By Paul Humberstone

When it comes to online job boards, targeted and specialised is better than big and general — though it’s still not enough to achieve recruitment potential.

Like most new markets, the online job board industry started out in a very general way and has evolved into highly specialised niche products, which are better able to target particular industries or professional groups.

When we saw the first online job boards launched many years ago, they were very broad, with retail sales and product manager positions being advertised next to head chef and high finance vacancies.

There are still plenty of those general online job boards around, but the real growth has been in niche job boards, where advertisers can target their message to the specific group of people they are interested in.

The biggest challenge is reaching passive job seekers — those people not actively looking to change jobs but whose interest might be sparked by coming across a job advertisement in the course of their business day

With most job boards, it is incumbent upon the job seeker to subscribe to an alert service to receive job ads, so the traffic is clearly active job seekers.

The model we have adopted with Jobla delivers a more targeted industry approach, delivering relevant job ad to thousands of middle and senior level professionals who actively subscribe to a daily newsletter, such as Current.com.au.

Since we launched in September, we’ve experienced encouraging growth with this model. This was helped by our post-launch promotion, for which we gave away free job advertising at the end of 2011.

The free advertising appealed to recruiters wanting to test out a new platform, while the strong increase in job seeker registrations showed the broader appeal of this business model.

Paul Humberstone is the general manager for recruitment services at The Intermedia Group (publisher of Current.com.au).