Arik Filstein

Arik Filstein

RIP To Announce the Death of the Corporate Careers Job-Board

by Dr. John Sullivan Jun 6, 2011, 5:35 am ET

5 years ago someone asked if the adoption of internet sites would lead to the demise of job boards. It was a great question, one which forced a number of people to inquire about: “Why would they? What value were they not delivering? How should they evolve?”

Today there are other job boards than there were 5 years ago, some of which are attempting to become more social, just like the social networks are taking a look at how best to serve the use space. As the job boards have demonstrated a stable pace of evolution, corporate career sites haven’t. Yes, the graphics are becoming better and widgets in some places are displaying live feeds from social networking sites, but in the end they offer exactly the same loathed experience they did five years ago.

Corporate career sites have never been compelling enough to capture a crowd. Despite huge advances in content management, content aggregation/curation, and content sharing, most sites remain little more than a thin veil for that ATS-delivered online application. The always informative Doug Berg of Jobs2Web once shared in conversation that all studies have shown someone desperately seeking new employment will ignore all content and go direct to whatever link is labeled having a variant of “apply now.” Knowing this, is it still worthwhile to construct out pricy, glossy career sites no one is watching when other avenues to apply are emerging?

I only say emerging, because studies now reveal that about 20% of candidates find their opportunities via social networking, nearly 30% via employee referral, 25% via job boards, and another 10% via direct sourcing. On average, that equates to 85% of the external candidate pool coming to the applying from an origin point apart from the corporate career site. Increase that university programs, event-based efforts, and occasional agency usage, and it’s pay off the corporate career site is a questionable spend at best.

I’m arguing they don’t need to survive, and I don’t think those who work in the employment advertising world would be sad to see career sites disappear while they really are a huge source of revenue. The standard career site costs a lot and is wrought with problems and shortcomings. Most career site development initiatives begin with unclear goals as well as an much more vague evaluation. If you’re interested whatsoever later on of recruiting, looking at the factors which are resulting in the demise of corporate career sites may help you spot other “dinosaur” practices in recruiting and save your organization millions.

Explanations why Corporate Career Websites Have become Irrelevant

Much like job boards, some variant of corporate career sites will exist for a long time, but listed here are 20 reasons their value continues to dwindle.

