I would like to add a little bit to the discussion about the future of job boards. As a longtime job board operator, I alternate between being amused by job board bashing and being concerned over the future of our own business. In addition to running a job board, we also have been in the job search engine business for two+ years and run a number of career focused social networks.
It is true that I no longer recommend starting a job board to anyone. That’s not because job boards don’t have a good future, it is purely a function of the intense competition and rate of change in our industry. The job board business can still be a viable and rewarding place for entrepreneurs who have a lifetime’s worth of resources, knowledge and connections in an unserved niche and have the patience to focus on delivering value. If that’s not you, take heed of Don Firth’s advice: "My best advice is to launch your job board in the late 90s or early
2000s. Today, it’s very difficult for any new job board to compete
against the established boards."
So what about the job board bashing business? Here is what I think is going on:
- During a recession, everyone loves to hate job boards. During the real estate boom, everyone gorged on big houses and every conversation turned magnetically to real estate profits. During the .com bubble, everyone quit their job and started a .com. So what?
- A lot of the naysayers have a direct economic stake in bashing job boards.
Some are self-evident like a healthcare insurance company that is
opposed to health care reform. Of course, they predict doom if reform
is enacted. Recruiters are a good example.
But, the handful of times I tried to use a recruiter, I asked each one
not to use job boards. Each time, the recruiter ignored me and sent me
resumes from major job boards. Yes, there are good and bad job boards
just as there are good and bad recruiters. - Some commentators and ‘gurus’ have indirect economic interests in bashing job boards.
Bloggers and consultants have to say something. Social networking comes
to mind. The media and consultants need predictions and messages. They
need something to talk about and sell, the more controversial the
better. No message = no readers = no ads & no clients. - Fewer job boards is a good thing. In a bubble, everyone looks
smart and most are motivated by greed. It’s a very noisy time and it’s
hard for quality to shine. A recession weeds out competitors who
pollute the marketplace with more noise than value. A few barking dogs
ruins the neighborhood. Instead of predicting the demise of job boards, let’s hear about sites that have actually thrown in the towel. - When we emerge from the recession and companies have to compete
for talent again, employers are going to go back to throwing money in every
direction. Sure,
employers are cutting costs now and job boards are being punished. But
talent will never cease to be the lifeblood of free enterprise. It’s
very likely that the recruiting industry has 10 years of steady growth
in front of us. Job boards included. - Some of the bashers are motivated by the simple psychology of envy according to Jeff Dickey-Chasins: job boards are too simple and easy to start to be expensive. I cannot argue with that!
The good news is, recovery is right around the corner now, and pretty soon the wave of bad PR for job boards will begin to fade away, until the next recession!
‘Job boards are dying’ posts:
- Cheezhead
- Corcodilos.com
- PersonalBrandingBlog.com
- Lou Adler
- Human Resources Pufnstuf
- Simon Meth
- QuintCareers
- WSJ
What do you think?
{ 9 comments }
Nice follow up to the CareerBuilder post Eric.
Couple of thoughts:
Job boards much like the staffing industry are going through unprecedented change. Change that brings about fresh perspective, and a new way of doing business.
I see these two industries very much joined at the hip, like it or not. Having spent the past 13 years in financial recruiting and the past 2.5 years running a niche job board the game is very much the same, fierce competition, building strong relationships with clients and candidates and providing better service and value than your competition.
As in past recessions competition weeds away the tire kickers. Unfortunately, this one will have a longer recovery period with sustained high unemployment through much of 2010. Recruiters and job boarders alike will continue to innovate and will once again re-gain their rightful place.
**es** thanks Todd. at this point, I think we will all be grateful for any recovery no matter how slow!
Soon it is a PDA lets call it a “spank” or some other trendy name for the technology that will allow us to access, organize and leverage the growing knowledge repository which is the web and the services based around it.
The website including job board is dead ……… it just doesn’t know it yet !
smsthejob.com.au allows you receive and apply for a job from your very handy, always on, little life support mobile
I continue to be amazed at the degree to which our field of recruiting and staffing has been completely seduced and mesmerized by all things INTERNET over the past few years.
Led by the younger generations in staffing and recruiting who were weaned onto "the computer" since grade school, so many nowadays sincerely think that the computer and the internet are the ONLY way to do almost ANYTHING…from recruiting to simply communicating with someone who sits 10 feet down the hall from them.
In an article which I wrote for "The Fordyce Letter," a respected journal of recruiting topics, I made the case that even in this computer age, if a company is serious about hiring the BEST, most qualified candidates, in the most effective, timely, and economic way, the best way to do that is through a program of targeted, primarily TELEPHONE-BASED identification and recruiting of PASSIVE candidates. (And NO, anyone you find posted on the internet, even on the so-called "Business Networks," is NOT a true "Passive" candidate….anyone who posts a profile or resume on the internet is most likely ACTIVELY seeking a job to one degree or another, and often for reasons that make them not as attractive a candidate as the true "Passive" candidate who is well-situated where they are right now and NOT in the job market).
