By Alexander Chukovski, CEO Crypto-Careers.com
Do you want to differentiate yourself as a job board in the next 1-2 years? Here is what you can do.
In the last month, I have had discussions with three job boards that lost clients because of an increase in unqualified applicants. These were European-based job boards; some charge north of €600 per job posting!
The reasons applicants were considered unqualified were not unusual: people apply for jobs without local language skills or don’t have necessary work permits. A lack of local language competency is a massive problem in Europe, where many jobs still require a good command of a language other than English.
What’s unusual now is the amount of unqualified applicants. It’s huge and growing even larger!
For employers and job boards alike, this is a new phenomenon. In prior years, companies were happy when they got any applications. Now, they get too many, and most of them are crap.
I think that there are several factors that drive this:
• Recent layoffs increasing the demand for jobs
• The stagnating labor market in Europe due to economic uncertainty
• An increase of applications from non-European countries
• The gap between employer demand and labor supply concerning skills and education
• Immigration
• Mass applications driven by AI-based application automation tools
So, if you want to continue charging these sweet prices for a job posting, you must do something.
Start thinking about pre-qualifying applicants. This is going to be a massive thing in the next few years.
I already see some employment criteria becoming important for job boards in the EU:
• Work permits
• Required languages
• Residency
• Degrees and certificates
• Salary expectation
Concretely, the pre-application process can be broken down into two steps:
Step 1: Identify services that can handle the verification requirements. Plenty of external services can be used for this (like CV Wallet) or you can build custom services yourself.
Step 2: Decide how to embed these services in the application flow. As a job board, there are two ways you can handle an application:
- you host the application form OR
- you redirect the applicant to the employer's ATS.
If you host the application process, you can integrate verification services as part of the application flow and only send the prequalified applications to the customer.
If you are not hosting the application, you can argue that the ATS will handle this process. This is clearly true, but the explanation will only sit well with some clients. Moreover, you are giving up control, and should something go wrong, you will likely be the one who gets the blame.
So, you have two options:
- Look for an ATS integration so that you can host the apply and integrate verification services. Although the tools on the market could be better, some ATS platforms are user-friendly;
- Apply some form of pre-qualification questionnaire before the user is redirected.
The latter approach is straightforward and involves modern technology. Simply send the job description to GPT4 and ask it to generate 3-5 questions based on the job’s critical specifications – salary expectation, skills, education, language, and experience.
Last but not least, it is now more essential than ever to build analytics tools that can capture feedback on your traffic channels and processes so you can rotate traffic sources between clients.
In summary, if you want to maintain your job board’s competitive edge and keep charging high fees, you should focus on pre-qualifying candidates, a crucial trend in the coming years. This can be achieved by owning the application process through integrating verification services within your platform or through the use of qualifying questions before redirecting candidates to employers' systems.