What is Talent.com?
TrustRadius Research Team Analysis
What is Talent.com
Talent.com is a generalist job board that seeks to match job hunters and companies. It is available in over 78 countries and has over 35 million jobs posted per month. Talent.com’s position as a generalist job board puts it in direct competition with sites like Indeed, Ziprecruiter, LinkedIn Jobs, and Monster.The Basic Process
Applicant Pool
For generalist job boards such as Talent.com and Indeed, the proportion of qualified candidates is likely to be the same as in the general population. This is in contrast to niche job boards, where you may expect the user base to have a much higher proportion of appropriate candidates than the general population. As such, the number of qualified candidates is directly proportional to the size of the user base.
Getting the size of the user base is not an easy task, since every job board knows the user base is important and inflates their numbers wherever possible. As a proxy, I prefer to use the number of unique monthly visitors and some other SEO stats shown for August 2022.
Simply put, Indeed is the winner here. More people are looking at more pages for more time on Indeed than on any other job board. That means more visibility for your job. However, that doesn’t mean that Talent.com is uncompetitive. While it isn’t leading the pack in traffic, it does have the second-highest average pages per visit and the third-highest average visit duration.
Further, Talent.com has a large partner network with over 1000 partners. These partners display jobs depending on their audience. The exact value of the partner network is hard to quantify. It does definitely help get job posts in front of more eyes. Whether those are the right eyes is a different question.
On one hand, posting certain jobs to niche websites, like a developer forum, makes sure the right people are seeing posts. On the other hand, many of those people may not be actively looking for jobs and may just click on the job description out of curiosity.
Applicant Filtering
Having candidates take online tests is another way to screen them. Indeed, Ziprecruiter, LinkedIn, and Monster all have skills assessments for candidates, and Talent.com does not. The number of recruiters and HR professionals who value these skill assessments is growing, so this could be a big weakness.
Campaign Management
These campaign management tools mostly center around optimizing the way your cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-application (CPA), and overall applicant volume interact with each other. These tools include:
Increasing CPC to increase visibility and raise volume
Geo-expanding to increase applicant volume
Diverting funds towards partners with the best metrics or most relevant job titles to improve CPA
Many similar tools are available from Talent.com’s competitors. Indeed allows for optimization based on one of five pre-set criteria. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager similarly lets you choose a primary objective from a pre-defined set and optimizes your campaign around that.
For the most part, the competitor’s campaign management tools require less effort to use but are not as granular and flexible as Talent.com’s tools. Talent.com makes some passing references to running campaigns for businesses on its blog. However, specific details are lacking, especially for the cost, and probably only available on request.
Resume Search and Matching
Integrations
For example, Indeed has a number of ATSs that Talent.com does not. These include ADP Recruiting, ADP Workforce Now, Arcoro, Avature, Homebase, UKG, OnShift, Paycor, Paylocity, When I Work, and Workable. That is a long list of ATSs associated with HR Management systems for small and mid-sized businesses.
On a similar note, Talent.com has a number of ATSs that Indeed does not. These include iSmartRecruit, Recruit CRM, Staffing Future, Talent Now, and SAP SuccessFactors. All of these are either meant for recruiting agencies or enterprise-level businesses.
That isn’t to say that Indeed can’t handle recruiting agencies or that Talent.com is a poor choice for a small business. However, looking at the integrations can suggest what each platform is leaning towards. It also means that you should check your ATS because whether or not it is supported can be a deciding factor if you are still on the fence.
Pricing
While this is incredibly frustrating, it is also not that uncommon. Many pay-per-click job boards lack pricing transparency for job postings. In fact, the exact rate for a pay-per-click job post might fluctuate from day to day. For example, we can see the following help desk FAQ from LinkedIn:
The real question is always who is cheaper while still delivering high-quality candidates, which is hard to answer when a lot of the prices are published or even known ahead of time. However, I would like to point to this blog post by Talent.com. When the result of “weekly meetings and a constant flow of open dialogue” is that “Our cost per application is now slightly lower than with other providers,” I don’t think that is a ringing endorsement on the price front for businesses who don’t have the resources for that level of oversight and engagement.
Use Case
It has strong web traffic, a wide reach, and granular campaign management tools. However, it lacks a resume database, it has relatively poor candidate filtering capabilities, and its pricing is questionable.
Talent.com’s strongest use case for either large businesses with significant hiring needs or recruiting agencies. Both of these groups can effectively utilize Talent.com’s wide reach. They can also dedicate the manpower to effective campaign management to lower costs and fully optimize outcomes.
Talent.com’s weaknesses are not as much of a problem for these groups. With a strong ATS and other tech stack, they don’t necessarily need Talent.com’s tools to handle candidate filtering and assessment for them. If they want that, they likely have it built out somewhere else. Additionally, these groups may not be interested in candidate filtering, as their other recruitment automation tools may handle that.
Categories & Use Cases
Technical Details
| Mobile Application | No |
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