Why Cambridge needs a dedicated job board

It is widely accepted that Cambridge continues to be one of the fastest growing UK cities, year after year.

Cambridge companies made a significant contribution to the UK’s output in 2022, as they have done in previous years. Much of this can be directly attributed to the amount of growth that Cambridge companies have experienced over the past 12-18 months.

With demand for staff at an all-time high, it is incredible to think that until recently, Cambridge didn’t have a dedicated job board.

So just how does the Cambridge Jobs Board benefit local employers?

Cleverly targeted advertising

National job boards spend a lot of money on advertising: online; radio, and TV. You name it, and they have most likely used it. And yet, their very nature (i.e., national) means that a lot of this advertising is not targeted.

Sure, search engines can now do clever things with sponsored keyword adverts, and job seekers will inevitably be channelled towards these national boards. However, as soon as they click through to the site, all of that targeting is gone. Job seekers in Cambridge are directed to the same page as job seekers in Glasgow or Manchester, with several hundred thousand jobs to search through. Not great.

However, by having a job board focused entirely on one location, in this case, Cambridge, all the website marketing is immediately targeting the ‘right’ job seekers. Why would you visit a job board dedicated to Cambridge if you wanted to work in Bristol or Edinburgh?

Targeted advertising = effective advertising and the result is a much higher percentage of relevant traffic visiting our site. In turn, this will ultimately result in more hires for local employers.

Increased access to passive job seekers

It has long been assumed that only active job seekers use job boards. If you want to reach passive job seekers, you don’t use a job board. Right? Well, traditionally this has been true, as national job boards have so many agency adverts, it takes far too long for a passive job seeker to find anything even remotely interesting. Thus, they give up and leave the site quite quickly.

When we recently surveyed users of the Cambridge Jobs Board, we found this to be quite the opposite. It turns out that passive job seekers use our site just as much as active job seekers. Why?

Well, because our site is dedicated to jobs in Cambridge and the surrounding area, it is much quicker and easier for them to keep up to date with who is looking for what.

So, while they might not be actively seeking a new job, a weekly browse of the site is not tricky, nor time-consuming, and is often very rewarding.

A real opportunity to promote your ‘employer brand’

For all the fantastic ‘PR’ that Cambridge and the surrounding area continues to receive, many people still see Cambridge as just a ‘University city.’ Not that there is anything wrong with this, but Cambridge has so much more to offer, not least the many amazing local employment opportunities.

Employer brand awareness is now so crucial to both big and small companies alike, with job seekers putting a lot of importance upon this when looking for a new job. However, it’s all good and well investing time and money on improving your employer brand, but if job seekers are not ’aware’ of this, what’s the point?

As well as offering fully branded job ads, the site uses individually crafted company pages to allow employers to upload creative content, photos, and videos, showing job seekers what it is like to work there. With a dedicated job board, Cambridge employers finally have somewhere to promote their employer brand.

A job board for job seekers

Having a list of jobs in Cambridge on your website does not make you a job board. Nor does it guarantee a user-friendly experience. More often than not is it quite the opposite.

While other local sites support and promote B2B networking, job advertising in Cambridge has been limited to newspapers and one or two ‘niche’ business sites, whose focus is on commerce and not recruitment. From a job seeker’s point of view, the search for a new job is both painful and time-consuming.

With a site that is focused entirely on local employment and nothing else, the user experience for job seekers is improved infinitely. The better the experience for job seekers, the more likely they are to stay on the site and view more jobs, increasing applicant rates.

The Cambridge Jobs Board is dedicated to supporting employers in Cambridge and the surrounding area, connecting as many job seekers and employers as possible.