With so many third-party job boards out there, many of which are free to post on, why would a recruiter decide to join a recruitment network and post their job orders on that organization’s job board instead?

The answer is easy: results.

If you’re a niche recruiter, oftentimes you don’t get the right caliber of candidate on generic job boards. If you join a specialized recruiting network or a split network that has other recruiters who work in your specialty, chances are you will have an easier time finding that “needle in the haystack” candidate, as opposed to a generic job board that caters to everyone from cashiers to forklift operators.

While most active candidates begin their search on job boards, recruiters have the advantage on finding passive candidates – those who are still employed and are not actively looking, and therefore, don’t have their resume posted on job boards. They may know a top candidate with the skills your client is looking for, and they often can post these candidates’ info within the network because it is confidential, whereas the candidate would not publicly post their information on a job board.

In addition, working with other recruiters’ candidates can help save you time and effort. Recruiters keep in close personal contact with their network of candidates, so if a candidate is referred to you by another recruiter, they’ve likely spoken to them to confirm they are still actively looking, their salary range, their relocation preferences, etc. Whereas if a candidate posted their resume to a job board several months ago, they might have already found a job and not taken down their information, and you would waste your time reaching out and trying to get in touch with them.

Rather than posting a job order to a generic job board and taking the “wait and see” approach to see if they get talent or bottom-of-the-barrel candidates, recruiters in a recruitment network post to the network’s internal and/or external job boards to get quick and effective results. Take, for example, this story from a relatively new member to NPAworldwide:

“One of our long standing clients, an Australian based manufacturer of specialty chemicals, asked us to find a Business Manager for their rapidly growing American market.  This role has responsibility for the d

evelopment and management of business growth in the US, South American, Canadian and UK markets.  The brief was to find someone with a strong business development orientation and entrepreneurial flair, who could develop and grow with the company.”

She placed advertisements on the LinkedIn job board and Monster, as well as listing it on NPAworldwide’s internal and external job boards. This was the first time her firm had used the NPA job board, and she said they were interested to see what the results would be.

“We were very pleased with the results from the NPAworldwide job board, which was very good in both number and quality, giving us a consistent stream of good candidates.  The response from Monster, while reasonably good in number, was short lived and disappointing in quality.  Response from LinkedIn was very poor in both number and quality.”

In addition, some USA-based NPAworldwide partners referred several very good quality candidates to her, she said. The short list she presented to the client consisted entirely of NPA-sourced candidates, except for one.  Ultimately, the successful candidate was from the NPA job board, with a candidate referred to the firm by another NPA partner coming a close second. 

“Also, because of the high level of NPA job board response, we had the added security of knowing that we had gained a good understanding of that specific candidate market.”

The results from the split placement network’s job board were higher in number and much more relevant than those of the other job boards. While third party job boards can assure you of applications – you don’t want to spend all your time deleting a bunch of irrelevant resumes. Time is money, and sometimes it is worth it to pay for quality over quantity.