It’s been a while since I’ve talked about whether or not a job board or recruit­ing site should have a resume data­base. Orig­i­nal­ly, almost every job board had resume data­bas­es – and they charged employ­ers to access them. Some still do, in fact. But resume data­bas­es have fall­en out of favor in the past five or six years – or at least, that’s the ‘com­mon wis­dom’.

Yet just today I learned that OLX Ukraine has added resumes to its recruit­ment area. And if you lis­ten to Indeed’s ads, a con­tin­u­ing theme is how can­di­dates can post their resumes and be ‘dis­cov­ered’ by employ­ers. Plus, let’s not for­get one of the world’s largest repos­i­to­ries of resumes – LinkedIn. They aren’t fad­ing – they’re grow­ing! And don’t for­get to ask CV Library if any­one is inter­est­ed in resumes, too – since they’ve built their entire busi­ness around them!!

So is this a case of ‘com­mon wis­dom’ being a bit wrong? Maybe. Let’s dig a bit fur­ther.

In very broad terms, employ­ers fall into one of two camps in their recruit­ment efforts: ‘posters‘, who are more than hap­py to post their jobs and wait for can­di­dates to respond, and ‘hunters‘, who search out can­di­dates and con­tact them.  In my esti­ma­tion, posters have his­tor­i­cal­ly made up about 70% of all employ­ers, ver­sus 30% as hunters. Don’t for­get that some employ­ers do both – it’s often a mat­ter of avail­able resources. Being a poster makes sense when you’re work­ing in an employ­er’s mar­ket – can­di­dates are try­ing their best to get hired, so you’re assured of a decent response to your job ads.

But what if you’re work­ing in a can­di­date’s mar­ket? What if can­di­dates have the lever­age (for once), instead of employ­ers? Then being a hunter makes more sense – you can go after the can­di­dates you want and per­suade them to join you. A can­di­date’s mar­ket is a pret­ty good descrip­tion of where we are right now, after many months of the pan­dem­ic and a labor force that appears to be small­er than what is need­ed.

Most employ­ers are not stu­pid. If being a poster does­n’t work, then they are will­ing to try hunt­ing. Thus, hav­ing a place to hunt becomes more impor­tant – they are look­ing for con­cen­tra­tions of can­di­dates that can be sort­ed, searched, con­tact­ed, and inter­viewed.

If you’re a job board right now, you may very well want to have a robust, up-to-date resume data­base for these hunters.

I can already hear the objec­tions: “But it takes too much time to build up a resume data­base!” “But, LinkedIn…” “But the tech­nol­o­gy…  “But, but, but….”

Fine! If you don’t want to do the work, some­one else will. You may (or pos­si­bly may not) lose some busi­ness. It’s real­ly your call.

Just don’t for­get that each of the two of the largest job boards in the world have a resume data­base – and they’re mak­ing mon­ey from them right now. 

Some­thing to think about!

Note: this post first appeared in 2021 but con­tin­ues to be rel­e­vant now!

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