Blogs

Yesterday, I talked about why I blog so today let's talk about why you should blog if you run a job board.

Competition is heating up geometrically. Transparency is being forced on us all as secrets become evermore difficult to keep. The winners will be boards that build credibility and authenticity.  You can have high credibility without a blog but if you want authenticity, start blogging.

Blogging may attract special people who are passionate about your product like our Sandra Bavasso. She worked for us for five years and had a big impact on the company starting our job fair business and launching many new features like job agents.

Had an interesting conversation with Mike O'Brien and Nick Jimenez at climber.com a few days ago and when I asked them how I can improve my blog, they said 'transparency'.  They wanted to know why I blog -- so here it is:

Why do I blog?

When I first met Allen, he was fairly new to the job board industry but talked about its similarities with the newspaper digitization industry which he pioneered beginning in the early 80s.  Launching in 2005 his company onTargetJobs.com has built a substantial portfolio of niche job boards. His most recent acquisition of RegionalHelpWanted.com valued near $100 million was onTargetJob’s largest to date.   I had been planning to interview Allen for some time and with the changes in management at onTarget, this seemed like the right moment. Don't miss reading Allen's bio and resume while listening to techno music.

The 2008 Top 100 US Job Board Niches report lists the 100 most searched for job categories. For each of these employment categories it lists the top ranked job boards according to Google but excludes the following:

A reasonably sophisticated friend (working on his Ph.D.) admitted to me recently that he has never heard of Monster or CareerBuilder.com and that got me thinking about the word 'job board' -- how many people actually know it?

I've been working in the job board industry for 11 years and come to realize 'job board' is not in the dictionary nor in Wikipedia. So what would the Wikipedia page for 'job board' look like? Maybe something like this:

A job board is a website that publishes job ads and is dedicated to matching employers with job seekers.

History

Here is why I am so fascinated by the free classifieds concept and in particular free job boards -- they create more value than they capture. I came across this thinking in a post by Aaron Wall today and realized that it perfectly illustrates a serious flaw in the typical job board business model. Generally speaking and within reason, we capture as much value as we can. And that makes us vulnerable, inspires competition and limits our growth. The quote that grabbed me comes from Tim O'Reilly's blog:

We just launched a website that aggregates the top career advice blogs - the site is only a few days old so you can expect to see some nice improvements happening in a couple of weeks.

Since this website builds on our experience with InternetRecruitingNews.com it's not really as crappy as you might expect for a few days work. Our Croatian designer disappeared weeks ago, so I had to do the logo myself and that's probably the weakest link!

Suggestions for improvements?

 

I love the job board business but could never have imagined the roller coaster ride that it is... sometimes talking to other job board people is just good therapy, because many of these things or some variation on them will happen to everyone sooner or later. This morning, I started this list in frustration after a database server crash.

Competition