Monthly archive for January 2025

Question

Are there any statistics about the success rates of the major job boards? Thanks much.

Nick’s Reply

I’ve written about the success rates of job boards many times over the years, but it’s a question that very few people ever ask. And I’ll tell you why people don’t ask. It’s because job boards including LinkedIn actually suck so badly at filling jobs that they don’t want to talk about it. All their marketing avoids it and misdirects you with platitudes.

The job boards design their marketing carefully to imply a high-powered machine driven by AI. What they’re delivering is a ride to nowhere. The rusty euphemisms for “success rates” must have cost these firms some huge marketing salaries!

• “The most used job board!”
• “Highest user engagement!”
• “AI-driven job matching technology!”
• “Used by 83% of job seekers!”
• “We connect over 2.8 million businesses with job seekers!”

Any business that can’t proudly show you it can actually accomplish what you’re paying it to do — at least most of the time — is hiding a big problem.

Here’s what a recent an AI chatbot (CoPilot) reported in response to my query (I added the underlines, italics indicate the chatbox is talking.):

“Are there any statistics about the success rates of the major job boards?”

Yes, there are some interesting statistics about the success rates of major job boards. Here are a few key points:

• LinkedIn is the most used job search engine, with 40% of job seekers saying it’s their primary tool.
• Indeed and Glassdoor are also popular, with 83% of job seekers using online job boards in general.

It’s “their primary tool” and 83% of job seekers use job boards. But how many get jobs that way? (I don’t think the boards work any better today than they did 15 years ago, when employers cited leading job board CareerBuilder as their source of hires 5.3% of the time.)

I followed up with this gripe to the chatbot (I’ve underlined the deepest B.S.):

“But those are not success rates.”

You’re right, I apologize for the confusion. Success rates for job boards can be a bit harder to pin down, but here are some insights:

• LinkedIn: Known for its high success rate, LinkedIn reports that 80% of employers find their hires through the platform.
• Indeed: While specific success rates aren’t always published, Indeed is widely used and trusted by both job seekers and employers.
• Glassdoor: Similar to Indeed, Glassdoor is a popular choice, and its success rate is often tied to the quality of company reviews and salary transparency.
• ZipRecruiter: Uses Al technology to match job seekers with employers, which can improve the success rate of finding the right candidate.

Let’s review the marketing drek the chatbot turned up.

“…Known for its high success rate”? This sounds like Donald Trump citing “everyone knows” to substantiate a patently ridiculous claim. And 80% of employers find hires via LinkedIn? That could mean 800 of 1,000 employers each find one hire per year. Is that success or doubletalk?

“…widely used and trusted…” Evidence? Well, blame the chatbot, which might not distinguish marketing-ese from facts.

“…a popular choice…success rate is often tied to the quality of company reviews…” Really?

“…AI technology… can improve the success rate of finding the right candidate.” Just quote us the success rate if it’s true. But it’s not, is it?

I tried asking another way, in an effort to be fair to any job board that might actually be playing the game transparently:

“Does any job board report how many jobs it fills?”

Some job boards and recruitment platforms do report metrics related to job fill rates, but it’s not very common. For example, platforms like LinkedIn and Oracle’s recruitment tools provide various recruiting metrics, including vacancy fill rates and time to fill analysis. These metrics help organizations measure the effectiveness of their recruitment efforts.

However, not all job boards publicly share this information, as it can vary based on their business model and the services they offer.

Lots of marketing blabber — but nothing about hiring success rates. So I decided to give the big boys a chance. My next four queries asked the same question about each of four major job boards:

“How many jobs does [Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor] fill?”

