Web 2.0 is about enhancing creativity, information sharing, and collaboration. The definition must have been written with the intent to exclude job postings and job boards as part of the world wide web.

With all of the talk about attracting passive talent, the war for talent and focusing on hiring quality, I was surprised to see little has changed – when taking a look at things from a candidate’s point of view.

I started with a simple search on a job board. After closing 2 pop up windows, here’s what the candidate would see with this example:

A page filled with paid ads:

• 1 on the page header
• 8 vertically on the right side of the page
• 1 on the footer
• 2 pop-ups

Within the job posting:

• Grammatical errors
• 40 different daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual responsibilities / tasks
• 9 requirements

Thinking this must be a fluke, I ran another quick search on another board. The first posting I clicked on was from 1 of Fortune’s Best Companies To Work For. Surely, this will be better…

This posting was much shorter, and contained:

• 9 responsibilities
• 8 requirements
• 3 portfolio examples

Since the organization requests you apply online through their site, I clicked the link, and found the following:

We’re kidding right? The candidate has to complete another search to find the position, which ironically isn’t even listed on the corporate career site. If it would have been and they would have applied, the candidate of course would have had to sign up for another profile too.

If you use the big boards for postings, consider the following 5 quick fixes you can control and implement:

• Utilize a branding template with all of the boards. Templates pushes the ads off the page, so the candidate is looking at your posting, in your brand. They’re not forced to look at the online degree programs, or the amazing work from home opportunity ads. All the major boards offer branding as a service and is easily negotiated as part of a package.
• If you believe recruiting is sales and marketing, then sell and market both your organization and opportunity. Don’t utilize a bureaucratic, and time consuming process to accept Resume’s.
• Link your posting directly into your A.T.S., so the potential lead doesn’t have to search again once coming into your site.
• Do not copy and paste you’re job description into your online posting. It doesn’t always format properly, and your main goal should be driving talent to your community or site. You can engage them further if they get there, so focus on selling in your posting.
• Use titles and keywords candidates search for, and limit internal acronyms.

When relying on a poorly written job description or web posting, there should be no surprise less than 10% of corporate career site traffic converts into a completed application.

While most of this seems fairly basic it appears there is still a tremendous amount of opportunity – and we have a long way to go in recruiting – in Web 2.0 standards.