We have used online job boards for over a decade – you go to one of them, put a few keywords that you feel describe the position you might want to pursue, or the candidate you are looking for, click search….and….nothing. Well, not exactly nothing – the vast majority of the “matches” that you get are only remotely close to what you might want, and you know that finding that right position or that right candidate is like finding a needle in the haystack.

Candidates and hiring companies looking to find each other often have the inclination to resort to one of the major job boards to find the right position or candidate – where else can one find what he/she is looking for….job boards are extremely easy to use, and contain a massive database of candidates and positions just waiting for you. Well, at least that’s what job boards try to make us think.

In reality, however, job boards are nothing more than messy storage areas, very much like my own garage space, where on the surface it looks full of valuables, but when you start looking a bit closer you find out that most of its contents are basically of little or no value to you. Finding the right position or candidate out of massive amount of information primarily indexed by keywords is very much like trying to find a book you might want to read based on the words it contains…

Looking for the right position or the right candidate is a complex process that requires much more than a keyword search. It involves areas of interest, culture, personality, experience, skills and many other factors. In fact, in many fields it is almost impossible to find the right position or candidate simply by means of searching for keywords, and people that attempt to do so generally only waste their time.

With job boards having only up to a 3% success rate of filling positions, what still pushes hiring companies and candidates to use job boards – I believe that this comes from three main reasons – massive amount of marketing exercised by job boards to convince us all that they can deliver upon their promise, lack of decent alternatives, and finally a failure, particularly of hiring companies, to measure and realize the effectiveness of these services.

Job boards have been with us for many years, but it’s time for better suited recruiting means to emerge and accommodate the complexities and challenges of the hiring process. We need to let job boards finally “rest in peace” and be left for the pages of history.


Gil Shabat is the co-founder of Scopings, a new online recruiting service that puts heavy weight on the needs of employed professionals looking to advance their careers. You can visit the Scopings website under www.scopings.com.