The responses:

• Indeed doesn’t publicly disclose the exact number of jobs it fills annually. However, it does provide various recruiting metrics and insights for employers, such as vacancy fill rates and time to fill analysis. These metrics help organizations measure the effectiveness of their recruitment efforts on the platform.
• LinkedIn doesn’t publicly disclose the exact number of jobs it fills annually. However, it does provide various recruiting metrics and insights for employers, such as vacancy fill rates and time to fill analysis. LinkedIn’s Hiring Insights reports offer valuable data and trends to help optimize job postings and recruitment efforts.
• ZipRecruiter doesn’t publicly disclose the exact number of jobs it fills annually. However, it does provide some impressive statistics about its effectiveness. For example, 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Additionally, ZipRecruiter’s Al-driven matching technology helps connect over 2.8 million businesses with job seekers.
• Glassdoor doesn’t publicly disclose the exact number of jobs it fills annually. However, it does provide various recruiting metrics and insights for employers, such as vacancy fill rates and time to fill analysis. These metrics help organizations measure the effectiveness of their recruitment efforts on the platform.

My favorite bullshit line is ZipRecruiter’s claim that 80% of employers get a quality candidate within the first day of posting a job. Do you think any HR executive that dumped millions of dollars into ZipRecruiter asked about how often it actually fills jobs? But 80% sure sounds good, doesn’t it?

We’re not saying

The highlight, of course, is that these companies have one thing in common: They don’t publicly disclose the number of jobs they fill annually.

They’re part of a highly competitive $11.5 billion online recruiting technology market. Do you have to hire a genius to help you surmise that the boards suck at filling jobs — and that’s why they don’t disclose the most critical number a customer needs to know?

It seems they devote their marketing budgets to making sure you don’t think to ask whether their products actually deliver hires! Your question is so unusual because people don’t dare ask it anymore.

Seeking further illumination (maybe I’m just blind to the wonders of job boards), I looked for other statistics about job boards. You’ve got to read Martin Lunendonk’s 65 Job Search Statistics for 2025. Useful information. Not one word about how well the boards actually work! My favorite items? “80% of jobs are filled through networking.” And “75% of resumes are rejected by applicant tracking systems (ATS).”

My standing challenge to the job boards

Here’s something I’ve never understood. All the boards started out with venture funding. Did any of those venture folks ever ask for audited outcomes analyses of a board’s performance in delivering jobs? We know VC’s want profits — but come on, folks! Don’t you look like horse’s asses when the truth drops like dung on the customers?

Over the past 20 years I’ve given the job boards — individually and collectively — a standing challenge: Disclose your audited success rates. How many jobs do you fill? How many people do you put into jobs?

Nothing doing — no answers. (For an article I was producing for PBS NewsHour, CareerBuilder once told me it fills 57% of all jobs — but declined to show me any data.) Some wags have tried to convince me “it’s not possible to track that information.“ Web analytics software can tell which side of my nose I’m scratching while I’m on my favorite websites. It knows where I am on the web, where I was 10 minutes ago and how much I spend on socks. “HR Technology” can conduct interviews over video and judge your personality by tracking your “micro expressions” and your eye movements.

Gimme a break!

The reason we know job boards suck

The reason we know job boards suck is that none of them will produce their audited success rates in filling jobs. They won’t disclose the metrics because, well, they suck.

Let’s add a challenge to HR executives — maybe one that ought to come from their board of directors: Prove to us this stuff works!  Where are the hiring metrics you use to assess the job boards and ATSes you use?

Don’t agree with me? If you run a job board, skip the euphemisms and distractions and show us your audited success rate metrics and data.

Or go kiss an AI chatbot.

How do you know job boards suck? What do you want to say to the folks who run the major job boards? What could they do to make you believe they’re worth using? What’s your success rate been when using job boards to hire or to get hired?

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Question

I am underemployed at two days a week as a dental hygienist. I used to work part-time in two practices at one time (40-55 hours a week) with partial benefits and health insurance. Now I have no benefits or insurance. I make just a little too much to get state programs. I have been in the dental field for about 20 years. I have my local newspaper’s app on my cell and I check the job listings every day. What can I do to improve my situation for employment and health insurance?

Nick’s Reply

The number of people that are underemployed is often overlooked, so I sympathize. I’m not a benefits or insurance expert by a long shot, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for specific advice about your options. I suggest starting with the Health Insurance Marketplace.

