This month, we are taking a cold, hard look at job board pricing models. We talk a lot about job boards as we’re unashamedly obsessed with the data behind getting job board posting right – right place, right time, right content. So much so that we devoted a huge chunk of our Candidate Attraction Playbook to it.
Given pricing models is a topic that crops up again and again in conversations and on LinkedIn posts, we felt it deserved a deep dive of its own. Here we journey back in time to the origins of the job board to discover where these pricing models originated, look at the 5 basic models that exist today, and take an expert punt at what we might be seeing from job boards across the globe in the near and distant future.
Job boards aren’t going anywhere
Let’s get this out of the way first, shall we? Love them or hate them, they remain an integral part of the recruitment advertising landscape. Prices may have increased pretty much across the board but, as Wave data shows, the majority of recruiters are still using them as a significant part of their candidate attraction strategy – we’ve found that a huge 85% of all jobs are posted to job boards. The fact remains that no other platform can offer the reach that job boards do, whether that’s a goldmine of specialist candidates on smaller, niche job boards, or a wide reach from the bigger, more generalist job boards. For now, at least, job boards are here to stay.
The bare bones of job boards haven’t changed that much in 30 years. The concept is still essentially the same – recruiters and employers pay job boards to advertise their jobs and the job boards try to ensure that those jobs are matched to relevant candidates. What has changed is the way in which you pay to advertise your jobs. There are 5 different pricing models on the market (or in the works) and we’ll dissect each.
1. Duration-based
Based on paying for your job ad to be live on a job board for a set period of time (often 30 days), this is the model traditionally used in the UK. Its origins are the pre-digital job advertising method – print. Before the internet, the most popular form of advertising jobs was in the classifieds section of newspapers. You’d pay for your advert to feature on the one day that jobs were advertised, which differed from paper to paper but was often a Sunday. When the internet became more accessible and job boards came along, they took the newspaper classifieds and put them online.
The benefit of an online listing is that they suddenly became filterable and therefore far more easily searchable – rather than flipping newspaper pages, scanning through dozens of irrelevant job ads, you could do a keyword search and filter according to your specifications. Online job board advertising was also significantly cheaper than print. The main difference between the duration-based pricing model and others is that, whatever happened as a result of that ad – whether it was seen or responded to, whether the quality of responses were good or bad, whether you ended up placing anybody or not – the price remained the same.
2. Cost per click
Due to some of the frustrations with the way the duration-based model operated, a new form of online job advertising platform emerged – and with it, a new pricing model. Aggregators, which scrape job boards and recruitment and career websites and list them on a single site, operate on a cost per click (CPC) model. Indeed wasn’t the first to adopt CPC but certainly popularised it. CPC works not by charging a set amount for a set time on its site but per click. When a candidate clicks a button on the job advert, often ‘apply’, that’s the click and it’s at that point that you pay. Sometimes a candidate is sent through to an application page on the job board and sometimes onto the recruitment agency’s or employer’s own application page.
The downside of CPC is that it can be harder to manage budgets (although you can put a cap on how much you’re willing to spend and the ad will be expired when it reaches that point) but you’re also not paying for an ad that might never get any engagement, which is the risk with duration-based models. Of course, a click isn’t an application and, on an upcoming Talent Matters podcast, College Recruiter’s Steven Rothberg revealed that roughly 5% of all clicks convert into an application.
3. Cost per application
In an attempt to combat the issue of wasted clicks and find a more cost-effective way, Indeed tried to roll out a cost per application (CPA) model in 2023. It switched all clients over from CPS to CPA – and the majority were not happy. The idea was that if you rejected an application you didn’t have to pay for it but you only had a limited time to do do so, made even harder if you were receiving hundreds of applications. The cost could potentially skyrocket with this model if you don’t keep on top of it – or if the quality just isn’t there. Of course, psychology also plays a part here – if you’re paying 25p for a click that doesn’t result in anything, that can feel less painful than paying £25 for an application of poor quality, even if you get a lot of bad clicks.