In a recent article, Lou Adler pointed out that only about FIFTEEN PERCENT of candidates are normally "in the job market" at any given time…and thus might post a resume on the internet, or respond to job advertisements or posting.
Further, on the popular "business networking sites," it takes little experience with such tools to quickly discover that only a SMALL PERCENTAGE of the people you might want to target as candidates from any given employer in any given job function have in fact posted themselves on such sites.
So if you want a shot at recruiting that OTHER 85% of prime, "A" candidates that are NOT "Active" candidates — are NOT to be found on the internet or answering your job ads, you must PROACTIVELY GO OUT AND GET THEM!
The best, most efficient, and most productive way to DO that is with a highly targeted, TELEPHONE-BASED program of PASSIVE candidate identification and sourcing (recruiting).
The process, for those of you who might be unfamiliar with it, is as follows: 1. You identify a list of prime "target companies" from which you would like to pull your candidates 2. You use skilled telephone researchers (either your own or from a specialist research firm) to penetrate those companies by telephone and get a COMPLETE LIST of all of the players in a given function or at a given level that meet your candidate criteria 3. You, or a good "Passive" candidate sourcing firm you outsource this work to, proactively telephone each such prospect on the list you have developed in step 2, and SELL THEM on the benefits of the opportunity you are trying to fill…then do a preliminary screening of them, get resumes and compensation info from all interested and qualified prospects, and move them on to the stage of in-depth interviewing.
Telephone-based recruitment of "Passive" candidates has been the "Gold Standard" for the best retained search firms for generations now, and despite the advent of the computer and internet, it is STILL being used, still works, is still cost-efficient, and is still the fastest way to assemble a good array of top-quality candidates for any position.
Please feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss this subject further.
MIKE RABIN
President
THE RABIN GROUP
Search-Research and Candidate-
Sourcing for "Passive" Candidates
847-394-5254
rabgrp@aol.com
**es** Amen Mike! it’s not easy finding a recruiter who will actually do this anymore.
I agree that traditional job boards are dying. Who wants to pay to post jobs and search through candidate databases. Although who wants to waste excessive amounts of time searching and networking in multiple social networks that were Never designed or structured for employment purposes!
Job Boards just need a new approach….
Great topical post.
In Australia, there have been a number of blog and industry articles in a similar vein. Unfortunately many are focused on the short term rather than the long term.
In times of economic boom, SEEK found that advertisers struggled to find good candidates, and were inclined to support other channels and methods beyond advertising out of necessity. The thing was that jobseekers didn’t do the same – they were able to use job boards or recruiters very easily, and access the job market without needing to resort fo alternative models.
As economic hard times came around, the situation reversed. Jobseekers started to explore a diversity of channels to find new opportunity, though not at the expense of job boards. Advertisers found that using other channels could sometimes deliver a good candidate or a cheaper candidate. The advertisers of course all realise that candidate supply is cyclical and haven’t really abandoned job boards as a source, simply because job boards are still very effective – and will continue to be – and the productivity cost of sourcing from other channels is far greater in the long term.
These trends are well supported by the actual numbers.
Job board traffic to the major Australian job boards is at an all time high. The same is true when you look at SEEK’s job boards in Australia, new Zealand and the UK as well as our international investments in China’s Zhaopin, Brazil’s Catho and Manager, and South East Asia’s Jobstreet.
There has been no change in the upstream and downstream traffic statistics to alternative sources for jobhunting. The number of applications per ad on Australian job boards are up by over 100% in some cases. So the jobseekers are not deserting job boards at all in countries across the world.
With jobseeker engagement with job boards growing, not shrinking, its hard to see how a prediction of industry death can be right.
When you look at the advertiser volumes on our job board which has the largest market share, the number of long term advertisers has not changed apart from where companies have gone under.
Clearly the advertisement volume has changed exactly in line with forecasts correlating to the unemployment and participation rates in the economy. That was to be expected. All channels are effected by this, not just job boards.
The data simply does not support the idea that there is an exodus of actual advertisers to alternative sources.
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that advertisers are using complementary sources, but none that supports a winner / loser shift in channel choice along the lines that occurred in the structural shift from print to online.
These broad trends are perhaps complicated by data showing shifts in market share for different job boards.
What SEEK has seen is a number of advertisers cancelling contracts with niche job boards and the number two and three job boards in favour of consolidating their spend with the number one job board, particularly as applications per ad grow, and jobseeker numbers hit all-time highs.
This is a factor that may only be consistent in markets like Australia where there is a very strong number one job board – SEEK.
We grew our market share over the last year (measured by Neilsen in jobseeker time on site on Australian job boards) from around 70% to 78% over the last year.