You can keep scrolling the apps on your cell to find a job, but all you’re doing is competing with more people than any dental office can hire. This is a common mistake. We all succumb to what seems the easiest way to find a job, which is to wait for one to come along in the listings. But as you’ve found, that doesn’t work. Please stop for a minute and think.

If you were a dentist, who would you hire? Someone you don’t know who responded to a job listing on an app, or someone who was recommended to you by another dentist or healthcare provider?

Where jobs come from

Hint: Depending on what survey you look at, 40%-70% of jobs are found and filled through personal contacts. So you know what you must do.

Prepare a list of every dental office in the towns and cities near yours. Then prepare a list of all medical personnel you know, no matter what area of healthcare they’re in or whether they work in a hospital or private practice. Now comes the real work. Go through your list of doctor’s offices and research them online. Most will have a website.

Who knows where the jobs are?

Which practices seem big enough that they probably have some turnover? Which seem very busy? Which might need help? (Don’t worry about whether they have job openings.)

Now turn to your contacts in healthcare. You’re not going to ask them for job leads. Ask each of them whether they know an employee or a patient at any of the dental practices on your other list. Since you’ve been in the business so long, you probably also know some of the medical sales reps who come calling at the doctor’s office. Contact them, too — they know loads of doctors. (Get the idea? You could even contact patients or anyone that would know a practice.)

Get personal to get ahead of your competition

In each case, don’t ask for a job lead. Ask about the particular office:

• How long has it been in business?
• Is it respected?
• What kind of place is it to work in?
• What kind of help does it need?

Any information you obtain this way, by getting personal, is probably more information than your competitors have. This gives you an edge and puts you ahead. (Please see Job Hunting With The Headhunter: Go around the system!)

The more you talk, the more you’ll learn. The magic question to close with is this: Would you recommend this office as a place to work? Then: Who would you recommend I talk to, to learn more about working there?

This is how headhunters operate. We talk a lot to learn a lot. We need only one solid tidbit of information, and one solid personal referral, to do business. It’s what you need to get an interview in a good office.

Insurance and benefits

I’m sure you know this already: A full-time job is more likely to get you insurance and benefits than multiple part-time gigs. Loads of employers prefer part-time workers because it lowers their total costs. Often, job postings aren’t clear about whether the job is part-time (perhaps through a contracting firm) or full-time and direct, with insurance and benefits. When you approach via personal contacts you’re more likely to learn the truth sooner — all you have to do is ask.

The solution to being underemployed is to make personal contacts. So start talking to people about the dental offices in your area, and get introduced. It’s how medical offices hire — through trusted referrals.

Going from underemployed to employed with insurance with benefits isn’t very different from starting out unemployed. Am I missing something? Have you ever gotten stuck being underemployed? How’d you get back into the mainstream? How would you advise this reader?

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This marks the 1,000th edition of this weekly newsletter, first published September 20, 2002. Over all these years, one idea continues to permeate all of Ask The Headhunter: To win a job, do the job in your interview. Everything else I write about, and everything we discuss in the Q&A and the Comments section, clarifies and expands on this idea. That’s why I chose reader John Grace’s e-mail about how he won his job by doing the job in his interview.

A reader’s story

I started a new job, and I think Nick would be proud of how I got the job.

In the interview, I did the job. I couldn’t figure out what exactly it was the company did from its website, but a mutual friend had connected us, telling the company it “needed” me.

It quickly became apparent that the company couldn’t explain its business in the interview. They knew what they did, but they spent 10 minutes explaining it in technical jargon. There and then I knew why my contact said they needed me.

I took over a whiteboard and made a very focused argument about why the company needed to be better at explaining what they do (they are a technology company). Before I was completely done, the interviewer said to stop and that he would be back in a minute.

He returned with a gentleman who was introduced as the CEO and I was introduced as “the guy you’ve got to hear.”

