Lena SteffenMajor job boards such as Monster, Indeed and CareerBuilder are widely used by all types of companies today because they are effective at extending the reach of job postings to a broad audience. However, relying only on them might negatively impact your hiring. Even though they work well for high volume recruiting, such as filling store-level positions, things get trickier when you need candidates with specific skills.
We are not talking about only tech talent. Every industry struggles with hard-to-find, high-skilled talent, including logistics managers for retail, nurses for health care and designers for fashion.
However, if you are sourcing high-skilled talent only on major job boards, you will find yourself in one of these two painful situations:
- You may get a few high skilled candidates, buried among hundreds of non-relevant applications, making it almost impossible to find the gems.
OR
- The right talent simply doesn’t apply to your job posts. The opposite happens: your job post gets buried among thousands of irrelevant job postings, when high-skilled candidates are not willing to spend too much time browsing jobs.
So what should you do? You should incorporate niche job boards to your sourcing strategy!
Here’s how niche job boards can help you achieve hiring success in 3 different ways:
1. Remove the noise.
According to HCareers, it is likely that 95% of applicants won’t be qualified when you post only on major job boards. That’s too much noise in your applicant pool, and it is likely that you don’t have a dedicated team of statisticians willing to data-mine all your applications to find the right candidates. A targeted approach with niche job boards removes the likelihood of getting non-relevant applications and optimizes the use of your recruiting dollars.
2. Get more applicants with specific skills.
Besides removing the noise, you need also a higher number of qualified applicants. When you use niche boards you are targeting the right talent where they spend their time. And we are not talking only about tech talent: for instance, you can find hard-to-find fashion designers and style creators using fashion focused job boards such as FashionUnited.
3. Target people that are passionate and savvy about your industry.
High performing employees don’t stand out only for their skills, but also for their passion and engagement. Job boards focused on a specific industry or interest increase your odds of finding highly motivated candidates who are savvy about your industry. Taking the fashion industry as an example again, having employees that love fashion and are genuinely interested in the latest trends, you guarantee that your brand is always fresh and up-to-date. Boards like FashionUnited increase candidate engagement by offering multiple services to its visitors, such as industry news.
Want to know how to best hire fashion professionals?
SmartRecruiters has partnered with FashionUnited to empower customers to distribute jobs to FashionUnited’s job board with 1-click. Learn more and get started by accessing FashionUnited’s profile in the SmartRecruiters’ Marketplace today.
FashionUnited is an independent international B2B fashion platform. Globally active, the website reaches more than 1.6 million industry professionals per month. At FashionUnited, we strive for more fun and efficiency in fashion! That’s why we created a one-stop-shop platform where visitors can find the latest fashion news, a career center, an events calendar, an article archive, various trade statistics, employer branding pages and more.
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This article was written by Lena Steffen, Marketing Executive for FashionUnited. After arriving in Amsterdam over a year ago, Lena started working at FashionUnited as an intern, emphasizing on the French market. After 6 months of her internship, she was then hired as a full time employee and now works as a Marketing Executive for the fashion platform.
Lee Ann Prescott
