The debate on the future of Job Boards seems to become more polarized by the day. Depending on your viewpoint / agenda it seems you should either believe they are going to suffer a painful death and all shut down tomorrow or carry on regardless effortlessly circumventing the massive digital changes that are effecting every other industry so dramatically. History should teach us that changes in the recruitment industry are never so black and white but instead always come in a million shades of grey.
With all of this in mind I’ve been pondering recently what the future might actually hold and some recent experiences are indicating the emergence of a massively disruptive trend.
As anyone who has properly experimented with social media will tell you, it’s all about conversations. It’s all about connecting, listening and engaging and the ability to do this on an enormous scale offers the glimpse of a brave new world for recruitment. Emerging “conventional” wisdom says that bulk feeding jobs into Twitter is at best missing the point and at worst cynical spam. While I strongly agree with the “conversations” viewpoint I would now argue that Twitter job feeds are not necessarily mutually exclusive. After all following someone’s Twitter feed is an opt in choice and it is impossible to spam users on Twitter if they are not following you. The flip-side of this though is that not many people will want to follow an automated job feed, making its potential reach distinctly unimpressive
However a few weeks back I became aware of a fascinating paradox. While I was doing a project for a big corporate employer they started experimenting with an automated Twitter job feed. Expectations were low and the number of followers the Twitter stream attracted was even lower! It soon became clear though that something very unexpected was happening. Despite only having 50 followers the Twitter account started generating over 200 quality CVs / resumes a week. Since then I’ve found numerous other corporates and job boards who are experiencing the same thing and keeping it to themselves as a kind of “dirty secret”. Before anyone starts thinking this has got anything to do with brand or employer brand it’s also worth noting that a lot of these feeds are anonymous!
So what’s happening? Well in addition to being an excellent tool for conversations, Twitter is also an open platform that it is very easy to get content into and out of. While people may not be following job feeds directly, they are obviously using Twitter to search for jobs somehow. This may be via general search engines like Twitter Search, via vertical ones such as Twitterjobsearch or by other means. While we may not be exactly sure how these quality candidates are accessing the jobs, the evidence that they are doing so and in numbers is pretty strong.
If this trend continues and more and more employers set up free job feeds, we’ll start to see the creation of a what I’d call a “Job Cloud”. Effectively a free Twitter powered open access database of jobs much bigger than the closed databases job boards currently hold and charge for. This is highly disruptive and would certainly dramatically alter the recruitment advertising landscape. Rather than the focus being on the publishing of jobs it would shift to be providing users with the tools to access, find and filter jobs within this “Job Cloud”.
How will this pan out? Well I’m not exactly sure at this stage but I would suspect that as an industry we should start taking companies like Twitterjobsearch and the many other start ups offering Twitter job filtering very seriously indeed. Although they could be an even more radical viewpoint that this will be a concept that is impossible to monetize. If that’s true it would be great news for employers but bad news for the job board industry.
Whatever people might say, two key revenue pillars of the recruitment industry have always been “owning” candidates and “owning” jobs. LinkedIn is already disrupting the candidate ownership space and it looks like Twitter might be about to do the same thing with job advertising
Really liked your article. Thought provoking and very true. Will pass this along to people I know. Thanks, and keep up the great work.
Hey Matt, excellent post.
You’re dead right about the notion of “ownership” in recruitment being dead. It’s a dinosaur notion. The real challenge for recruiters is how they can add value through deeper search and more effective selection techniques.
I don’t buy what you’re saying about Twitter though. I’ve been use job feeds (automated and much more personal) on Twitter since day dot, and I know a number of others who have as well. As far as I’m concerned the truth is that as a candidate sourcing tool/job-board cloud-style clone, Twitter doesn’t work. It has many, many other uses but, at the moment, I don’t see it happening. I’d love to be shown otherwise though….
Matt, I think there is clearly something very valid here, though I doubt the long term impact.
I’m not sure the jobseeking world has entirely embraced Twitter yet – lets be fair – only a seriously small percentage of the population have embraced twitter actively.
