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

The process for posting a job opening for small and mid-sized companies (less than 500 employees) is very straightforward. Simply create an account. It will require your name, email, phone number, and some details about your business. Then click the “Post Job” button on your account page. Fill out the job details.

Picture of initial form

Then fill in the job description as well as the pay range. On the next page, select any screener questions that you would like on the application. Then agree to the terms and conditions and post your job.

Applicant Pool

All other features and tools aside, there are two things that you want from a job board. First, to get you the highest number of qualified applicants for your job. Second, to get you as few unqualified applicants as possible. Unfortunately, the two goals aren’t always easy to meet at the same time, but it is generally better to sacrifice goal two to achieve goal one. You can always filter bad candidates, but you can’t magically make good candidates appear.

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.

Picture of the first stage of posting a job

Source: Semrush

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

Applicant filtering tools on Talent.com take the form of screener questions. There are some preset questions, like years of experience and available start date, as well as the ability to create custom questions. These questions aren’t set up to be deal-breaker questions like on Indeed and Ziprecruiter. They are just things that you can use for quick manual filtering.

Picture of applicant filtering questions

How does this compare to other job boards? As mentioned, both Ziprecruiter and Indeed offer deal-breaker screening questions such as education or years of experience in a field. These questions will simply hide or reject candidates who do not provide appropriate answers.

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

The simplest campaign management tool, and the one that will be used by all employers, is setting a maximum budget. Beyond this, many of the campaign management tools are targeted toward enterprises or recruiters. This is reasonable because if you wear multiple hats in a small business or mid-size business, you probably don’t have the time to use these.

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

Many job sites, including Indeed, Ziprecruiter, LinkedIn, and Monster, offer access to an extensive library of resumes. Depending on the site, you can either search through these yourself to find potential candidates or the site will automatically match with candidates. Talent.com does not provide this service, and it is a noticeable absence from their offering for employers and recruiters looking to tap into the passive candidate pool.

Integrations

Talent.com has a massive list of applicant tracking system integrations, numbering just short of 100. This compares favorably with a lot of other job boards. One interesting thing to note is what ATSs are and are not included and how this differs from other job boards and how this reflects on the use case.

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

So Talent.com has all of this interesting stuff, but how much does it cost? That’s a good question, and the answer is you don’t know. Not only does Talent.com not publicly publish its pricing, but you can’t see the price before posting a job. You know the cost is based on how many people click on your post, but you don’t know what that rate is. The most you can do before posting the job is setting a maximum budget.

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:

Picture LinkedIn Cost-Per-Click policy

Of course, that’s not to say that every job board does this. Indeed has a similar pay-per-applicant model for sponsored jobs where the rate is determined by job market factors. However, that rate is shown upfront. And many job boards charge a flat rate, such as Monster.

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

Talent.com has definitely made it into the top echelon of generalist job boards. However, the competition is stiff, and Talent.com has nothing to definitively set itself apart from its competitors.
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.

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What is Talent.com?

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