Within twenty minutes several other managers came into the room. Two of them asked me how I would solve their current biggest problem. The CEO stood up at the end of the meeting and said, “We’ve got to have this guy on board. Do whatever it takes.”

That’s how I started my most recent position.

Thank you, Nick. Not everyone can understand the idea of doing the job, but the ones that do are great. Those are the people I want to work for. Your book helped me to sell myself that way.

John Grace

Nick’s Reply

There is nothing easy about doing the job in the interview; nor is there any substitute for it. Your resume won’t do it, your LinkedIn profile won’t do it, and being able to answer the Top 10 Stupid Interview Questions won’t do it.

Every situation will require a different approach depending on the business and the job, and on the problems and challenges the hiring manager needs you to address.

Doing the job

The underlying idea is profound and powerful: Do the job to win the job, right there in the interview. But, to what extent and in how much detail? That‘s up to the candidate. If the candidate is not prepared to think fast on their feet like you did, I can’t help them and they probably don’t belong in that meeting because they’re not prepared.

I know: This is a very tall order, and if employers expected job applicants to do the kind of presentation you did, then more interviews would result in job offers and new hires.

But then the job boards, LinkedIn and every ATS company would go out of business. And good riddance, because today’s Employment System is a house of cards. Employers and job seekers alike should step back and let it fall because it has already failed.

Of course, much goes into preparing to demonstrate what you can do. That’s what all of Ask The Headhunter is about. (If you’re new to this, please start with the links above.)

I am honored by anyone who uses my advice to win a job and then shares the outcome. So I thank you, John, for sharing your story and for your permission to share it with others. I would have given a lot to be a fly on the wall while you did the whiteboard presentation you described! Nice work doing the job to win the job. Thank you for your story and for your kind permission to publish it!

Where did 1,000 editions come from?

When I first started Ask The Headhunter, I felt good about sharing what I knew with my readers. After all these years, I find I learn more from my readers than they learn from me. While I’ve produced 1,000 editions of weekly Q&A columns, I’ve actually answered over 50,000 questions from readers since Ask The Headhunter was born. That’s where the article-quality Q&A columns start — I edit the very best of the questions you send me that I answer.

For this enormous archive of Q&A I owe a very special thank-you to one of The Motley Fool’s founding partners, Erik Rydholm, who found my stuff on Prodigy, adopted me and gave Ask The Headhunter a chance to reach a huge audience on The Fool and America Online. I’d been getting around 10 questions a week on the Prodigy forum I started, but on AOL it grew to 50 or more. I asked Erik, “You don’t really expect me to answer every single question anybody asks, right?” Erik gave me the best advice: “Sure! You can do it! Answer every single question you get!” (The rest is yet another story!)

In a lifetime, a headhunter would not encounter all the situations and experiences that ATH readers have reported in our discussions on the website. Thanks to all who have shared their problems and challenges in finding (and filling) jobs — especially for contributing your insight, wisdom and advice in the Comments section every week! What I’m most proud of is the high standard of discourse on our forum!

Are you looking for a better job? Are you interviewing candidates to fill a job? On to the next! And please share your questions so I can get on to the next edition, too! And if you have a story or experience about Ask The Headhunter or about “do the job to win the job,” please add it to the Comments below — especially if it’s from the Prodigy or AOL days!

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Question

I had an interview over the phone since the manager was out of state. Things went okay and then he asked me to put together a 30-60 day business plan for what I would do to increase business. The idea is for us to have a face-to-face interview next (assuming he likes what I wrote, I guess).

I was very skeptical but I went along. I probably didn’t spend enough time or do a thorough enough job because I really don’t think the job is a fit, but we’ll see. I wrote up some really high-level stuff and told him there wasn’t any reasonable way for me to generate a more detailed plan on the basis of a one-hour phone conversation. Of course I thanked him for his time and told him I looked forward to meeting him.

I haven’t heard back and frankly I’m pretty lukewarm on the opportunity, but I just wonder what you think of his request. It seems a bit odd if not inappropriate to me. It also seems like a no-win situation as I’m in no position to write a meaningful business plan.

