From the Mighty Collection

Job Aggregators vs. Job Posting Sites: Differences Explained in Laymen’s Terms

While the line between job posting sites and job aggregators is blurring, recruiters that understand the difference between the two types of platforms can get more candidates with less work.

A job posting site is where thousands of job postings are published and available for jobseekers to search. The jobseekers often end up on this type of job site because of their interest, expertise, or intent. In other words, most job posting sites are niche in some fashion. For instance, CoolWorks is a job posting site that connects jobseekers with adventurous temporary work gigs in cool places. Super niche!

Job aggregators pull job postings from different places around the Internet, including career sites, employer job listings, and other job posting sites. The primary job aggregators — Google Jobs, Indeed, and LinkedIn — will often republish your job posting if their spiders, bots, and related tech crawlers find your posting. The goal of these job aggregators and their predecessors (RIP Simply Hired) is to list every available job in the world on their site.

In this way, job aggregators are competing with the job posting sites for the acquisition of the potential applicant. However, more focused job sites often provide more value and a more relevant experience to the jobseeker. For example, Dice can attract more developers and engineers because of their valuable professional content and relevant community members.

When it comes to job posting sites:

1. Remember that these sites are often niche, so researching which ones best suit your open position is essential. Look for sites that cater to your company’s industry and the job’s vertical.
2. Knowing where candidates in your industry “hang out” online is a good idea since often blogs and industry news sites, like TechCrunch for example, have industry-specific job posting sites.
3. Learn to determine the value of a niche job posting site by researching how many ‘interviewable’ candidates it supplies, evaluating its traffic, and considering its pricing model (read more about the art of evaluating job posting sites).

When it comes to job aggregators:

1. Thanks to the high level of traffic they garner and the user information they collect, these sites can bring you suitable candidates across countless verticals and industries.
2. Even if you don’t pay job aggregators, they’ll still help with your job posting’s SEO because they’ll link back to your original job post on your career site (if you included this info). In other words, you can mostly ignore them, and they’ll still help you find candidates.
3. Use aggregators to your advantage by viewing your competitor’s job posts. Type in your job title and location and compare your job ad to those that appear at the top of the search list. Are they more enticing than yours? What can you pull from those postings to make your ad perform better?

More bang for your buck: aggregators or job posting sites

But what’s the best choice for recruiters who are working with limited budgets? If you have to choose, spending your money posting to smaller niche boards is the way to go since you’ll get more bang for your buck on those than on the larger, more general job boards. Why are niche boards a better value? Flat rate postings on the big job boards will likely yield less high-quality candidates than posting to smaller industry-specific sites. Additionally, since the job aggregators will likely index the jobs on the small sites over time, your job ad will also get exposure on that front.

At the end of the day, it’s not about choosing between a job posting site and a job aggregator since, more than ever, these types of sites work together to drive relevant traffic to your opportunity. If you post to the high-ranking niche sites, your posting will rank higher on the aggregators, while the top job aggregators will drive more traffic to the original job posting.

This sponsored post was originally published on the MightyRecruiter Blog.