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Sounds simple but we have had the hardest time arriving there. The Big Three firehoses produce a flood of less than perfectly screened resumes and a consequently higher administrative workload. The little guys produce an erratic trickle of the right stuff. Everybody's learning while the customer pays a high price. No one has the full answer.

For the big boys, better quality service involves smarter search engines, clearer categorization and all of the other things you'd expect when trying to tame something that got too big too fast. For the little guys, more precise correlations of advertising and customer needs are the game. Adequate forecasting (which is now possible but unpracticed) is still too expensive for the little guys and too complicated (at scale) for the big players.

We're believers in  Campus Career Center's commitment to deliver the candidates you need but understand that their model works well on campuses and may not translate well to other venues. That it's harder to do off campus is not a good reason for not attempting to do it. The definition of effective service from a job board ought to be just the right number of the right candidates. Campus Career Center delivers on this promise for college recruiting.

A useful alternative is Hire.com's model which produces candidates who are qualified and available. While precision in quantities remains somewhat problematic, the administrative burden is radically reduced from job board dependence allowing rapid improvements in hiring cycles. Hire.com offers solid supplemental tools for increasing candidate traffic volume.

We're taken with another new innovation from RecruitUSA. The "Phaser" allows customers to set an ad budget and a prioritized/scheduled procurement of ads. In other words, you can wait to turn on the firehose until after you've tested the trickles. By setting  a spending budget per job and prioritizing the use of various boards, a new level of control is available. A Recruiter can turn off the spending when the right level of candidate saturation has been achieved. No longer does the use of multiple boards mean that you have to sift through the results of them all at the same time. RecruitUSA is wrestling with the problem of turning the flow into a faucet that can be easily managed. It's worth a look.

There's more ground to be covered. In the long haul, having the right level of candidate volume at the right time is a matter of building out very complex relationships in volume over time. We're just at the edges of learning how to do that.

-John Sumser