Here's how you can prevent large costs on job boards as a flexible agency

"Especially at many staffing agencies, the need is urgent."

To gain more control over (external) online marketing expenses, spending on job boards and platforms, you need to make a choice. How will you keep up with the trend of online platformization? How do you optimize your candidate first experience and improve your digital services? In short, he sees three strategies for agencies: Build, Belong, or Buy. And each route offers specific advantages and challenges, depending on your business model, goals, and vision. The routes, briefly summarized:

Build: build a platform yourself

Strategy: You take full control and build an online platform that perfectly matches the unique characteristics of your organization.

Advantages: Provides a robust system that allows you to continually optimize the user experience, respond flexibly and quickly to changes in the market, and integrate additional services as needs evolve, unmatched by your competitors.

Disadvantages: Takes significant time and resources, especially in the startup phase, although a custom platform can also go live within 6 weeks.

For whom? This is the route for companies that want to stand out by creating their own community and ecosystem and have full control over the user experience and branding. A good example: Aanpakkers, from House of Covebo. Or StandbyZorg, an organization that decided to build a tailor-made platform to optimize matchmaking in the healthcare sector, specifically tailored to the needs of healthcare professionals and institutions.

Belong: join an existing platform

Strategy: Use an existing online platform for recruitment, such as Indeed or LinkedIn.

Advantages: This route provides direct access to a large network of candidates and clients without having to build a platform yourself.

Disadvantages: You partially give up control. Your organization becomes less visible since users mainly interact with the platform itself, not your brand. Additionally, you share valuable data with the platform, which you often do not get back or can use. Costs can also quickly rise, which might make investing in your own platform ecosystem more profitable.

For whom? This strategy is ideal for organizations that want to quickly take advantage of platformization without making large investments.

Buy: purchase an existing platform

Strategy: Purchase a turnkey platform, such as the work platform Maqqie. You then integrate this solution into your processes.

Advantages: This approach ensures speed: you can quickly be operational with a platform that has already proven itself.

Disadvantages: Less flexibility. The platform is often designed for a standard workflow, meaning you must adapt your business processes to the platform's capabilities. This can limit your ability to communicate your unique features. Moreover, you also have no control over the journey and give data to an external party.

For whom? This strategy is particularly attractive for organizations that want to achieve results quickly and be operational from day one.

Not if, but how

In an increasingly tight market where good recruiters are becoming scarcer and costs are rising, it's no longer a question of whether you should platformize, but how to best do it, says Sepp. "Platforms like YoungOnes, Temper, and Maqqie offer an efficient solution by directly connecting companies and candidates. A platform is an efficient and super-scalable extension of your organization. Younger generations of employees, who have grown up with such tools, increasingly prefer flexible organizations that work this way via a self-serviced system."

"A platform is an efficient and super-scalable extension of your organization."

Sepp sees many agencies now choosing a Belong strategy by, for example, advertising heavily on LinkedIn and Indeed but questions whether that is the best long-term strategy. "They then almost automatically post all vacancies on such job boards via their ATS, which often yields candidates but is also costly. Additionally, the quality often declines. Unfortunately, we hear more and more that many applications come from far within the EU or outside the EU, where there is little you can do with them. Then investing in your own ecosystem, through a build or buy strategy, is often more advantageous in the long run." Yes, it brings costs. "But if you look at how much you pay for what you place outside your own ecosystem, that's often where your biggest gain lies."

Logical/Illogical

Then there is the availability of your own data. At many external parties, there is increasingly less visibility. If you have your own platform as an agency, within your own ecosystem, with your own candidate database, then you immediately have your own data, and it's much easier to actually do something with it. "That you recruit candidates for the first time via a large job board, I find quite logical. But that you do it every time, for every vacancy, that is illogical. The more candidate data you collect, and the more you bind them, the more control you can get."

"Recruiting and retaining candidates is not something you should want to leave to a third party."

Recruiting and retaining candidates should not be something you leave to a third party, he thinks. While large job boards can reach many people with sophisticated marketing, as an agency, you can compete with a platform that actually keeps the candidates you've recruited engaged. "That's precisely where parties like Temper and YoungOnes have also proven to be good. They know how to bind and retain candidates with content that is interesting for those target groups."

Databases full of candidates

Many agencies already have large databases filled with candidates. But recruiters often can't do much with them because the data is either outdated or not enriched enough. According to Sepp, AI tools like Recrubo can be valuable for easily enriching candidate data. "You can then fill at least 10% of your vacancies with it. Without it costing you anything in terms of recruitment." That doesn't mean you no longer need to invest in marketing, he emphasizes. "That remains important. But at many Belong parties, you can't freely share your own story. And perhaps that personal story is even more important now than your vacancies."

"At many parties, you can't freely share your own story. And perhaps that personal story is even more important now than your vacancies."

According to Sepp, the race for the future is about the question: who has the best positioning? "The hard shifting of vacancies will decrease. The big picture is not: who can fill today’s vacancy, but: who can fill the next vacancy the fastest and the best? Then it helps if you have built up your name and have enriched data in your system. As platform builders, we see: there is still much more to gain. So you can offer candidates much more relevant vacancies much faster. And thus achieve faster results."

A warming tray

A good platform and corresponding ecosystem are therefore key for the future, he says. "A platform is not just meant to bring supply and demand together. Good platform technology constantly monitors that candidate automatically: when does their assignment end? When should I offer which new opportunities? Call it a warming tray. Especially if you add self-service for the candidate, you can gain a lot as a bureau. Now that still happens quite traditionally with recruiters in many agencies. But that can be much more efficient."

Using smart tools for an automated candidate journey can, and enlisting AI where possible, can greatly improve the quality of your candidates, according to Sepp. "Building a platform often seems like an expensive solution if it's only about bringing supply and demand together. But if done properly, it's much more than that. The ecosystem you build with it helps you bind and retain candidates and thus reduce the ever-increasing recruitment costs through third parties. That's an issue that I think every agency should seriously consider."