Individual job boards are self-contained ecosystems. Each job board will post the job, record clicks, track how much has been spent on a job and/or in total, may track how many “apply clicks” have registered on the site, and so forth. It’s the very top of the funnel view. The challenge is that very few job boards can see down the funnel to understand if the clicks they are sending are turning into candidates, and if those candidates are quality candidates. Typically, once a year, they may request from you a “hires” report. Unfortunately, by that time there is little a job board can do to improve the quality of candidates they are sending.
Job boards view their responsibilities quite simply – take the job, make sure it gets into their site with other jobs, and try to show it to candidates who might click on it. On the other side, you are somewhat stuck with what you get – too many, not enough, all wrong, or just right.
Job boards can’t see what is happening on other job boards or on your ATS. If one of your jobs is driving a lot of clicks or candidates, it might also be driving a lot for you on another site or even organically. What looks to them like they are doing a good job in their ecosystem could actually be causing a nightmare for you. For example, it’s day one of a job and you already have 600 candidates, but you only needed 30.
A job ad exchange starts from a position of a cross job board view and a focus on down-funnel. By having access to hundreds or thousands of job boards, a job ad exchange can reach far more candidates than any one job board, while it has the advantage of understanding what those job ads and clicks are returning in value. Lastly, the job ad exchange, leveraging programmatic technology, solves the challenge of too many candidates on some jobs, by force limiting the number of candidates that can apply to any specific job.
To understand more about how job ad exchanges got their start and how they might be helpful, take a read of our whitepaper, “What Is a Job Ad Exchange.”
