Understanding the difference between job boards and job search engines

What’s the difference between shrimp and prawns?

Like shrimp and prawns, there are other pairs of words, objects, and terms that are so similar that people are often unable to distinguish between them. Or they don’t have enough awareness to tell those things apart from one another. Such terms have become so engraved in our memories that it is next to impossible not to mistake one thing for another similar thing. Be it Great Britain or the United Kingdom, a tortoise or a turtle, or crocodiles and alligators, people often get confused and think of them as the same even though they are not. Similarly, people often confuse job boards and job search engines online. They often think of both as the same. Although they might sound similar, they surely are not.

Understanding the difference between job boards and job search engines online

The online recruitment industry comprises recruitment companies, job search engines, job boards, and professional networking platforms. Of these, job boards and job search engines are often confused as being the same. So, let’s get to know each in detail to clear the confusion once and for all.

Job boards

A job board is a website where employers post job vacancies. Job boards gather and host job ad listings from employers and act as a mediator between employers and candidates. How do they do that? Job boards employ premium job wrapping services and job crawlers to fetch jobs from employers’ websites. Job wrappers can be programmed to scour employers’ websites periodically. They then post the jobs on the job board in a structured, consistent format. Employers who have partnered with job boards can even get the job listings posted in a format of their preferences, niche, and location. So, job sites in the USA serving the IT industry can have a different format from say, job sites in Europe serving the oil and gas industry. There are two types of job boards based on the audience they target, namely, a general job board and a niche job board. General Job boards focus on a plethora of industries ranging from manufacturing to IT. A niche job board, on the other hand, focuses on a particular industry, region, or function.

Job search engines

A job search engine searches the web to find job postings from job boards and employer’s websites. It basically acts similarly to the Google search engine but for jobs. Job search engines index jobs from various pages of employers and list them on their website. They then show users results based on their searches by analyzing the search phrases. The different types of job search engines are a general search engine, niche search engine, and global search engine. The general search engine is restricted to one country or market, the niche engine to niche jobs, and the global search engine searches for jobs all over the world.

Now that you have a better understanding of job boards and job search engines, you will make better decisions regarding the appropriate service to use based on your needs. However, job boards seem to be a better option between the two, whether you look at it from an employer’s perspective or from a candidate’s perspective. A job board has updated, structured, and customized job posts, whereas job search engines can be filled with duplicate listings or invalid job posts on display as they index job postings from multiple websites without any analysis. Thus, you need to be a job board instead of being restricted to just a search engine, if you want a large number of employers and candidates to use your services. And to be among the top job boards, you will require premium recruitment tools such as those offered by Propellum.

And by the way, here’s the answer to the shrimp vs prawns question: there are tens of differences between prawns and shrimp. Prawns have three pairs of claw-like legs, whereas shrimp has just one. Prawns also have longer legs than shrimp. However, the main difference is in the way they reproduce, shrimp carry their fertilized eggs in the undersides of their bodies, but prawns release their eggs into the water and leave them to grow on their own.