What criteria should I use to judge job-posting sites?

Question

The amount of sites (both free and paid) offering to post job openings keeps growing. Free or paid is not a good criteria to judge quality by, as many paid sites just take jobs from other (free or paid) websites and aggregate them just to get better traffic from search engines.

When looking for a place to post a job opening, what criteria are most important in finding the best candidates? Are sites (like Stackoverflow Careers for programmers) directed toward the audience you want to fill the job more effective than aggregation sites (like Monster.com)? Is it better to advertise to a wider audience, or to focus on a single site to post all job openings? Does it depend on the type of position? What criteria should an employer use to judge the effectiveness of these postings?

Although, it can be a general question, but my focus is on teaching and education jobs!

Answer 1

Are you tracking how your current applicants hear about the job openings to which they're applying? That information will tell you where people interested in your open positions have been going to find you, and it's a good place to start. Applicant Tracking Systems often record how the applicant found the opening and affix it to the candidate's profile as something like "Original Source".

If you have an urgent need and can't wait to build that data set, you might talk to a friendly recruiter from another company to see where they get the best results.

Answer 2

First, start off by searching the different sites for the kind of job you are advertising, using the keywords you think are important. You will get a good idea from doing this as to which sites are best for your kind of job. The other thing you'll get is plenty of examples of how to write job ads, and an indication as to what the state of the market is like.

After that, suck it and see. Post some ads on the job sites that you liked the most, and see what you get back from each site. What I've found is that if you get in touch with the job sites, they may have an introductory offer, and, more importantly, they may be able to give you some help and advice as to how to get the best results from their site. When I first advertised with a major site, I got some useful tips as to what to put in the title, etc, to get the most hits on my ad.

It's very difficult to answer your question in more detail. Hiring, just like job searching, is quite interactive, and very dependent both on your own individual requirements, and on the state of the market. You put your foot in the market, see what happens, invest some more time and effort, and try to make judgements about your successes and failures as you take it forward.

Answer 3

When looking for a place to post a job opening, what criteria are most important in finding the best candidates?

The quality of the people using the site which I admit is likely hard to measure. The key is to find a few quality people to interview and not get a deluge of resumes.

Are sites (like Stackoverflow Careers for programmers) directed toward the audience you want to fill the job more effective than aggregation sites (like Monster.com)?

For very specialized jobs, I'd say yes though this is worth understanding that the specialization here means that you are looking at what a rather small percentage of people would have. A .Net Developer may be sufficiently common, however someone that can build graphics, build games in XNA, develop in .Net and handle all the security of things would be a bit more specialized.

Is it better to advertise to a wider audience, or to focus on a single site to post all job openings?

Depending on what is working each has its merits.

Does it depend on the type of position?

Yes.

What criteria should an employer use to judge the effectiveness of these postings?

Look at how much time is spent on various sites and see what kind of ROI there is. Perhaps no one is found and hundreds of hours are spent which would lead to thinking it isn't that effective. On the other hand, if only a handful of hours can produce a few good candidates then it may be much more effective though I would likely consider having a few levels of what is effective here. Getting a hire is one level but having that hire get past a probation period and contribute greatly are a couple of other stories to consider here.