4. Cost per quality application
Where cost per application fails is on the issue of quality so the logical next step for pricing models is to go down the cost per quality application (CPQA) route. However, this is really difficult for the very reason that ‘quality’ is completely subjective. Ultimately, there are a huge number of factors that play a part in whether someone deems an application ‘quality’ or not, which makes it incredibly challenging to define quality. Is it one that fits the criteria of the job? One that doesn’t fit in certain areas but could be used for future jobs? Is it one that results in a hire? Of course, the latter would be a cost per hire model, which is another model completely. Even an individual recruiter’s assessment of quality will depend on a number of factors and might differ daily depending on external influences.
5. Organic
Organic listings are those that are not paid for, which the likes of Indeed offered for many years. They were like an early version of Google for Jobs – they took jobs from everywhere, including job boards, recruitment companies, employers and offered that service for free but they didn’t put any further marketing efforts into those listings. If you wanted more traffic to be driven to your jobs, you could pay for it. The margins may be reduced but you’re essentially paying for a greater chance of finding valuable candidates that can be placed. Buying good quality traffic is generally worth it, especially if your competitors aren’t, as it gives you an advantage.
CPQVA – the future of job board pricing models?
CPQVA, or cost per qualified validated application, is a model we could see appearing on job boards in the future as a way to provide an objective definition of quality in the form of validity. The recruiter or employer will need to provide a set of ‘knockout’ questions – yes/no, objective questions which will immediately knock a candidate (or a bot) out of the process and prevent them from applying. For example, do you have the right to work in the UK? Do you have X qualification? Do you have a Class 1 HGV license? Each would necessitate proof. This enables a certain amount of validation and prevents fake candidates such as AI bots from applying – a rapidly rising problem in recruitment.
Many recruiters and employers are becoming increasingly frustrated with the volume of applications they’re receiving that bear no resemblance to the job ad and part of that is down to some job boards making it too easy to apply. No-one wants a return to a convoluted, hour long application process, but a set of but knockout questions would help prevent irrelevant applications. Of course, this is of higher value so it will inevitably cost more per application – but not necessarily in total.
A move to increased privacy could be a job board’s USP
Job boards will say their database of candidates is their greatest asset but in a world where privacy laws are stringent and differ across the globe, are we moving to individuals owning and controlling their own data? This is the view of upcoming Talent Matters guest and job board expert, Steven Rothberg. Essentially, job boards won’t own anyone’s data, their role will be to facilitate connections. Gen Alpha – the next generation to come into the workforce – could be the first to say no to data handovers, opting for job boards that will destroy data as soon as it is not needed.
The future of recruiters among increasingly sophisticated job ad tech
There is an innate fear amongst recruiters that tech and AI will do away with their jobs but we believe that the opposite is true. As AI continues to develop, it will become harder and harder for the average employer to distinguish between a candidate and a bot. Recruitment agencies solve that by acting as an intermediary. They can take 100 applications down to 5 great ones by having contact with these candidates, vetting them, and building relationships with the high calibre ones before presenting them to the employer. Job boards can match applications to jobs but they won’t take on any of the human part of the process. As hiring also isn’t the average employer’s job, this gives recruiters huge value add. Job boards will never interview, will never evaluate soft skills. Recruitment will always need the judgement, persuasiveness and people skills of human recruiters.
Price increases necessitate greater selectiveness
No-one wants to pay more for anything but the job board price increases have meant that recruiters are being forced to be more selective about how they market their roles – and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Some of your roles will always need some paid support with traffic but others might be filled more easily, whether that’s because they’re more in demand or because generally advertising them on your website, marketing them on social channels, or utilising your network or talent pool will usually produce great candidates. And if there are fewer jobs on job boards, the roles that are advertised on them will have more exposure.
Want to explore this topic more? We recommend:
📖 Wave’s Candidate Attraction Playbook
📖 How to get more for less from your job boards
🎧Talent Matters: Performance models and the future of advertising
🎧Talent Matters: The evolution of the job board and what you can do to attract candidates now
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