How Job Boards Are Your Secret Branding & Advertising Weapon

Well, no. The majority of jobs aren’t filled through job boards. In fact, a recent survey found that 85% of jobs are filled via some sort of networking. With these stats, one might now be able to assume that job boards are a total waste of money and you shouldn’t be using them at all. I’d counter that as an absolutely ridiculous assumption and that you should be posting your jobs to many boards! Here’s why:

In 2019 brand equity, awareness, and recognition are hard to come by. Unless you have a dedicated social media team, sometimes it can be hard to stand out – not to mention let people know you even exist. So how do you get your presence known in a world where we are bombarded with ads everywhere we look?

• You can buy sponsorship – but throwing your logo on something doesn’t necessarily indicate your values or what you do.
• You can host an event – but that doesn’t mean people will come or enjoy themselves.
• You can start a blog – but that takes a ton of time and consistency and it doesn’t mean that people will read it.
• You can buy advertising space – but people might gloss over it and ads aren’t really effective if seen only once.

Not to mention these are all pretty costly and require finding the right people to appropriately execute the idea.

So what’s the solution?

This is where job posts come to the rescue. Typically when you buy a job post you get nearly an entire webpage on someone else’s site as your own giant advertising space to write whatever floats your boat as long as it’s pushing some type of job. People who look for jobs are trying to find companies that match their values, where they can grow and feel appreciated, and contribute to something that’s important (while also making money – obviously). Think back to job posts you’ve read in the past and mull over which one’s grabbed your attention. Were they dry and stale or friendly and seemed like a company that was innovative and had their 💩 together?

Using this perspective, it’s more advantageous to think of a job post as a piece of marketing material. It needs to have brand voice and it needs to spark joy!

Moreover, I always hear people asking, “how can I create more diversity within my company?” And my answer is always: you must invest in underestimated communities. Job boards that focus on minorities in tech are great ways to do that! Those who find themselves marginalized in tech respond by organizing – whether it be online, at meetups, wherever. This women in tech platform alone is an example of that. So it’s important you seek those communities out and invest in them, because if you sit around waiting, chances are you’ll be waiting for a pretty long time.

As by products of posting on these boards, you accomplish several things:

• offer opportunities to minorities in tech who may not have known your company existed or had career openings
• support the platform that is investing their time and energy into creating this pipeline of amazing and talented professionals that you might not otherwise have access to
• brand your company as an entity taking strides to be supportive of a progressive and inclusive industry
• start to build a relationship with that platform and their community

Okay, but what about that 85% networking statistic I mentioned earlier?

Networking happens when people have a conversation. It doesn’t have to be in person. In fact, it happens all the time online when someone tags you in a post they thought you’d find useful. Or when people share things because they trust the source. The result of sharing your job with a trusted network that has built it’s community with authentic engagement is intangible. It increases brand awareness and causes the opportunity to spread via shares and word of mouth. Check out one of our recent job posts we tweeted out below:

Only 12 hours after it was posted, it received 900 impressions. That means 900 different people saw this in their timeline, and either learned of or recalled the company Blastpoint, and now know they have job opportunities they can share with their network. The tweet itself received 4 retweets, and 2 retweets with comments that received their own separate engagement all while driving traffic back to the original job post on our website where the company has their own space to “advertise” their job and their brand as they want to be seen.

TL;DR

• job posts aren’t just for finding candidates
• job posts are an affordable advertising space that not enough people taking advantage of
• job posts are some of the best places to share your brand voice and company values
• posting to job boards that focus on minorities in tech allow you to invest in those communities, offer opportunities to those who might not even know your company exists because they don’t hang out in the same places as your network, and supports the platform that’s investing time and energy in connecting you with said community
• creates word of mouth and internet networking job opportunities when job is shared on social platforms
• all of this increases your brand’s equity, awareness, and recognition through an underutilized affordable method.

Rethink how you utilize the space in your job posts. Industries are always evolving and it’s critical to find new ways to keep an advantage. If you’re interested in sharing a job with our community click here: