5 Compelling Reasons to Choose Academic Positions Over Free Job Boards

Hiring for an academic position can be difficult and time consuming. Competition for academic jobs is high and potential applicants are all over the globe. Thanks to increased researcher mobility and the explosion of new universities in the past few decades, recruitment for academic positions has grown increasingly more challenging. With so many universities vying for talent, it can be difficult to distinguish your job and university from others, leading to higher instances of failed recruitment.

Although you could simply write a generic job advert and post it on a free job board, the likelihood that you’ll find quality candidates in a reasonable amount of time is low. Finding the right person for your job requires patience and a targeted marketing approach. Using a platform like Academic Positions to advertise your vacancies can result in more relevant applicants in less time. 

Failed recruitment is costly. It means more time being short staffed, more time crafting an advert that will attract new or better candidates, and perhaps more money to advertise and market your position again. However, with a bit more initial investment, you can improve your candidate search and get your position filled by the right person, the first time around. 

With so many free job boards, we understand why you may be wary of paying to advertise your vacancies. We’ve built a reputation of trust and efficiency with our comprehensive approach to academic recruitment that will help you attract more qualified candidates. Here are five reasons universities choose Academic Positions to help with their recruitment.

1. You will reach the most relevant candidates

Our job boards allow job seekers to sign up for job alerts for more than 600 academic fields. Many free services allow only a handful of custom alerts, drastically reducing the number of relevant candidates who will see the advert. Our specific and targeted approach to advertising your position means more and better candidates will see your job posting vastly increasing your potential applicant pool. 

All advertisements posted on Academic Positions include a job alert which notifies relevant registered job seekers about your vacancy. Instead of hoping that qualified applicants stumble upon your job advert, we can help make it more visible so more qualified candidates find it. Our helpful guides to writing targeted job postings will ensure they click through to read more. 

2. You can spend less time publicizing your position and more time working on your research 

Many free job boards require you to upload and publish your own advert. At Academic Positions, we provide hassle free publication by taking care of advertising your open positions for you. 

Just as you are experts in your field, we are experts in ours. We let you do what you do best and we’ll take care of the rest. 

3. You will benefit from international visibility

Unlike the majority of our competitors, our job board is truly international. We have an international portal where we post adverts in English, as well as 13 national portals where we post adverts in the national language. You’ll reach more candidates with the ability to post vacancies in multiple languages. 

Academic job seekers are eager to find the most relevant and advanced research facilities within their field of study, and recognize that this often means looking internationally. Because they are passionate about their studies and professional community, academics are happy to explore opportunities worldwide. We help you capitalize on this willingness to find the right fit by helping you find the best candidates no matter where in the world they are. 

4. You get full access to invaluable data

We take a data-driven approach to recruitment marketing to provide our customers with the most efficient and proven methods for advertising open positions. Our performance reports give you unique insights into the performance of your advert on our job board, taking the guesswork out of what is, or is not, working. 

Optimising your recruitment with data will help you attract better candidates, track agency performance, and foster a goal-driven working environment. Our metrics will help you recruit smarter, saving you time and money. 

5. You will receive more traffic from search engines 

While it would be nice to simply publish your vacancy online and know that people will find it, it takes time and effort to make sure your content ranks in the search results. In order for potential candidates to be able to find your job advert online, the website you publish it on needs to have good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

SEO is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website gets from search engines so that it ranks at the top of the search results. Because most candidates start their academic job search by using a search engine, if the job website doesn’t rank in the top results, you’ll be behind your competitors right from the start. 

Luckily, we are well versed in SEO best practices and consistently rank in the top search results for most academic job queries. We work tirelessly to make sure our listings remain at the top of search engine searches so we can deliver high quality traffic to all the jobs published on our site. Free job boards cannot always guarantee such excellent search engine rankings.

Just because you can post a job for free, does not mean you should. In fact, while you may be saving money up front, a failed recruitment campaign can end up costing you hours of wasted time. Investing in a paid job board will not only leave you with more time to pursue your research, it will also provide you with top talent to enhance your work and elevate your university’s profile.