Two to three years ago all the talk was of an elusive passive candidate who had to be tracked down either through some clever searching or via an emerging new recruitment channel called a social network.

As we are all only too aware, it’s a very different story today. Because of the economic downturn many of us know at least one high-calibre person laid off during the recession who has involuntarily moved from being a passive to an active jobseeker. In theory, this should mean that recruiters have higher quality talent pools than ever, which potentially reduces reliance on job boards and recruitment advertising as we pull out of recession. So if this is the case, what will it mean for the job boards? How will they respond and demonstrate that they still add value for recruiters?

Unsurprisingly, most job boards contend that while recruiters may have been talent pooling throughout the recession, this won’t be the solution for long-term sourcing needs. James Brian, director of product at job board Monster, reminds us that keeping a large database up-to-date is no easy task. “Some agencies are aiming to become more independent from job boards,” he says. “[But] a database of even millions of people is useless if the information contained isn’t current.”

Dan McGuire, managing director of job advert distribution and response tracking specialist Broadbean, is similarly sceptical about the notion of pools of “quality” candidates. “People have told me they’ll stop using job boards in a year or so as they’ll have so many candidates they won’t need them,” he says. “I’ve wished them luck with that.”

It’s fair to say that recruiters currently lack the experience and expertise of the job boards when it comes to managing candidate databases. And to highlight the scale on which boards do this, day in, day out, Totaljobs website director John Salt explains that the monthly average of different unique users to Totaljobs.com during 2009, compared to the previous month, has been 1.55m. “No single recruiter is able to generate anywhere near that level of fresh talent over such a short time,” he says.

Salt and the other job boards undoubtedly have a point but the economic downturn has forced recruiters and resourcing professionals to evaluate the processes and systems they have in place to collect candidate data. Recruitment consultancy Martin Ward Anderson, which specialises in accountancy and finance professionals, has worked hard on referrals and relationship building with candidates, and its activities have included a series of networking events with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Marketing manager Abigail Hemming says that 24% of its placements come from its own database and 21% are from referrals. Job boards alone account for 17% of placements, although when combined with social media sites such as Twitter, this statistic rises to 47%.

“We’ll still continue to use the job boards but as a business we have invested more time building our presence on social media sites,” says Hemming. “We’re also working closely with the institutes and are finding this activity is paying dividends.”

She adds that she’d like to see more focus on quality control from the boards. “I think job boards should be doing a lot more to help us improve the quality of responses through filtering products and advice on writing better adverts,” she says. “This would decrease the volume of irrelevant applications.” She’d also like to see better integration with social media sites.

Giles Guest, director of Enhance Media, which publishes the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS) and the soon to be launched Recruitment Online Survey for Employers (ROSE), believes that online recruitment will start to be more about building relationships with candidates. “And in particular about delivering smaller, more targeted lists of jobs to candidates and smaller more relevant lists of candidates to employers,” he says. “A big challenge for job boards will be to move up the value chain. The notion of a job board simply being a database of jobs will come to an end.”

We’ll still continue to use the job boards but as a business we have invested more time building our presence on social media sites

To be fair to the job boards, many of the good ones have been looking at how they can add value for some time and, as well as improving candidate features, have made improvements for recruiters and employers. Scotland’s leading recruitment site, s1jobs, claims that the tools and systems it offers to recruiters are more sophisticated than those available to jobseekers, such as applicant screening. “That’s because we recognise that professional recruiters have the skills and inclination to make use of all those added-value services,” says Mark Smith, s1jobs, managing director.

Monster says that its employer platform is “coming to fruition” and Brian says recruiters will be able to exert better control over their own accounts, benefit from tools such as a ‘compare and contrast’ feature and says it will be introducing Symantec Search to interrogate databases. Salt says that Totaljobs is focusing on the targeted delivery of several media channels to an engaged jobseeker, whether that be multimedia company profiles incorporating live chat, or embedded social networking tools.

Lee Biggins, managing director of CV-Library, meanwhile, says that with advertisers becoming choosier, additional services are imperative. It has introduced a traffic light system which shows the client response team how each account is performing. “So if it is not meeting its full potential, the team will proactively look to increase performance [for example, better quality candidates] and try and get better results for the clients,” says Biggins. He adds that he is looking at partnerships with several third-party suppliers in the field of response tracking.

Clearly investment in tracking software and services is one way that good job boards can tangibly demonstrate their worth to recruiters and employers. They should also be mindful that recruiters are being empowered to more closely monitor and compare job board performance. For example, tools from software developers Bond and Bullhorn allow recruiters to carry out concurrent internal database and external searches and Broadbean’s search tool, Stream, can simultaneously search online sources and show which ones provide the best return on investment (ROI). Going forward and with pressure still on spend, this all adds up to an increased focus on measurement and tracking across the job board sector.

Mark Rhodes, head of marketing and eCommerce at Reed.co.uk, says it has always endorsed response tracking as it is fundamental to the success of the business. The site works with third-party applicant tracking systems and sees ongoing integration as a core part of its own product development. He adds that he would fully support the introduction of new metrics and charging structures where it helps recruiters better understand the returns they receive on their investment. “The one caveat, however, is that the technology must be robust and simple enough to report accurately and with no scope for error or uncertainty,” says Rhodes. “Google’s success in generating advertising revenue owes a huge amount to the ease with which advertisers can report instantly and with 100% confidence on the effectiveness of their campaigns.”

While everyone wants recruitment to remain a people business, there is little doubt about the power of data to make everyone a better recruiter. As Guest says, better data enables better decisions, which will ultimately save money and deliver more relevant candidates. We are already starting to see more relevant metrics emerge for the post-recession era. Salt says he’s been to meetings in which recruiters tell him the exact cost of shortlisting, getting to interview or hire for a candidate sourced through Totaljobs and believes these metrics should become standards. Broadbean’s McGuire adds that it has started to look at metrics such as cost per placement, interview and application, and how that differs by location and industry. But he reminds everyone that to assess the true value of an advertising channel, as well as knowing what works, you have to understand what doesn’t.

“How much time is spent dealing with all the responses that aren’t right and how much money is wasted advertising jobs in the wrong place?” he says. “They’re important questions to ask. Just because a generalist job board has 40 sectors it doesn’t mean they’re equally as good at delivering in all of them. It’s one thing saying a job board delivers but if you stopped posting ads to its three weakest sectors, how much could you increase your ROI by?”