job board and their rankings

Posted this note on linkedin to a question from one of the member. Sharing this on my blog too.

Each job board has unique characteristics of candidates it attracts. I have only used India specific job boards. So the thoughts that I am sharing are India specific. However some of them would apply in general. Most of the boards in India complete on 1) number of resumes in the database and 2) number of visitors to the site. I have found that with growing count of resumes on the job board, we have to dig out a lot to get to the right candidate. Numbers of visitors are dependent on number of job postings. As mentioned by other members on this forum, recruiters rule most of the job boards. They keep posting same jobs again and again.

So really to me, job board ranking based on visitors do not make sense at all. While selecting job board for recruitment I have used the following approach.

Got multiple job boards to give a trial access, Looked at various skill sets, briefly spoke to candidates from those job boards. Based on the evaluation of ease of use, kind / quality of resumes and type of candidates that have submitted the resume I selected the job board.

I feel that job board ranking in my opinion do not make any sense as parameters used for ranking and parameters that determine the quality of candidates that we want do not have any correlation