There was a day when employers advertised job openings by publishing ads in the newspaper. That was before the internet. Back then, you had to apply for jobs in-person. Times certainly have changed. In the internet era, it is all about the online job board. People looking for work post their resumes on job boards and then scour-posted ads in search of jobs they can apply for.
Did you know that not all job boards are equal? For example, some job boards are populated exclusively by employer-created posts. Others accept original posts along with curated content. Still, others don’t take original posts at all. All their content is curated.
Aside from how job boards get their posts, there are five types of job boards that make up the lion’s share here in the U.S. These are:
1. Generic Nationwide Job Boards
First up are generic job boards that list virtually every kind of job imaginable. They accept posts from employers nationwide, dividing those posts by job type, geographic location, and a plethora of other filtering categories. You can spend hours browsing through just one category.
The owners of these massively large job boards make their money on volume. They are not necessarily concerned with the quality of the posts – or the content for that matter. What they want are numbers. The more jobs posted, the more money they make.
2. Location-Based Job Boards
Next up are job boards that focus on a specific geographic location. It might be a state in one case and a larger, multi-state region in another. Location-based job boards can also be as targeted as a local town or county. The smaller the geographic location, the fewer in number its job posts will be.
3. Industry-Specific Job Boards
The largest single group of job boards are those focused on a specific industry. Pharma Diversity is a good example. Their main thrusts are pharmaceutical jobs and the biotech industries. From time to time there may be a post more suited to general healthcare, but by and large, everything on their site in some way pertains to either pharmaceutical or biotech jobs.
The main advantage of this model is keeping things at a reasonable scale. Generic, nationwide job boards can list hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is a lot of data to wade through. Industry-specific boards offer far fewer jobs. This keeps data volume down and speeds up searching.
4. In-House Job Boards
There are some companies big enough to constitute their own employment communities. They already have tens of thousands of people on the payroll. Some of them offer in-house job boards in addition to their public boards. Why go in-house? Because sometimes it is better to fill an open position from within. An in-house job board lets them keep those jobs separate from the ones the general public will see.
5. Social Job Board
Last on the list is the social job board. LinkedIn is a perfect example. LinkedIn isn’t technically a job board in its original iteration, but it has evolved to include thousands of job listings. The thing that sets it apart is the fact that LinkedIn is a social media site for business professionals. You get all the benefits of social media with the added potential of posting or looking for a job.
Different types of job boards accomplish different things. There is nothing wrong with that. With so many open jobs and applicants waiting to be matched, job board owners do their best to make sure everyone involved is accommodated.