JOB BOARDS

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 | Updated: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:59 am

Online recruitment tools are necessary to keep streams of candidates flowing into recruitment agencies’ data bases — but some recruiters would prefer to invest more resources in their company web sites than continue to pay a host of job boards to post vacancies.

Some recruiters who attended a roundtable forum on online recruitment Friday also said that they are cutting back on the numbers of job boards that they use.

“I don’t want to have 70 job boards on our books — I want five in each sector, and I want them to be good,” said Kat Grigg, marketing and communications director for Eden Brown.

For corporate governance recruiter Barclay Simpson, online is currently “the largest single source of candidates”, said Ian Coyle, who recruits internal audit, risk and control staff. He said that from his  perspective, the most successful online tool for job listings serves more as an information portal than simply a job board.

Amongst the ways Barclay Simpson benefits from its own web site is that it is “a publication we own” and the company can control its own costs, Coyle said.

An online presence is “a pre-requisite in this day and age”, concurred Rob Scott, marketing and sales director for Austin Benn Consultants. Scott, who was among the attendees who preferred that his company invest more in its own web site than in job boards, said online had changed the role of consultants. Today, he said, a consultant may spend two hours daily going through CVs that have been received online — in years past, he added, consultants were able to “get more done”.

The London roundtable gathering was hosted by web design company 4Mat.