"Spotlight" takes a look at companies and services that help small and midsize businesses solve the problem of hiring. Know of a tool that you'd like to share? Email your suggestion to info@squarehire.com.   Today we're looking at Snagajob.

Snagajob (http://www.snagajob.com)  is a  job board for hiring hourly employees.  So this isn't the place to find doctors, accountants, or computer programmers, but it can be a good option if you're hiring for positions like:

• Food and restaurant
• Home healthcare or senior healthcare
• Customer service
• Administration and office support
• Retail
• Warehouse and production
• Light construction

Job Slots
Snagajob follows the standard job board model. You pay a fixed rate for a number of active job slots.  At the time of this writing, a single job slot costs $99/month.  That job slot allows you to have one active job at a time on snagajob.  That  means that even though only one job can be active at a time, you can swap multiple jobs in and out of that slot throughout the month. 

There is another pricing option that is not listed on the snagajob pricing page, a two week job slot for $49.  This link will take you to the page where the $49 posting is offered http://www.snagajob.com/employers/employer-pricing-plans-ca.  There's no telling how long that link will remain active.  If it doesn't work for you, try contacting snagajob support directly.

Resume Search
Job slots also come with unlimited access to the snagajob candidate search.  Resume search is less usefull for hourly positions than it is for white collar jobs, and you're highly likely to spend a lot of time contacting jobseekers who are no longer looking for a job, but it's still an important feature and it's nice that snagajob throws it in free with the job slots.

In Conclusion
If you're looking for hourly employees, snagajob is a good tool to have in your toolbox.  If you use snagajob and have any information you'd like to share, please email us at info@squarehire.com. 

When we talk about free job postings sites we mean a site where we can post jobs for free. There are  two different types of sites that fit what we're looking for, Free Job Boards and Job Search Engines.

Job Search Engines
Soon after the pay job boards like monster and careerbuilder became popular, a new type of free service emerged, the Job Search Engine.  These sites were places that jobseekers could come to find jobs, but instead of having their own job postings, they took the google (search engine) approach and indexed the job postings on other sites.  Jobseekers could then run a search on the Job Search Engine and get results back from tens, hundreds, or even thousands of different job boards and company websites.

The great thing about job search engines from an employers perspective is that they were indexing and driving traffic to job postings for free. The jobs search engines were willing to index jobs for free for the same reason that Google is willing to index websites for free.  They needed a big enough index that jobseekers would come to their search engine to search for jobs.  They needed the jobs to attract jobseekers. Once they had the jobseekers, then they could sell pay-per-click job postings ads, again just like Google's business model.

That's why pricing can be a little confusing on job search engines. Usually they don't sell job postings for a flat fee.  Instead they may ask employers to put money into a pay-per-click budget for the job. 

Some of the first and best known job search engines are: 
Indeed
SimplyHired
Glassdoor
Juju

There has been a recent surge in new job search engines. Some of the best of these newcomers are:
Careerjet
Linkup
JobInventory

Free Job Boards
Free job boards are just what they sound like, traditional job boards that have their own job postings, but they let employers post jobs for free.  Most of these will be small local job boards, sometimes associated with a professional association or a local chamber of commerce that charges a fee for membership and then offers jobs for free.  The reality is that free job boards are a bit of a myth.  Most people who talk about free job boards are really referring to a job search engine.

How can a company post jobs to these free sites?

The short answer is this:

1. There really aren't any free job boards worth posting to.  What companies really want to post to are Job Search Engines (sometimes referred to as aggregators)
2. The Job Search Engines really don't index individual companies or let them post jobs for free.  They did 5 years ago, but not anymore. 
3. The Jobs Search Engines will index  job boards, Applicant Tracking Systems, and very large companies for free. This is equivalent to letting them post jobs for free.

There's a lot of misinformation out there, and these free resources do exist if you're a large company.  But I'm sorry to say, if you're not a Fortune 500 company and you want to get your jobs listed on the job search engines for free, you can't really do it on your own.  

Your best option is to find an inexpensive  Applicant Tracking System (like SquareHire) that will get those jobs indexed for you.  A more detailed answer is included in this post How to Post to Job Search Engines for Free

What is a Job Search Engine?
Job Search Engines are job search websites that take the google (search engine) approach.  Instead of building a big database of their  own job postings, the index the job postings that exist on other websites and then provide search results that link to them.  This way, jobseekers can come to the job search engine and find job postings on hundreds, or even thousands of different job boards and company websites.

Some of the most popular job search engines are 
Indeed 
SimplyHired
Glassdoor

Why small and midsize companies can't really use job search engines for free.
The great thing about job search engines is that they don’t just index big job boards, they also index individual company websites.  In the early days you could contact Indeed or SimplyHired, give them a link to your company jobs page, and there was a good chance that they would start indexing your jobs and including them in their search results. 

These days it's not so easy.  Most job search engines will still let you submit your jobs page, but it's unlikely that it will get indexed unless you meet two criteria.  

First, you must provide a custom XML feed of your jobs.  This is a special data format that the job search engine specifies and each job search engine usually has a slightly different format.    For example, here is a link to the job feed format for SimplyHired 

http://www.simplyhired.com/a/add-jobs/example-xml

Second, you must have enough jobs to make it worth their while to index you.  If you only have a few open jobs each month, it's not really worth the overhead they incur by their systems constantly checking your feed for new jobs.

How small and midsize companies CAN use job search engines for free
The is a solution.  Smaller companies can plug into the free job search engine ecosystem if they use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).  An ATS (like SquareHire) is software that manages your hiring process.  You put jobs into it, the jobs are published to your company website and other free websites (like job search engines), and then applicants submit their resumes through the ATS.

Job search engines do take XML feeds from most Applicant Tracking Systems.  The ATS creates and submits the XML feed for each search engine so you don't have to.  The job search engines accept the feed from the ATS because that feed contains a high number of jobs from all of the ATS customers (you included).  

So the take-away is, when you use an ATS you get the job search engine ecosystem for free.

If you're reading this you probably want to get listed on the job search engines.  SquareHire is an ATS and will automatically publish your jobs to (at the time of this writing) 5 different job search engines / free job board networks.  An easy way to get started is the SquareHire free plan at https://www.squarehire.com/ShPub/Signup?planId=10