Job Board Overload

Want a job in finance? Job boards—on major agglomerative sites like Monster.com, on finance-specific agglomerative sites like eFinancialCareers.com, and on individual firm and bank sites—list plenty of finance jobs. The problem is that each listing, no matter where it’s listed, is pretty much guaranteed to have application overload. I.e. job boards and companies with job boards are seeing numbers that would be impossible for even the largest of Human Resources teams to sift through, and HR departments are not exactly known for having eyes to spare.

Of course, this isn’t a problem unique just to finance jobs. For almost any job in almost any industry the demand far exceeds the supply. With 12.2 million Americans still unemployed and an unemployment rate hovering at 7.8%, according to an early January 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics release, this is hardly a surprising quandary. But just as people in finance jobs tend to deal with more money than almost anywhere else, so are their numbers in terms of job board overflow larger than almost anywhere else. Thousands, even tens of thousands of people, might apply for just one job. Why? The pay is good, the living (supposedly) easy (even though this living “easy” often requires 100-hour work works), and the prestige and chances for advancement higher than in many other careers.

The problems with job boards are ample, the solutions—not so much. Who is responsible for coming up with the solutions? Agglomerative job boards are making great traffic with so many applicants, but if they want to keep the business from the job listers’ side, it might be up to them to make the change. But banks and firms might have to change their approach to looking at and comparing applicants, as well. In other words, they cannot expect job boards to happily solve all of their recruitment problems for them. And in part, they haven’t. Traditional on-campus recruiting at “top” schools and networking have increased importance in the hiring process once again.

The dilemma is perhaps scariest from the point of view of the applicant, though. Applicants spend time creating usernames and putting together profiles and uploading their resumes on numerous sites, and once they’ve pressed “apply,” there is no actual guarantee that that resume will be opened on any Human Resource personnel’s computer screen. And if the applicant did not attend a “top” school, then he or she must work even harder than applicants who did attend one to make networking connections offline—because just one in, just one currently employed Associate or Vice President or Project Manager, could make all the difference in his or her future.

In the current situation, then, companies risk not finding the diamond in the rough, because they do not have the time or capabilities to comb all that rough, and the applicants who are those hidden diamonds enter the job arena at the risk of not being found and thus not having a way to pay their future way. One, or preferably all, side has to give in and start thinking creatively, start making a change. Or maybe it will be up to a fourth party—one who could revolutionize the job board or sweep it away with an altogether new system. As with most things, only time will tell.