Carl Bradford

If you’re primarily using the big job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo Hotjobs to conduct your job search, you’re missing many of the better job postings.

While the big job boards still offer many job postings, they have likely reached their peak in terms of sales and usage by both employers and recruiters.

Employers continue to value candidates with very specific job skills and they are finding they can find these candidates more easily with job boards that target a “community” of professionals with background, and experience and education within a specialty.

With the big job boards peaking there has been another type of job board that has increasing become more popular with employers and recruiters.  This type of job board is typically referred to as a niche job board.

There are literally hundreds and probably thousands of job boards on the Internet, most of which would fall into the niche category.  Finding the right job boards is where the difficulty lies for the job seeker.

Here are several additional reasons that I believe will continue to drive the increased use of niche job boards.

• Niche boards are more tightly focused: that is, they deliver targeted job seekers with specific credentials that close match a much narrower skill set.
• Financial considerations: niche job boards tend to be much less expensive for employer and recruiter ad postings.
• More specialized job board settings: a job board that deals with a narrower set of job skills can put more effort into building their job board so that it does a better job of classifying candidate skills.  This in turn will result in better and quicker matches for candidates and recruiters/employers.
• Social Networks: many employers are beginning to use popular social media sites for recruiting and several of these sites have begun to incorporate job matching within their sites.  The best example would be LinkedIn.
• Ability to focus on hard to fill positions: this is related to reason number one above, but deserves its own place on the list. Harder to fill positions result from either a large demand and low supply of a specific skill or perhaps a new skill that is evolving quickly, but for which few people have had the opportunity to become qualified.  Employers are much more likely to find these critical job skills in a specialized job board setting.
• Job board aggregators: sites like Indeed.com and simplyhired.com collect thousands of jobs from all over the internet and bring them together in one place.  Job seekers, employers and recruiters alike seem to gravitate to this “one stop shop” to conduct their recruiting activities.

That’s one reason we took the time to compile our 500+ job website ebook which is available in our members area.  While many of these sites will be invaluable to your job search, finding them can often be a bit elusive.  Go to our  Members Section for direct links to these 500+ Job Sites and see how you can benefit from these niche job boards.