1. Sourcing Today
The Challenges of Online Recruiting.
Getting Lost in the Job Board Jungle
and Social Media Swamp.
Scott Holsman
President
Next Level Performers

2. The Challenges of Online Recruiting.
In 2005, we started asking companies what their challenges were
in the sourcing and recruiting arena. Here are the results:
 Job boards had radically
changed the way they sourced
and recruited candidates.
 Companies were not willing to
pay executive search firms
their asking fee’s for
candidates sourced from job
boards.
 Postings were getting lost in
the Job Board Jungle
 Companies were overwhelmed
with the number of job boards
and selecting which ones to
use.
 With the proliferation of Job
Boards companies were
realizing a diminishing return.

3. The Challenges of Online Recruiting (cont.)
 Many companies simply did
not know how to effectively
utilize web-based recruiting or
how to maximize their returns.
 Their postings either
generated a tremendous
response, most of whom were
not qualified, or they did not
generate any qualified
candidates at all.
 Database search was
expensive and frustrating.
 Companies were interested in
someone managing the Job
Boards for them. They wanted
to move from spending time
sourcing candidates to
interviewing qualified people.
 Companies had good ads on
the wrong boards or bad ads
on the right boards.
 Then along came Web 2.0
and the Social Networks.

4. The Social Networks
TM.Biz estimates over 4,000 Social Networks. For recruiting, the top 4 are
LinkedIn, Twitter, facebook, Google+.
If learning Boolean and writing Google Strings to recruit Web 2.0 style was
not challenging enough, we now have to build networks with a minimum of
500 contacts to reach the tipping point, and learn how to recruit in these
networks.
Then our job postings often drown in the Social Media Swamp.

5. Today, Companies are Faced with
The Job Board Jungle.
 The Conference Board Help-Wanted Online Data Series report an
average of over 4.8 million unduplicated jobs posted on over
1,200 job boards in the U.S. Over 50% of these jobs are
reposted each month due to churn, lack of hire or growth.
 This does not count postings in:
 the social networks
 corporate job boards/pages
 38,800 U.S. boards they do not track
 the additional 40,000 boards worldwide.
With this volume, it is easy for a job posting and
a job seeker to get lost in the Job Board Jungle.

6. What is Your Online Strategy?
Selecting the right:
Job Boards
Databases to Mine
Social Media Outlet
Social Network and the Groups within Social Networks
Search Engine
And Writing Boolean Strings
is now a core competency of the recruitment team.

7. The Right Message to the Right
People at the Right Time.
All of this is for naught if a Search Optimized and Candidate Driven
compelling ad is posted in the wrong place or if a poorly written Job
Posting is in the right one.
If the ad is not in the right place with a compelling message to the
right people at the right time, it will never be seen.
We call this post and pray.

8. Who is managing your online efforts?
Human Resources?
Marketing?
Accounting Department?
Hiring Managers?
Administrative Assistants?
All of the above?

9. Online Advertising – Who Creates
the Posting? Do they know how?
This job was recently posted on one of the big three boards.
Confidential is hiring a .NET Developer to join our team. The Software Developer is responsible for maintaining production of retail systems related to point of sale, pricing,
procurement and accounting. As a Software Developer, you will develop and maintain new applications, as well as support existing applications for 600+ store
locations as well as internal departments. Strong candidates will possess a self-starter attitude, exceptional communication skills, and be able to work in a
collaborative, team environment.
Duties & Responsibilities:
• Maintains the daily production of all Retail Systems used for business needs relating to point of sale, product orders, and sales data.
• Develop new applications, as well as provide support and enhancements for legacy applications, written in C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server.
• Assists in the development of new IT systems and business processes which will ultimately increase the profitability of the company.
• Obtains the business requirements needed from internal and external customers in order to develop the appropriate solutions to ensure a functional and efficient
product.
• Provides training assistance to customers on the use of the respective systems or processes.
• Teams with various departments throughout the organization to create the best possible product and to maintain a timely and accurate delivery of requested software.
• Responds to customer systems issues and provides solutions to problems as needed.
Work Experience / Education:
• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university; a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics preferred
• 4+ years experience in software development
• Experience with C#, ASP.NET, T-SQL, and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
To see how it performed, read on.

10. It Was Lost in
The Job Board Jungle.
At 2:00pm that day, a query was ran and the search criteria was
engineer in Kansas City.
It returned 712 matches that were posted in the last 30 days.
The day it was posted, it was already on page 20. Job seekers would
have view over 500 engineering jobs before they got to this one.
Is there anything compelling about this ad? Is there anything that
would make a top performer want to respond? Why did it not perform?

