Looking for Temporary Staff via Job Boards – biggest challenges in 2022

Are you a recruiter or a hiring manager looking for temporary staff from Poland, Romania and other countries? You use job boards and you start to question whether they’re the right place to look for temps? In today’s blogpost we are going to talk about the biggest problems with job boards and why they mostly benefit large agencies with big marketing budgets.

What are 3 most common problems with job boards when recruiting temporary employees?

• Lack of Flexibility 

This is probably the biggest problem with most of job boards. In the temporary staff market people need to be hired fast. Clients many times mention that they need 7 new people within 72h and as an agency you either place those people or someone else will. Its ok if you have some people with matching profiles in your database (for example rejected for other jobs), but many times you need to start searching people from scratch. Even if you have a database, it takes time to call all people and we recruiters wages go up with inflation every year. 

The minimum wage for a recruiter (inc. all benefits, taxes etc.) is around 18-20 eur/h in the Netherlands/Germany/Belgium. Calling 100 people is like all day for for 2 people. Assuming 20 eur/h * 16h (2 people 8h/day) = 320 EUR of cost and there is no guarantee people can start working with 72h. Most likely there will be someone starting within 72h just by the law of probability, but still 320 EUR to place 1 person is not the best CPH (cost per hire).

Considering all these facts, you just go to a job board anyway, you pay 100-200 EUR for a job post and you wait for candidates. Also, since you need them urgently, you will most likely pay for various add-ons like highlighting offer, putting it on the very top etc. You only have 72h to place 7 people so you will spend that extra 50 EUR anyway so be highlighter like offers below.

When your people need to travel to a specific location to work (eg. Amsterdam) you prefer people from the surrounding areas. When you post job offer on a job board, you have no idea where people are located at the time of application. Job boards advertise job offers all over a specific country (Poland) or region (EU). You call each of candidates to learn where they currently are, which again increases the cost of recruiting and it’s almost impossible to get someone from Poland or Romania to get to Amsterdam within 72h from making a call. There are some people desperate for a good job, but the average time to get someone form Poland or Romania to the Netherlands is around 1 week. 

What happens if customer changes his mind or someone else placed those people? You are basically stuck with a 30-day job posting you already spent the money on. Good thing is if you have similar job offers you can offer to those people applying over the course of a month. If not, well, you just wanted 200 EUR and disappointed your client.

Irrelevant Application

You have to understand how job boards market in order to understand why this points is relevant. Basically job boards invest in SEO, Google, Facebook campaigns to generate as much traffic as possible and then try to sell the same traffic to as many agencies as possible. That’s their entire business model. Eg. Budget for advertising is 50k EUR they spend a month and they need to generate at least 50k in sold job offers to break even (excl. labor cost etc.), therefore job boards business model makes sense only when they sell traffic worth 50k EUR to agencies that spend at least 100k EUR for job offers. The more offers they sell, the less applications you receive. That’s how this business model works.

What does it mean for you? If you do not pay a lot for your job offers, you will not receive a lot of applications, because there are other big agencies willing to promote their offers to get as much traffic as possible. As a result, if you do not highlight your offers, job applicants will apply to 5-7 other “Production Worker” positions before they even see your position. 

The result is harsh, you either get to hire people bigger agencies rejected or did not have time to call before you. 

Lack of pre-screening

This is another problem with job boards. Most people just provide with CV, email address and phone number. That’s all we know about the candidate. As much as it is a pretty standard process for most of the market, in our industry, most agencies do not require a detailed resume, but rather information on when someone can start the job, if the candidate speaks a foreign language and if there is a valid driving license. Most people in the temp staffing market do not regularly update their resumes. People change jobs at a higher rate than in other industries so if we see “Amsterdam” in resume, it does not mean someone lives there.

What problem does it cause? If recruiters have 100 applicants to call, they do not know who should they call in the first place. Even if someone’s resume looks good, we do not know if that person is available today or in 3-4 weeks. That means your recruiters have to call all 100 people to understand who would be the best candidate, which again increases cost of hiring.

Below is a screenshot from a major polish job board, that’s all information they require. Its a recruiter’s job to learn more about the candidate.

Solution

What is the solution? It depends on the agency and vacancies that are open. If your agency is mostly into agro and logistic jobs, your solutions would be different than when you are dealing with electricians and plumbers.

Solutions also depend on your marketing / advertising budget. If you have almost unlimited budget, you can overpay for regular solutions and beat competitors, but if you are on a small budget, you have to become much more creative. 

At Maryd Consulting we have solutions for all type of agencies, which can be testes for free. 

We also have a 14-day money back guarantee program so why not to talk?

https://calendly.com/maryd-consulting/ – just book an intro call to discuss your situation.

If you want to have a free audit of your services, feel free to reach out to us at mateusz@marydconsulting.eu and we can see what solutions would be the best for you.