Job boards preferred route in academic sector

Jo Faragher

Job boards are the preferred advertising medium for recruiting academic, research and science staff, a survey has found.

According to Jobs.ac.uk, which surveyed more than 170 organisations, 64% cited jobs boards as their preferred means of advertising a role. Almost three-fifths (58%) said they have either reduced or no longer use print publications to advertise roles.

One of the key attractions of using a job board is that they can be highly sector-specific, and 72% of respondents to the survey said this was the most important factor. A similar proportion prefers using specialist sites to generalist job boards (71%). Audience size and pricing were also cited as important factors.

More than 70% of the survey’s respondents were based in the UK, with most of the remainder located in Europe, Asia Pacific and The Middle East. Over half of the respondents were from universities.

Exactly half of the respondents in Jobs.ac.uk’s survey said they used social media to recruit, with LinkedIn the most popular platform, cited by 62% of those who used social media.

Just over a third of respondents said they expected their hiring levels to increase this year, while most said it would remain the same. Twelve per cent predicted decreases.

The use of technology and mobiles to recruit in this sector is less of a priority than in others, the figures suggest. More than two-thirds of applicants do not use an applicant tracking system, despite reducing recruitment costs and time to hire being a key priority.

Carl Freelove, marketing manager at Jobs.ac.uk, said: “The numbers in the survey clearly demonstrate that job boards, particularly, specialist job boards, are still an important part of the recruitment mix.”