Paying for Reed, CV Library, Totaljobs, and LinkedIn Recruiter separately is costing you more than it should. Here is a smarter way to source candidates without the expense.

If you are running a recruitment desk in the UK right now, chances are you are either juggling subscriptions across several job boards or missing out on good candidates because you can only afford one or two of them.

Reed, CV Library, Totaljobs, Monster, LinkedIn Recruiter. They all charge separately. They all have candidates the others do not. And most recruiters end up either overspending or under-sourcing as a result.

There is a better way to go about it.

Why Paying for Every Job Board Separately Does Not Make Sense

The average job board subscription in the UK is not cheap. When you start adding them up across Reed, CV Library, Totaljobs, Monster and LinkedIn Recruiter, you are looking at a significant monthly outgoing before you have even placed anyone.

For a small or independent recruitment business that is a real problem. You are essentially paying upfront for access to candidates you may or may not find, on roles that may or may not convert.

And even if you do have the budget for it, managing five different platforms, five different search interfaces and five different candidate databases takes up a lot of time that could be spent on actual recruitment work.

The Candidates You Are Missing

Every job board has a slightly different pool of active candidates. Someone who registered on CV Library three months ago might never have looked at Reed. A passive candidate on LinkedIn might not be on any of the traditional boards at all.

If you are only searching one or two platforms, you are working with a fraction of the available talent. That matters more on hard to fill roles where the right person might only exist on one specific database.

The recruiters who consistently fill roles faster are not necessarily better at interviewing or writing job ads. They just have access to more candidates and can move quickly when the right one comes up.

What Most Recruiters Do Instead

A lot of recruiters settle into a routine. They post on the board that has worked before and hope for the best. When that does not deliver they either spend more time manually searching or ask the client to extend the deadline.

Neither of those is a great outcome. Clients notice when searches drag on. And spending four hours manually trawling through profiles is four hours not spent on business development or managing existing relationships.

The smarter approach is to have someone else do the sourcing across all the main boards while you focus on the parts of recruitment that actually need your expertise.

A More Cost Effective Way to Source

Rather than subscribing to every job board individually, a growing number of UK recruiters are using a sourcing partner who already has access to all of them.

The way it works is straightforward. You share the vacancy and what you are looking for. The sourcing team searches across Reed, CV Library, Totaljobs, Monster, LinkedIn Recruiter and local databases, formats the best CVs and sends them across. You review and shortlist. No platform management, no wasted subscriptions, no hours lost to searching.

At Source Mate that is exactly what the team does. Whether it is a one off role that needs a quick turnaround or a steady flow of vacancies on an ongoing basis, the sourcing gets handled so you can get on with the job.

How It Saves You Money

Think about what you are actually paying for when you subscribe to a job board. You are paying for access to a database of candidates. That is it.

When you work with a sourcing partner who already has that access, you are not paying subscription costs. You are paying for the actual output, which is good CVs on the right roles. It is a much more direct transaction and for most recruiters it works out significantly cheaper than maintaining multiple board subscriptions month after month.

It also scales properly. If you have three roles on this month you need three roles worth of sourcing. If you have ten next month you need ten roles worth. A subscription does not flex like that. A sourcing arrangement does.

Getting Started

If you have got a live vacancy that is not getting the candidates it needs, the easiest thing to do is try it on one role and see what comes back.

Send the job title, a brief on what you are looking for and the location. The team at Source Mate will search across the main boards and get some shortlisted CVs back to you. From there you can decide whether it is something worth doing on a regular basis.

No long term commitment needed to find out if it works.

Get in touch at source-mate.com or drop a message directly to find out more.