No Longer Reliant on the Major Job Boards

I am pleased to announce that professionally, I am no longer a paying customer of Careerbuilder, Dice, or Yahoo! HotJobs, for job postings and resume database access. Where I work, we still use Monster, but my employer's parent company pays for the little we use of it. Applicant flow from all the major job boards were clearly on the decline and we were making fewer and fewer hires from them.

We got rid of Dice nearly a year ago. Our Careerbuilder account lapsed some months back - I was not pleased at all by the company's sudden ramp up in aggressive marketing efforts to existing clients. Even to this day, I get voicemails from Careerbuilder asking to become a vendor again. And with HotJobs, well, even though I was an early fan of HotJobs back in 1999, and I always thought they had a better user interface than most of the other boards, Yahoo! seemed to let HotJobs lag and hiring results showed it. The account with HotJobs just lapsed. We really don't have budget for any of them anymore.

These days, it's all about LinkedIn and employee referrals. Jobvite, our applicant tracking system, helps a lot with managing employee referrals, as well as cross-posts our jobs for free to Indeed and SimplyHired. We get an impressive flow of job applicants from Indeed and SimplyHired. We continue to post to Craigslist, since it continues to be a great bang-for-the-buck deal, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I really feel a great sense of relief to no longer rely on the pricey major job boards, after many years of signing big invoice payments to them. I was getting sick of being beholden to their previous reigns to the talent market.