The HeadHunter: CareerBuilder Sucks
January 16, 2007 4:12 amNick Corcodilos of Ask the Headhunter has published his newsletter from last week which discusses why using a site like CareerBuilder is a bad idea.
He gives three reasons, here are a few more of mine.
- Signal to Noise Ratio: Look at the number of resumes on sites like CareerBuilder, then look at the number of jobs. There’s a huge difference. On top of that, there are people who will spam job postings with their resume hoping somebody bites, whether or not they’re qualified. This makes it miserable for job-posters, and a lot less likely that they’ll get anyone useful. For the same reason, the search function is useless to them, so don’t hope someone will find you through it.
- Most Postings Aren’t for Specific Openings: Lots of companies with a high churn rate will keep a continuous posting up on a website to keep a long pipeline of incoming candidates for the even longer pipeline of people leaving. Do you really want to work for the company that everyone else is quitting?
- Even the Real Postings Are Bad: If CareerBuilder is so bad, what kind of companies are using it? Usually, the postings to a site like CareerBuilder that are genuine are made by smaller organizations whose HR person doesn’t have the knowledge, network, or wherewithal to use more effective methods. Again, is this the company you want to be working for?
For active job searchers, I highly recommend subscribing to the Ask The Headhunter newsletter, and although I never read the book, if it’s similar to the webpage, which I assume it is, it could also be a wise buy. While there are those who disagree, I think one of the most important things about a job search is to have a strategy, regardless of what that strategy is.
Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Matching Mechanisms, Strategy
3 Responses to “The HeadHunter: CareerBuilder Sucks”
If CareerBuilder is so bad, then why do the fortune 1000 companies continue to increase their spend with them? Why have they out grown YOY over any of their competitors. If so many companies thought that online sites sucked, then why are more and more companies utilizing them? I will be the first to admit that job postings can attract unqualified candidates. That is why it is the job boards responsibility to have a user friendly backend of the site that will help recruiters eliminate unqualified candidates quickly.
Thanks for using an actual name, ‘me.’
The fact that Fortune 1000 companies continue to spend with CareerBuilder or that its outgrowing its competitors are unrelated metrics to whether it’s good for job seekers. A better metric is the one The Headhunter posts, the number of jobs that companies who use CareerBuilder fill through it - 2%, or 2 out of every hundred. If I were a job seeker, regardless of how much a company spends on CareerBuilder, or how well it does relative to other sites, I’d still want to be using the method through which 98% of jobs are filled.
On another level, though, the fact that companies are using online sites doesn’t prove that they don’t suck - if anything, it’s further proof that Human Resources departments suck. Just because they’re spending money, doesn’t mean they’re spending it smart (usually, you can call something a stupid idea because they are spending money on it). They’ll use an online site to cut costs o make it look like they’re doing more, whether or not they can actually show results for it.
From an Information Econonerd perspective, a site like CareerBuilder tries to solve the underlying matching problem but ends up exacerbating the asymmetrical information problems.
If you read the Ask The Headhunter article I linked to, and look at his site, you realize that a job search based on searching for postings is already off the mark - he has a philosophical problem with the way CareerBuilder and similar sites work (as well as most of the HR profession), not with CareerBuilder specifically. The only reason they ended up the target was because an idiot in their development department didn’t do his due diligence when looking for cross-promotional opportunities.
Dave,
You’ve hit an important nail on the head, and most people really don’t get this. My compliments for explaining it so well.
The financial success of a company like CareerBuilder has little if anything to do with how good its services are. The online job board industry is a freak of economics. I’ve talked with investment managers and IT industry analysts - and they don’t get it. Why? Because they make the reasonable assumption that only companies that produce good products perform well financially and on the stock market.
But this industry is an anomaly. There is zero connection between how much money HR departments spend on job postings or to access resume data bases, and how well these services work. Freaky, eh? Not really. When you drill down, what you find is that HR departments are not measured on how effectively they hire, but on how many “applicants” they put through their system. Ironically, the tiny numbers of hires that come from the job boards actually makes it easy for HR to bury the stats. As long as people are hired, who cares where they come from? (Another dirty industry secret: studies show that anywhere between 40-70% of jobs are found and filled through personal contacts. The huge range is of no concern because any number in that range is so much larger than the success rates of the boards that, well, who cares?)
So the point: HR continues to spend inordinate dollars on CareerBuilder et al. because nobody ever got fired for buying IBM
That’s the mentality we’re talking about. Now, there are some good HR people out there who actually recruit. But most are glad to keep paying for the benefit of being able to daily skim scum off the top of the barrel.
Here is the compelling proof that HR is bamboozling the board of directors. HR will pay the job boards $200 for 5,000 resumes, with the frequent result that none are hired. HR will pay a headhunter $30,000 for 3 candidates, one of whom will be hired. Reconcile that.
There are no hires in a haystack. I’m glad you came up in my Google Alerts. Cheers.
Care to comment?