There are superior ways to gather information – using the development of social media, it is now much easier to discover what you need to know about a company and it is jobs. You can study almost anything you want, including things an organization knows are true, but would never admit. Sites like glassdoor.com and jobvent.com provide an insiders view, and Glassdoor even provides you with a preview from the interview questions, interview answers, helpful suggestions, and what to anticipate throughout the procedure. Merely a number of corporate websites provide any description of what to expect throughout the interview. It’s even possible to locate side-by-side comparisons with competing firms on external sites, something you’ll never find on the corporate site.
Outdated – with corporate HR budgets slashed, the design of corporate websites frequently remains unchanged for 3 to five years, during which there’s virtually no content curation. The information online is painfully old, especially compared to the current information that’s available on the web and through social media.
There’s nothing there for the non-job seeker – it’s no secret that 100% of the features and knowledge found on most corporate career sites are equipped for the “active” job hunter. Most career sites provide no value (i.e. learning guidelines, being a better professional) for a working professional not trying to find an instantaneous opportunity to visit.
Authenticity – applicants want authentic and believable answers to their questions, and let’s face the facts, every word on the corporate career website is pure propaganda.
The black hole – with a high rate of unemployment, the volume of resumes that a firm receives stresses the available resources. Since several individuals make an application for jobs they’re obviously not qualified for, most recruiters are unwilling to spend enough time searching the database of those that directly apply.
They’re referral killers – the very best quality hire and volume of hires almost always come from employee referrals, a recruiting channel that is aided significantly by advances in social media. Research with early adopters of social media revealed a substantial fact: when social efforts point contacts back to the career site the time of conversion to an applicant are less than 1:10.
They aren’t mobile friendly – a surprisingly large number of corporate websites can’t be accessed from the mobile device (the strongest recruiting communications tool in the world). Recruiting leaders that ignore mobile ought to be waterboarded. It’s unfathomable that creative agencies still leverage flash based navigation (invisible to many cellular devices) when HTML5 works.
Honesty – potential candidates need to know about both positive and negative factors, but no one in legal or PR would let a single negative bit of information survive on a corporate-controlled site.
Painful to lurk on – the abandonment rate (the area of visitors that leave a site just before completing a profile/application) on corporate websites is 92%. Yes, that is correct. Some from the abandonment could be attributed to lack of compelling content and features, some of it can also be attributed to the large gap in experience between career sites along with other service-oriented commercial websites. The pictures are staged, the videos lame, and the news obviously written by an idiot. Absent are believable stories and compelling reasons why your business is “different.” Zappos has learned how you can tell stories on the site; you should check it.
Painful to try to get a job – often the process of filling out the applying or posting a resume is painfully slow. (Basically can custom order a brand new luxury car with hundreds of configuration options within a few minutes, why can’t I obtain a job in the equivalent time?)
You can apply different ways – even if you decide to apply, it is simple to apply for most jobs without ever going to the site, because the same jobs are for auction on numerous job boards.
Many don’t have the features that candidates want – a significant percentage of corporate career sites lack blogs, videos, podcasts, and also the live chat features that can often be found outside of the site.
You can’t inquire – career sites are equipped for one-way communications. Corporations tell you what they want you to definitely know. The best that most sites can perform would be to offer “canned” answers and questions, yet you can ask a variety of questions “live” and obtain answers on Facebook, Twitter, and Internet forums.
Not global – in a world now covered with global recruiting, most career sites are still primarily centered on the country and the language in which the company is headquartered. Although jobs may be listed based on country, the accessible details about the company’s facilities and jobs is likely to be painfully insufficient.
Diversity is a joke – although every corporate career site mentions diversity and it has the obligatory diversity picture, most never provide targeted information relative to the particular interests and requires of diverse groups.
Use of employees isn’t allowed – many corporate sites provide no employee profiles. However, the ones that do limit access and supply only one-way communications. None possess the courage to provide the whole name from the employee being profiled and a way of contacting them.
The job descriptions are vague – they’re brief, incredibly dull, and they provide little details about the projects you will be working on and also the team you will be working with. Most websites of course provide no avenue for getting additional information about the job, the projects, or even the team. Should you don’t know the correct corporate job title to do the job you are seeking, this may also take an eternity to obtain the right job for you.
No Amazon-like features – on the commercial site like Amazon, visitors gets “prompts” informing you that other people who have purchased item A also bought item B. The “others like” feature whether it was available could alert you about similar jobs that you haven’t considered and other information which you may not have access to viewed.
Direct sourcing makes a website less necessary – like a higher area of corporate hires come from direct sourcing approaches (where recruiters proactively identify and target individuals), you will see less requirement for unsolicited applications.
Uniformity and consistency drive away innovators – it is a common recruiting goal to attract the innovative and inventive. Unfortunately, the amount of consistency and uniformity is so pronounced on corporate career sites that a person with an oz of innovation or creativity inside them will realize right away that this organization doesn’t tolerate variations and diversity. What on the page could possibly say innovation, however the monotonous page design and site layout sends a clearer message of massive corporate restrictions.
Conclusions

There are lots of defenders of corporate career websites, the majority of whom possess a financial curiosity about their survival, but even they cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence that suggests the cash allocated to them may be better spent on other channels of communication/engagement. If you still buy into their value, you should be ready to evaluate and prove their effectiveness at obtaining the people you need to affect really do so, since the great majority of popular website metrics tell the alternative story.

Whether you acknowledge it or otherwise, the glory times of the corporate career site are over.

Source: http://www.ere.net