In “All Job Sites Are Becoming One!”, veteran job board entrepreneur Bill Warren talks about the blurring of lines between job boards:
Post a job on your corporate web site, or on any commercial site, and follow that job through its Internet journey. Regardless of where you post your job it will end up on many of the same sites. The power of craigslist, Google Base, and vertical search engines Indeed, SimplyHired and others — often called “aggregators” — are redefining Internet recruiting. In my opinion, three things are happening.
The vertical search engines (or “aggregators”) are taking Internet recruiting in a new and exciting direction, job listings are quickly becoming a commodity, and essentially “all job sites are becoming one.”
I'm glad you mentioned it Bill because it's been on my mind a lot! If the job listings themselves are less valuable in today's online recruiting environment, what factors are becoming more important? Well, don't forget that in the late nineties when the online recruiting market was born, unemployment was much higher and recruiting talent much easier.
In today's hypercompetitive employment market, the websites that thrive, will be those with core competencies in
- internal hiring and management
- growing and managing a sales force
- producing or aggregating original content
- candidate marketing and traffic building
- user experience
- customer service
I put internal hiring and management at the top of the list, because the team that hires and keeps the best people wins! Character counts more than ever now. You might think that these have always been the ingredients for running a successful job board… but previously at the top of the list, you might have had:
- being first in the market
- getting lots of job listings
- industry connections or experience
Are the verticals good for candidates? Well, we shouldn't generalize so much… for some jobseekers (entry level, broad interests, geographically focused) they will be good and for others with a more focused outlook, they don't add that much in my opinion.
For better or worse, our ecosystem has become more complex and perhaps hospitable to a number of new species… whether or not they come to dominate, it is definitely an exciting time to be in the job board business!
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