What is multi-posting and how it helps online recruiters

How recruitment teams post on job boards and place job advertisements has changed fundamentally. In today’s digital—online—world, you’ll find multiple tools and strategies to optimize nearly every aspect of hiring.

You can negotiate contracts one-to-one and work directly with job boards and ad platforms, manually involving the various vendors in each step of your job marketing effort to find the right applicant. And you can also subscribe to any one of the services and tools for distributing job advertisements, known as multi-posting, to further strategize your online recruiting efforts. With so much change and so many new options, it’s not that clear-cut to find what’s right for your company’s recruitment plans.

In this blog we’ll show the advantages and disadvantages of multi-posting tools.

Let’s face it: online recruiting, choosing which job boards to post on and which platforms to advertise with, is still done on the basis of factor’s you, the recruiter, do not control. Like choosing a job board because of it’s website traffic and popularity. Or making an educated guess because the website claims it’s visited by job seekers in your target group. Many recruiters know that there are vastly more websites to attract talent on, than just the 20-30 well-known ones—there are thousands of job marketing websites to choose from. 

But, there are only so many hours in the day. Recruitment teams hit a limit on resources to research and keep up with all the options available. This is where the question of “How do I attract the right talent online for each open position?” comes from.

In a word: yes! The right online recruitment tool, whether it’s a best-of-breed set of tools or an expansive Talent Acquisition System, will have a profound impact on your online recruitment strategy. Afterall, the tool needs to be filled with life and expertise. But not all multi-posting tools are made the same. So let’s take a look at how it works.

Multi-posters aim to reduce the amount of time spent posting job ads online by publishing an ad on many different websites at once. The result is less effort and time, while also generating as much reach and online visibility as possible. You can multi-post using an online platform like VONQs Job Marketing or using recruitment and HR systems with a multiposting function.

A good multi-posting solution only takes a few clicks to publish the job advertisements and can save you up to 30 minutes per job ad that goes online. The ads are no longer published manually or sent directly to agencies in long emails, which simplifies and shortens the process enormously.

Increasing online reach in order to attract more applicants to fill a position is probably the most common reason recruiters choose to use a multi-posting solution. Posting jobs on more websites in less time ultimately increases the chances of finding more applicants, faster. Right? Right, but it is important to carefully consider quality applicants vs. quantity of applicants.

While a lot of time is saved through multi-posting, how the websites are selected doesn’t change much from how you selected them before: educated guessing and popularity. Posting on more websites to increase your reach does not always mean better applicants or that the job ad is reaching the right job seekers. More applicants, but low quality means all the time you saved posting the job ads is put back into turning down unqualified applicants. It also means your hiring budget is spent posting on websites that don’t deliver your ideal candidate.

There’s no optimization of where you post the job ads. In order to do that, you need to know which websites are converting the best applicants—and not just from your job ads, but from the entire industry. You are still stuck in a Post-and-Pray strategy, selecting websites based on superficial metrics. 

In order to benefit from low prices, the company usually has to purchase a certain number of job postings or credits from an individual job board to lock-in attractive conditions. This can look great for your hiring budget. For example, if you post on CareerBuilder and LinkedIn for 50-60% of your job openings and the results are reliably successful, it can be a good deal. However, framework contracts often tempt recruiting teams to first use those websites for which they already booked a budget, without really thinking about the effectiveness of the website in bringing in ideal applicants.

To attract the right applicants across a myriad of vacancies, the right mix of websites isn’t one-size-fits-all. In other words, multi-posting alone on the same websites doesn’t 100% replace the old way. It only partially solves the problem. 

It is important to be clear about which goals you want to achieve with the job advertisement: reach and awareness? Strengthening of the employer brand? More, high quality applicants? Optimized cost-per-applicant?

No matter which multi-posting tool you choose, it is important to identify the sites that generate applicants matching your ideal candidate. Ideally, you are able to publish jobs exclusively on relevant sites, so you can be sure that your recruitment budget is used strategically and that you generate as many qualified applicants as quickly as possible.

Download the overview of the advantages and disadvantages of multiposting technologies and Job Marketing and share it with your team.