Employers, Online Job Hunters Turn to Niche Web Postings

Jump to Joyce Bosc quote | PDF format | Original article at The Wall Street Journal

By Sarah E. Needleman
The Wall Street Journal | May 15, 2007

Last month Katherine Rempel landed a job she found online by perusing only ads posted on Web sites related to her field, such as MarketingSherpa.com.

Unlike the last time she searched for work in 2004, the marketing professional says she didn't visit any of the big job boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com. "I learned that you are a lot more apt to find companies that are serious about hiring and know exactly what they want at the niche sites," says Ms. Rempel, now a manager at iWin Inc., an online entertainment company in San Francisco.

Job seekers who limit their searches to traditional online hotspots may be missing out on the best career opportunities, as more employers are advertising openings on Web sites that cater to specific career fields and geographic locations. They say these so-called niche sites attract better-matching candidates than sites that list positions in a wide range of career fields and ZIP codes.

"There are a lot of jobs that we only post to niche boards," says Jeff Hunter, a senior human-resources director at Electronic Arts Inc., the world's largest videogame publisher. These include some of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company's most common positions, such as software engineer and game designer, he says. "We have to go to where those people hang out, and they tend to hang out at sites like Gamasutra."

Mr. Hunter and other recruiting professionals who use this kind of targeted recruiting strategy are helping to boost traffic in the niche category at a faster rate than the big boards.

Case in point: GovernmentJobs.com, which advertises only public-sector jobs, attracted 565,000 unique visitors in February 2007, 42% more than during the same month in 2006, according to Media Metrics, a division of Reston, Va.-based research firm comScore Inc. Also during this time, LocalCareers.com, which lists job ads by state, more than doubled its unique visitors to 290,000. By contrast, Monster saw a 20% decline in traffic for the same months, lowering its unique visitors to a little over six million, the research firm shows.

Niche job sites also are growing in volume. Boxwood Technology Inc., a provider of online job-posting technology, expanded its client base of trade groups tenfold in the past five years to more than 500, says Christine Smith, president of the Herndon, Va.-based firm.

The improving economy appears to have sparked some of these changes. "More recruiters are after same type of candidate, and discriminating job seekers understand this," says Nancy Moran, vice president of staffing at CCN Inc., an information-technology recruiting firm. "They will put their resume on a niche job board to attract fewer, but more targeted recruiters."

Corporate hiring managers also say they're using niche job sites more because the big boards produce too many unqualified applicants. "We get a higher volume of candidates from CareerBuilder than the niche sites, but I have to weed out a lot," says Daphne Batts, vice president of human resources at Bankrate Inc., an online publisher of financial information in North Palm Beach, Fla. "We tend to get a lot of hopeful career changers." Meanwhile, Ms. Batts says most applicants who come through niche sites have the experience she's seeking.

"If you put the right jobs on the right niche board, you can get a better return on your investment than broadcasting your jobs to the big, general boards," says Ray Schreyer, manager of Internet recruiting at International Business Machines Corp. "If I place an ad on SIOP.org, all the industrial psychologists in the U.S. will know IBM is looking for them," he says.

Hiring managers say they're also using more geographic-specific job sites to avoid expenses associated with recruiting faraway candidates. Among them is Karen Scott, a marketing director at software provider CorasWorks Corp. in Reston, Va. In 2006, she says she started posting job ads in the Washington, D.C., section on Craigslist.com. "We were surprised by the number of resumes and quality of candidates we got," she says.

For job seekers, the trend means that applying for positions through niche sites may give them an automatic edge in the eyes of some hiring managers. "It definitely lends credibility to their experience and background," says Mauro Scappa, director of placement services at Media Barn Inc., a staffing agency and creative studio in Reston, Va.

“If I get a resume from someone who used PotomacTechwire.com, then I know for sure they know the federal-government community,” adds Joyce Bosc, president and chief executive officer of Boscobel Marketing Communications Inc., a boutique public-relations and branding firm in Silver Spring, Md., that specializes in the public sector.

Another benefit niche sites provide job seekers is the ability to safely search for a new employer while at work, says Peter Weddle, publisher of Weddle's, a newsletter about online recruiting. This is because many provide industry news and career advice in addition to job ads, he explains.

Jim Wilson, a 45-year-old job seeker in Longmont, Colo., says niche job sites take less time to search than general job boards. When he enters the keywords "marketing" and "executive" on Monster.com in its marketing section, he says entry- and mid-level jobs in advertising and sales frequently show up. "You have to pick through hundreds of positions before you can find the type of job you're looking for," says Mr. Wilson, who was laid off in late 2005 when the company he worked for as marketing director went out of business.

Many niche job sites provide search categories that help job seekers refine their results. When Dennis Freeman was job hunting last summer, he says he went to TaxTalent.com and selected "US corporate generalist" from a menu of tax specialties to omit results for positions in areas such as technology and financial planning. Within two weeks, Mr. Freeman, 60, landed the job of tax-engagement manager in San Francisco at Jefferson Wells International Inc., a provider of internal auditing, accounting and finance, tax and technology services.

Job seekers also can narrow their searches by using Web sites that advertise jobs only in certain locations. Bryan Abramson of Baltimore, Md., says used this strategy in late 2005 following a layoff. "I didn't look nationally because I wasn't willing to move far," says the 31-year-old, who is married and has two kids. "We were stuck in a lease." After about five months of searching sites such as mdnonprofit.org, the online home of the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations, he says he landed his current job of development director at Independence Now, a nonprofit provider of services for the disabled in Riverdale, Md.

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