98% of job seekers are lazy. They’re happy to submit a templated résumé, a half-assed cover letter including the phrase, “I know I’m a good fit for the role of ____ because”, and cross their fingers.
And from a candidate side, that might even feel pretty good.
Yay, I *did* something, I took a step in getting that job, now I just need to wait for them to recognize my brilliance.
From an employer side, that’s an automatic delete.
Job seeker “work” with little actual effort is what I call The Monster Effect: tons of unqualified candidates blindly applying to your company and inevitably adding to your already-full inbox (You can substitute that for any of the massive job board sites: Indeed, SimplyHired, etc.).
I realized, these job board sites are for the JOB SEEKERS not for the employers. Yeah, you can sign up and post your job for MILLIONS of people to see. And yeah, there are some pretty OK resources on there, I guess.
But as a friend recently reminded me, “When was the last time you heard someone say ‘I found this awesome employee on Monster!’?” Answer: never.
There are four main issues I have with these sites:
- 1-click applications ensure that the candidate has not read your job description, and odds are, hasn’t read the job title either. My friend was hiring for a full-stack engineer and received an application from a tanning salon manager. I’ll bet you she wasn’t going through Code Academy during slow hours.
- Posting a general résumé to one of these sites for companies to “find you” does nothing but make the candidate feel good. I don’t know any companies that are scraping through résumés on a job board trying to find the perfect fit.
- These job board sites scrape information from other sites. I found this out the hard way. After posting a remote job on a site where good candidates actually do come in, I started receiving hundreds (literally overnight) of incredibly unqualified applications stating they found the job on WorkFromHomeMoms.com or IllBeYourVirtualAssistant.com or some other bs. I then had to find the contact info from each and every one of those and get my post taken down. Many informed me that they scraped from Indeed, which was in turn scraping from the site I had posted on. What a mess. Which leads me to my last point…
- The signal to noise ratio will make you go deaf. When your inbox is flooded with garbage, it takes a lot of effort to sort through and find those few gems that you’d want to hire.
As an employer, I’d skip right over these sites. Particularly if you’re in the tech/startup industry. Good candidates don’t tend to spend time on these sites and they’ll only give you a headache. If the adage is “You get what you pay for,” skip posting your job on the free or cheap sites, or risk getting free or cheap candidates.