11. It’s All About Relevancy,
Key Words and HTML.
In the early days of the Job Boards, Time was the important factor in
how a Job Posting was ranked in a Job Seekers’ search, not
Relevancy. Meaning the jobs that were posted most recently were
always at the top of the page.
The rise in popularity of search engines like Google and Yahoo began
to fundamentally change how people used the Internet to find things.
Searches were based on Relevance to the criteria entered, not which
website had been updated the most recently. Eventually, the Job
Boards adapted this methodology as well to more closely suit the
online
habits of their users.

12. So who should write the ad,
HR or Marketing?
HR is focused on:
 Strategic Management
 Workforce Planning and
Employment
 Human Resource
Development
 Total Rewards –
Compensational and Benefits
 Employee and Labor Relations
 Risk Management
Marketing is focused on:
 Branding
 Market segmenting and
targeting
 Communications
 Web 2.0 Technology
 Creative design
 Word Smithing
 Media
 Public Relations

13. The Answer is Both!
Both need to be involved in the process. Companies today need an
HR department that knows traditional recruiting and:
 The intricacies of the job boards
 Social media outlets
 Social networks and groups
 Blogs
But most companies do not have the resources to have HR focusing on
marketing or their marketing department working with HR. So it is getting
harder and harder for good opportunities to rise above the noise.

14. Skills Needed For Online Recruiting
and Advertising.
 Know how to write in HTML.
 Relevant keywords for that
position.
 How to write compelling ads.
 Understanding of what boards
performs in what geographic
regions for various positions.
 Which social media outlets and
networks are the most
effective.
 Which groups within those
outlets and networks have high
traffic.
 How to dive into search
engines.
 Write Google Strings.
 Create Boolean Searches

15. What About the Job Seeker?
It is also becoming increasingly difficult for job seekers to find job
postings online. For example, a recent search on one of the top three
boards for sales jobs posted in the last 30 days in Kansas City resulted
in:
 1,920 jobs.
 The search had 77 pages with 25 jobs posted per page.
 A Division Manger position for a major corporation that was posted one day
ago, was found on page 50. It was posted yesterday and there are already
over 1250 postings ahead of it!
 The same search also showed an entry-level outside sales position that was
posted three weeks ago still on page one.
Why is that? The way the ad was written and managed.

16. From One To Many.
E-recruiting requires considerable understanding and skill. The
Internet does not enable us to recruit the best talent; that capability is
achieved only with a fundamental change in the way recruiting is done
– one that is carefully designed to capture the full potential of the
technology.
For many companies, selecting where to advertise their open position,
sourcing and qualifying candidates is a time and resource intensive
process.
If there were one central location to search for candidates, the process
would be easy. However, there are tens of thousands of sources –
some free, some costly. All take time.

17. The Way We Were.
In 1994 I started my career in staffing and recruiting. We grew our firm
to over 600 people a day working for a variety of companies in a
town of 86,000. We had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation.
And recruiting, compared to now was easy. We dominated the
Classified ads. There were a couple of sources to advertise, but the
classified ads ruled.
In 1998, we got a corporate discount with Monster, but declined to use
it. Why? The classified ads worked great. Flash forward to today.
Classified ads are all but dead. There are over 40,000 job boards and
more springing up every day.
Then came the aggregators and Web 2.0.

18. Web 2.0 in Full Swing.
As of today there are over:
 40,000 Job Board in the United States and another 40,000 worldwide.
 15,000,000 Blogs in the United States
 100,000,000 Blogs worldwide
 Wikipedia reports more than 140 Social Networks and stated this is not an
exhaustive list.
The job boards and the web originally reduced the friction for the job
seeker and the hiring company. Things became much more fluid.
Now, the friction is drowned out by all the noise.
The question is, how do you rise above it?

19. Final Thoughts
The answer is focusing on what Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads calls
the Online Channel of Hires.
Two or even five Sources of Hire is not enough to get the message to
the right person at the right time in the right way with the right
message.
According to Indeed, the average company utilizes 8 sources and job
seekers 16 channels of hire.
To keep ahead of the curve takes on-going training and a broad
exposure in the online world.
And a lot of time and money.

20. Contact Us
Scott Holsman is the founder of Next Level Performers.
Next Level Performers broadens a companies recruiting exposure by
placing their opportunities on over 100 job boards, social networks, groups
within those networks and mining databases which increases the
probability of finding the right person faster at a lower cost.
You Drive. We’ll fill the bus.
You can reach Scott directly at scotth@nextlevelperformers.com