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Online employment advertising platforms, also known as job boards, have more than come of age. Indeed, online recruitment strategies are diversifying as hiring managers look for an edge in the marketplace.

This evolution has birthed new models such as industry-specific job boards, targeted demographic job boards, and even social media schemes. But are today’s online venues effectively meeting the needs of employers and job seekers? Research suggests the answer is “no.”

In fact, an April 2008 survey from The Adler Group reveals locating qualified candidates for key positions is a challenge that’s growing worse instead of better.

Despite the cadre of recruiting tools and technologies that have been introduced to help employers, Adler revealed, a whopping 89 percent of survey respondents said hiring top talent is getting increasingly difficult. Moreover, 63 percent of survey respondents felt the quantity and quality of candidates from major job boards is dropping.

Reexamining today’s recruiting models
Could it be time for a new paradigm for matching job seekers with employers? Put another way, is the online recruitment industry ripe for disruption? Here’s what we do know: There are a handful of popular online job board business models – and there are drastic differences between them. We also know that new models are emerging that offer different recruiting technologies and techniques. The latter could be the key to greater hiring effectiveness in a more mature online recruiting world.

“Job boards are an integral piece of the recruitment puzzle as job seekers are more computer savvy than ever – but not all job boards are the same,” says Roberta Chinksy Matuson, president of Brookline, Mass.-based Human Resource Solutions. “HR Executives would be better served if they focused on results and not the cost of each click.”

It’s admittedly difficult to compare cost-per-click (CPC) among the most popular online job board models – free boards, flat fee listing boards, and boards that charge only if you open a resume – because CPC is only part of the pricing equation. To be sure, there are benefits and drawbacks to each model. With literally millions of resumes posted online it pays dividends to understand the pros and cons of the various models better before you begin your next search.

Do you really get what you pay for?
Free job boards, where employers and job seekers freely exchange information with the keyboard as the only middleman, have gained momentum because the price is right. Doostang.com, TheJobSpider.com and LuckyDogJobs.com are among the better-known freebies online today.

But Tom Ruff, CEO of Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based recruiting firm Tom Ruff Company, says he hasn’t had much luck on the free boards. Spam postings often find their way on to free online job boards, but that’s not the only drawback he’s discovered.

“Sometimes free online recruiting sites appear to be free, but if you want the bells and whistles there are fees hidden into the back end,” says Ruff, who is also author of “How to Break Into Pharmaceutical Sales.” “We have tried some of the traditional free models, but we haven’t found any success. We stopped using them and moved to paid models.”

If time is money then do flat fee sites work?
Flat fee sites are another option. Craigslist, and online classified sites like it, once disrupted the recruiting model. Study after study emerged about print newspaper classified ads drying up as people went online to let their fingers do the searching. Craigslist, for one, charges $75 to post per listing. Others charge much more.

One of advantages of flat fee sites is the paid aspect keeps the spammers off the boards, but that may not be enough to keep recruiters coming back. Flat fee sites tend not to draw large volumes of executive level candidates, and aren’t typically as user-friendly as some of the more traditional job boards, according to Shawn Desgrosellier, Chief Leadership Officer at Kay/Bassman International, an executive search and recruitment firm in Plano, Texas.

“You’ve got to invest some time to use sites like Craigslist because the way the site is organized and the way the layout is structured isn’t straightforward,” Desgrosellier says. “If you’ve got a full-time online recruiting team, it can produce some good results but otherwise it’s not the best use of time.”

Avoiding the flood of irrelevant responses
When the Internet was young, the likes of Monster.com turned the way people hunted for jobs – and the way employers hunted for candidates – on its head. The business model was simple: a two-sided network consisting of employers and job seekers. The recruiters pay; the candidates don’t. What’s more, recruiters pay to be part of the network, and also pay to view searchable candidate resumes.

Since Monster pioneered the space, sites like CareerBuilder.com and HotJobs.com have rallied the troops to collectively dominate the online recruitment industry. Variations of the theme have sprung up, including niche job boards like Dice.com and TechCrunch. The advantage of posting a job opening on one of these sites is the abundance of job seekers willing to send their resumes directly to the recruiter. But this blessing can quickly become a curse.

“Many times, the resumes you receive are preloaded resumes from active job seekers. When a certain search criteria is loaded into the system, that resume is automatically sent to you,” Desgrosellier says. “It requires no action on behalf of the job seeker. That can leave you flooded with applicants that may or may not be a suitable match.”

Tapping into a real-time paradigm
An emerging model, and one that has caught media attention for being disruptive, is real-time matching from RealMatch.com. RealMatch offers technology that replaces keyword searching with a profile-matching paradigm that uses proprietary algorithms to match candidates with recruiters.

RealMatch doesn’t charge recruiters or candidates to join the network, and offers real-time search results that grade, filter and rank candidates according to how well their qualifications meet the employer’s requirements. This real-time, non-keyword based approach overcomes the challenge of e-mail boxes that run over storage quotas in the face of hundreds of resume attachments. For employers, RealMatch.com only charges to view the matches. For job seekers, candidates can spend more time updating their resume and less time responding to job listings.

“There are certainly benefits to real-time matching methods since recruiting is about the quality and not the quantity of candidates,” Matuson says. “ Job boards that help you reduce time spent combing through unqualified candidates are certainly a plus!”

A frustration-ending disruption
The sheer volume of resumes posted online every day make it difficult for employees to stand out in the e-paper crowd and make it equally as difficult for employers to find the right candidate in the electronic haystack. With candidates and recruiters frustrated by the limitations and challenges that earmark the current options, real-time candidate matching seems poised to become the next major online recruiting disruption.

Employment marketplaces like RealMatch.com that offer sophisticated matching technology in real-time solve a real problem. The pay-per-performance model RealMatch offers is more in line with the Google approach to advertising than the traditional offline models that leave recruiters waiting by the computer hoping someone will respond – and not just someone but the most relevant candidates.

“Real-time profile-matching paradigms are set to turn the online recruitment industry on its head,” says Rafael Cosentino, Vice President of Business Development for RealMatch. “RealMatch.com takes the risk out of online recruitment for hiring managers and job seekers. With almost 2 million job matches so far, it’s clear that the industry is ripe for disruptive technology that streamlines recruiting in an ultracompetitive job market.”

Visit RealMatch today for more information.