DC Velocity - February 2014

“sales pitch” for the employer. “We suggest looking at it from the candidate’s point of view. … You want to indicate the benefits of working for you,” he says.

While popular, online job post-
ings are not as effective as some
of the other methods employed by
respondents to CSCMP’s survey.

When asked to rate the effectiveness
of their recruiting methods, respon-
dents ranked the method they used
most often—job postings on their
companies’ own websites—next to
last, just above newspaper ads. The
most effective methods, they said,
Don Firth, president and co-founder
of JobsInLogistics.com, the first and larg-
est of the specialized job boards, points
out another potential drawback of gen-
eral listings. “If you advertise a logistics
job on [a general career website], almost
everyone will apply to it. But nobody goes
to JobsInLogistics.com unless they’re in
logistics,” he says. According to Firth,
the site has more than 30,000 registered
employers, who pay to list their open posi-
tions and have rights to search the résumé
database. The company, which also owns
the JobsInTrucks.com job board, has
more than 900,000 résumés in its logistics
database; more than 250,000 individual
job seekers in the United States peruse the
logistics listings each month.

Online posting may be popular, but many companies are not getting as much out of their postings as they could. To get the right candidates to respond to an online job posting, Firth says, employers should make sure the positions are correctly classified and that the descriptions include multiple key words that could apply to the position. “They should be aware that what one person might call a logistics position, someone coming out of distribution might call a different name and search with a different key word,” he says. He also advises employers to limit job descriptions to a few specific, brief points rather than long, narrative paragraphs, so candidates can quickly tell whether the job would be appropriate for them; the “nice to know” details can be shared with applicants later. And be sure to include a brief