Nick’s Reply

Is this manager’s request an odd interview strategy? Not at all. In fact, it’s very smart. It’s the interview approach I recommend to both job hunters and employers. Focus on the work. And that’s what this manager was doing.

Some employers want to know what you’re going to deliver. And that’s smart. I don’t mean to offend you, but you blew an opportunity. Don’t worry: you can learn from this. Let’s look at what happened.

Sure enough to do a business plan?

“I probably didn’t spend enough time or do a thorough enough job because I really don’t think the job is a fit.”

That is your key problem. You can’t be effective with the manager’s request if you “really” aren’t sure the job is a fit. And that will sink you in any interview, whether on the phone, in person, or in the form of the business plan this manager requested. This is why I say most interviews are a total waste of time.

It’s because people aren’t really ready to tackle them properly because they’re not sure enough that they want the job.

A business plan you can defend

“I was very skeptical but figured I’d go along. I wrote up some really high-level stuff and told him there wasn’t any reasonable way for me to generate a more detailed plan on the basis of a one-hour phone conversation. Of course I thanked him for his time and told him I looked forward to meeting him.”

This is where you actually took the step that blew it. You tried to fake it with “high-level stuff.” That’s not what a manager is looking for. He’s looking for an honest plan of how you will do the job day one, week one, month one, year one. Now, such a manager doesn’t expect you to be right on the money. You don’t need to provide “the right answer.” You do need to provide a carefully thought out plan that you can explain and defend.

The point is to engage the manager; to show that you are thinking about the key issues. The manager is trying to get you to reveal your thinking process and to engage you in the work. It’s a good opportunity for a job candidate who really wants the job.

But, how can you perform at your best in an interview if you’re not sure you want the job? How can you be sure it’s worth investing the time and effort to do a good business plan? The answer is pretty straightforward: You must know more about the company, the manager and the work. Otherwise, there’s no way to build the self-motivation that would drive you to do the sort of preparation that reveals the savvy and enthusiasm the manager wants to see.

Choose carefully

Avoid the random interview. Choose your target companies carefully — and you can’t do that if you apply to hundreds of companies through those dopey online job boards.

Suppose you applied for 100 jobs and — whoopee! — they all invited you to submit business plans. How could you possibly prepare an intelligent presentation for each of them? You couldn’t. And that’s what you need to reconsider: how to choose your targets.

Engage the hiring manager

You’re asking a very valid question because you encountered a very smart manager. What could you have done after he issued his challenge? It’s only natural that you cannot produce a business plan by yourself, or with an hour’s worth of dialogue! You need more information, just as you might if you were already an employee.

You could have organized your thoughts and figured out what additional information you needed. Then you could have called him back to ask your questions. “I want to present you with a plan I can be proud of — and to do that I need some additional information.” But, that call would have required real motivation. Did you have it? Make sure you do for the next opportunity you develop.

Do a business plan, but don’t work for free!

One caution about all this. Some managers use “the business plan exercise” to get free work from job candidates. It’s rare, but it happens. A job hunter must always judge the integrity of the employer. If you provide the sample of work an employer asks for, make sure you withhold the details of the implementation part of your plan. That is, don’t give them so much that they can get the job done without you. Never work for free.

You can do this

Other than that, my view is that this manager did the right thing. He asked you to show how you would do the job profitably. My guess is that if you can target the right company, manager, and job, you’ll do a good job on this kind of task.

The problem you’ll encounter is that few managers will ask you to do something so meaningful. Your challenge is to offer it even if they don’t ask. Your mission is to educate them about what you can do. In my opinion, producing a brief business plan is a very smart way to demonstrate your worth to an employer.

You can do this. On to the next!

Seriously? You want job seekers to create written business plans for every job they apply to? Yep. Why not? This turns the entire “apply for a job” process on its head. Do you agree?

Next week: In the 1,000th edition of the newsletter a reader shares an example of how to win the job by doing the job in the interview. That’s why this edition is #999.

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