The loss of advertising customers among niche and secondary-generalist job boards has meant many job boards have had to change business model to offer ‘all-you-can-eat’, ‘pay-for-performance’ or ‘free advertising’ deals in an attempt to retain customer bases. This trend has certainly been observed in markets outside of Australia as well.
While these are legitimate survival strategies for secondary, niche and alternative-model job boards, they ultimately destroy value in the industry for the longer term, because they’ll find it very hard to raise prices or renogotiate contracts from free upwards as the market returns. They may well do themselves out of existence.
In other words, what we’re seeing is consolidation of the industry around strong market leaders and products with a real core value.
While large scale generalist job boards are going to continue to serve as the primary means to access job / candidate markets for employers, recruiters and consumers, we are seeing the effects of economic cyclicality in the long term value of the idustry and the ability for smaller players to survive, and the cyclical effects of channel economics in different ways for jobseekers and advertisers.
The right answer here is to look at the long term view rather than draw hard conclusions about sesimic shifts in the industry from very short term trends driven by recent economic circumstances.
**es** Good to know, that’s great informatin Carey, thanks!
The number one factor accounting for double-digit increases in the average length of unemployment is the reliance on job boards.
First have to admit a bias because I am about to launch in Australia a new job ad service that is a web to sms service.
It will deliver to Job Seekers registered in the system, job ads directly to a mobile phone via sms and then allow the recipients to apply for a job by “replying” to the job ad sms and, because I need to promote that site, it is http://www.smsthejob.com.au.
I do believe the web is today’s ultimate knowledge repository and that having to be locked in a space somewhere behind a clumsy computer, even laptop computer, to access or interface with that knowledge seems counter intuitive in a world becoming more and more mobile & where a convenience of interaction with everything is the trend.
The iPhone and its apps are a glimpse at tomorrow not just job ads but all your information available on convenient mobile platforms is where we are headed.
http://www.SMStheJOB.com.au is taking job ads to this new place and yes as it occurs to more and more web based services then web sites, including job boards, will die.
Long live portability of knowledge.
Rob
[where are those spiders when you need em] http://www.smsthejob.com.au
Massive job boards, as they are today, are a major cause of dysfunction in the job market. Recruiters, as they are today, are close behind.
**es** lol, shall we add applicant tracking systems and employers in the race?
There is a lot of speculation that job boards are going to become obsolete and companies will find talent through social networks only. Social Networks have changed the dimensions of Recruiting in profound ways. And every recruiter and employer seems to be enamored by the world of “Social Recruiting” or “Crowd Sourcing” talent.
And the popularity of social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter certainly adds to the speculation that job boards like Monster & Careerbuilder is going to go away. But what the speculators fail to understand is that social recruiting as the primary source of talent acquisition works only in an economy in which you have 6 job seekers for every job. Employers can afford to be extremely selective and solely recruit from their networks (within the six-degrees of separation) because they have enough unemployed top talent within their network. But this model will fall in its face as the economy starts growing and companies start aggressively hiring. Can you imagine a world where all positions are hired through social networks? People won’t know where to go to look for jobs because all jobs will be hidden…that model just won’t work and is not sustainable in a growing economy.
Employers and Recruiters talk about the passive candidate talent pool as the “holy grail” of recruiting. This proverbial holy grail is really less of a recruiting platform in a recessing economy. Gainfully employed people in this economy are reluctant to switch jobs…so even though employers and recruiters can research passive candidates on LinkedIn and Facebook all day long…but when it comes the time to take the plunge, these passive candidates are not budging an inch from their current safe havens at their current employers.
So Job Boards are certainly not going away…they will however undergo major transformations and will have to revise their current business models. The business model of charging to post a job and search resumes seems really outdated in the Web 2.0 & beyond world where the whole premise of the internet is to connect with people and disseminate information easily. Why should companies have to pay to post a job and find people? The value add of job boards will be in the area of providing a feature-rich talent evaluation platform. Job boards will also have to evolve to integrate the major social networks into the job search and talent acquisition processes in meaningful ways. Some job boards are trying to reinvent the wheel by creating their own social networks…like Careerbuilder’s experiment with Brightfuse…their failed attempt to create another LinkedIn. What were they thinking? Why would I move my profile from LinkedIn to Brightfuse when I have all my connections and network at LinkedIn? People don’t need any more social networks…they now need tools to leverage their existing social networks.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, John Katz, the chief investment officer of Matrix Asset Advisors in New York, predicted that Monster is positioned for solid growth in the coming years. The article can be found here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125399832850543723.html . Speaking about Monster’s stock price, John said that he’s “very confident” that in 12 months, the stock will be in the mid-$20s. He also said that he is a frequent buyer of Monster’s stock as he considers it a good investment. This is just more affirmation that job boards are here to stay…but undoubtedly at the brink of a major transformation.