Corporate Websites Out of Sync
Despite all the criticism of job boards, it seems that many employers favor them even above their own websites. While we haven’t done a rigorous review of the posting patterns of employers on the boards, there’s ample anecdotal evidence. For instance, in looking at the 20 most recent listings for software programmers posted this morning on Craigslist San Francisco and Monster (10 from each site) we found that 13 (65%) listings were not found on the corporate website. The remaining 7 (35%) were found on the corporate website, but the listings aren’t always identical. We found a few examples of the job board listing including critical information that was omitted from the version on the corporate website – one corporate website version neglected to mention that a position was for the graveyard shift.
We’re not sure why companies don’t keep their listings in sync with what they post to job boards, but most of them must not see a positive enough return on the time investment it takes to keep the corporate website up to date. Maybe they don’t think people visit the jobs section of their site. Maybe it’s just too difficult to make changes.
It raises a couple other questions for us, too:
- Why haven’t the ATS companies been more successful here? Many good companies sell great ATS products.
- How credible is it that the job aggregators can exist without the cooperation of the major job boards? Crawling corporate websites as the primary source of content seems like a flawed back-up plan if companies don’t start keeping their corporate websites up to date. And even if rising traffic from job aggregators gives employers more incentive to post open positions to their corporate websites, what confidence should job seekers have that stale listings have been taken down?