job boards, it makes even more sense for job boards to programmatically post some or even all of their job posting ads to other job boards. The business model is similar to “splits” that have forever been a foundational element of how third-party recruiters operate. One third-party recruiter will own the relationship with the employer and get the opportunity from that employer to place a well-qualified candidate in return for something like 20 percent of the candidate’s expected first-year compensation. But the chances are good that the recruiter won’t have at their fingertips that well-qualified candidate and so they’ll reach out to their network of other recruiters to find out who does. If a second, third-party recruiter has the right candidate, the two recruiters will typically agree to split the placement fee, meaning that each gets 10 percent of the candidate’s expected, first-year compensation. When one job board sells a posting to an employer but doesn’t have enough, well-qualified candidate traffic to make that employer happy, the job board can programmatically post the job to other job boards. If one of those other job boards sends a candidate to the employer, the two job boards will typically split what the employer paid to the first job board. Now, it is unlikely that the split will be 50-50 as most employers for most jobs will want dozens or even hundreds of candidates, so if the employer pays the first job board $200 to post the ad, that job board might pay the other job boards something like $0.50 for each candidate who sees the ad and clicks through to the employer’s site. If there are say 100 of those clicks, the first job board’s revenue will be $200 from the employer and its cost to drive the traffic will be $50, leaving a nice gross profit margin of $150, or 75 percent.

It gets even better when the employer pays the first job board on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. Let’s say that the employer pays the first job board $1.00 per click, which is about average right now. If that job board programmatically distributes the job posting ad to a second job board and pays it $0.25 per click, then the first job board’s gross profit margin remains 75 percent. If the employer posts 100 instead of one job, pays the first job board $1.00 per click for 100 clicks per posting, and the first job board pays the second job board $0.25 per click, then the first job board’s gross profit margin remains 75 percent on revenue of $10,000 (100 postings x 100 clicks x $1.00 per click) for a gross profit of $7,500.

As you can probably see, programmatic job ad buying, especially between job boards, is highly scalable as they can automate the posting of tens or even hundreds of thousands of jobs at any given time. It is also highly efficient as the software takes care of almost all of the work. And it is highly efficient as the software automatically runs the postings on the sites which are driving the highest quality candidates, as measured by the percentage who click to the employer’s site, apply, are interviewed, and hired.

In 2016, College Recruiter became probably the first niche job board in the world to migrate most of its customers from traditional, duration-based to programmatic, performance-based advertising. We named the product that we created to make this happen JobsThatScale, and it is fueling our growth. Over the past few years, our revenues have grown 30 to 50 percent per year and we’re doing so profitably. The product is scalable, efficient, and effective. Over the past year, we’ve grown from accepting postings only in the U.S. to also running postings in Canada, the United Kingdom, European Union, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and dozens of other countries. We’ve just started to both buy and sell candidate traffic in every major currency because many of our customers — employers and other job boards — only want to pay us in Canadian dollars, British Pounds Sterling, Euros, or other currencies. And we’re paying the other job boards from which we buy traffic in every major currency as many of them only want to be paid in currencies that are local to them.

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