Six Tips For Recruiters Surfing Job Board Aggregators

“Where should I post my job opening?”

I hear this question weekly from HR colleagues and clients.  Assuming the people asking this question are specifically targeting active candidates (pursuing the estimated 80% of talent who aren’t actively checking out new positions on job boards is a completely different type of discussion which I’m happy to have), I often direct them to a job board aggregator (sometimes referred to as vertical job search engines) to help them conduct a bit of research to answer their question.


My favorite job board aggregators for years have been Simplyhired.com and Indeed.com.  Recently, I discovered a new favorite, Linkup.com, thanks to a blog postby Laurie Ruettimann on Punk Rock HRbefore she signed off on that forum.  For a list of other job aggregators, including European and Asian sources, take a look at Eric Shannon’s post on the topic. 


Job aggregators are terrific tools to drive visibility for your job postings but did you know that they can also deliver HR and recruiting value in other, unexpected ways?  It’s sort of like what happened when surfers turned their long boards into stand up paddle (a.k.a. SUP) rides.  They took their tried and true tools to the another level.  Think beyond just posting jobs on these sites and you’ll be surprised by a new sourcing experience.
To me, the biggest difference between SimplyHired, Indeed, and Linkup are the sources for their job posting search results.  The first two cull postings from company career sites and other job boards while Linkup purely searches and reports from company career sites.
As you’d expect, most people using these aggregators are job seekers conducting job searches and setting up posting alerts.  As a recruiter, I like to tap into these sources regularly for different purposes.  Here are six tips to introduce recruiters, HR, and business leaders to the benefits that job board aggregators bring to the recruiting table…beyond just posting jobs to these sites. 


1)  Identify your talent competitors.  Say you are recruiting for a Microbiology Medical Technologist in Denver and you want to know who else is hiring for that type of position and has posted those jobs in the last 15 days.  Yesterday I typed those parameters into Indeed.com, and found five other labs in Denver hiring Microbiologist lab techs.  So, now you know against whom you are competing for talent and where you can presumably find employed diagnostic microbiology passive candidates. 


2)  Benchmark job descriptions.  It’s common for HR professionals to compare and contrast job descriptions when developing new positions or calibrating pay considerations for external market equity.  Aggregators are a great research source to find benchmark job descriptions by industry, credentials, or company size.  Simply search for comparable jobs posted to aggregators by your competitors or industry leaders.  Extract the descriptions that match your needs.  By sharing your research when requesting job description samples from colleagues, you’ll develop a reputation as someone who shares value when networking.


3)  Gather competitive intelligence.  Say you want to know to whom (e.g., CFO, Controller, VP Tax, etc.) the Tax Managers report at your competitors which have between $100 – $500m in revenue.  Go to SimplyHired.com’s advanced search function, type in “Tax Manager” in the [within job title] box, type in “reports to” or “reporting to” in the [with the exact phrase box], and use the revenue parameters in the [company revenue] special filter.  When I ran this search today, 119 results returned. 

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