12. Mai 2008 │ Eva Zils

The Job Board Experience – Episode 6 – Buying Online Ads from a Print-mainly job site

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Some of my clients are really adorable: they call to give me the names of some internet sites and ask if I can publish their job ads there. Of course I can do that, provided that the mentioned sites are actually job boards and not corporate HR sites of an international recruitment agency or of a company where they post their own jobs only… (I’m talking experience here )

So last week I was asked to check on a Swedish site that was part of a specialised journal. I can’t help it but when I am doing research on this kind of job boards, there are two little “warning” signals that start blinking in my head:

1. The online version of the job section has poor visitor statistics but since it is more advantageous to sell print vacancies, the publishing house can’t be bothered to improve the situation. Apart from that most magazines offer a free online posting when you buy one in the press. Yeah, that’s how they appreciate the online recruitment industry…
2. The site is run by an internet-only job site or they have a co-operation with one of those. This means very often that your ad is posted on both sites and you pay the price of the “real” job board only.

Given that the site in question was hosted in Sweden, I took a wild guess and presumed that it could have something to do with StepStone and Jobbsverige. I was right.

I called the site to gain more insight into the nature of their partnership and finally spoke to the job advertisement sales manager, who was responsible for the press ads… There was actually no one who was exclusively taking care of online jobs. He tried (in vain) to sell me a print ad saying that this was the only way to post a job on their web site. Otherwise I would have to buy a StepStone posting (StepStone actually powers the site) AND a special package that would include their own and several other Swedish sites.

All this sounded a bit weird to me so I asked him to send me all this information by email. He replied that he had much work this afternoon, that he would go out for lunch now and that I should call him up after 3 p.m. in case he hadn’t sent anything through. I smiled mildly into my telephone and asked him if he was not interested in working with an HR communication agency.

At a quarter past two I received his email.

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