The big question is seriously, how long will Twitter last? – it needs so much development to be a truly effective tool for business benefit, and I just feel the joy of it’s simplicity will only last for so long.
I have a feeling Monster & Co will outlast the Twitter craze, and hopefully in the meantime, the job board costs will reduce to be more competitve whilst Twitter is here.
Very interesting read, with my limited experience of twitter job search and posting jobs to twitter I am underwhelmed at present but I do understand the concept. Maybe just requires that critical mass to help it on to the next level. With regard to the more traditional job boards, as per recruiters I think they will just become more niche and specialist, value added services. I can see the bigger boards utilising Twitter to drive the traffic back to their boards though? logical or dangerous, I have no idea.
Good thought provoking article, well constructed.
@Nick it would interesting if people started comparing notes properly, there are certainly many people that it does work for but much secrecy about it!
@Steve Focusing on adoption of Twitter is missing the point. You don’t have to be on Twitter to access the information. The point is the information is there and companies can create third party interfaces to access it. Winning the war to have a mass adopted interface is probably the key battleground here. As ever this also not about specific companies, if Twitter died tomorrow it wouldn’t matter. What matters in the concept and technology for an open access database is now out there
Good article and insightful. Well done. I think the hidden place to still look for a job is on the company’s own website where they can control the branding, the application and so many other things. Our firm, http://www.LINKUP.com, aggregates these jobs ONLY from company websites…over 20,000 companies. About 70% of the jobs on company websites are never found elsewhere or on Twitter.
Matt – thats a good point, I see the direction of your comments now, and what you mean by a “Job Cloud”.
Great article. We couldn’t agree with you more. TweetMyJOBS is the largest Twitter Job Board in the world, and tweets out 30,000 to 50,000 job tweets per day. It also provides an intelligent layer on top of Twitter to effectively target job seekers as well as “eliminate the noise” when searching for jobs.
Nice piece Matt,
Like the “job cloud”concept.
The aggregation of all content -jobs included is a huge issue and one which my see the end of “recruitment media” as we know it.
If jobs are content and I want content to attract an audience I will collect that content but I might not charge for it. Jobs content becomes commoditized.
Equally if “open social” linkedin etc become my CV database where doe that leave us?
Thought provoking article.
Keith
Now you have started something!
We are just getting companies to understand the concept of an ATS (nearly there now) , Social Media (plenty of push-back) and now you ‘throw’ this idea in to the mix! LOL
I know a good few HR Directors that still don’t get the basic ‘cloud’ concept, so the job boards might have a few years left in them yet!
(Like the way someelse has tagged this with your own hastag – #jobcloud!)
Hi Matt,
Interesting concept and as we are a new job board in Ireland we are very interested in how all the Social Media options will enhance how we will do our business.
We welcome Twitter as we feed our jobs into our second Twitter page and we are finding some interesting results. Whether Twitter will replace Job Boards, that remains to be seen, at present we believe it compliments how we do our work of bringing jobseekers and recruiters together.
I will look forward to more of your articles.
As a job board consultant, I’ve got an obvious bias. But I think you make excellent points, Matt. You could argue, however, that aggregators like Indeed have already created a ‘free’ universe of jobs. Yes, these jobs originally come from pay boards, but Indeed makes them accessible to the search audience – just as Twitter does. Job boards have always been ‘tools’ to connect seekers and employers – so it will be interesting to see how their role changes as some companies become more adept at getting their jobs out ‘in the cloud’ without using boards.
I have to disagree with the “ownership” of candidates and jobs, as these have always been in the public domain. What recruiters sell is disseminated information, which has a shelf life and short term value.
If I had an agency with a database of every candidate, it wouldn’t make me a better recruiter.
Equally, it’s not usually a secret, what jobs are available, and for whom.
The hard part is effectively and efficiently matching the right body to the right job, and progressing the process to a conclusion.
Smarter systems will help active jobseekers find vacancies directly from the cloud, and employers find candidates, but until that is obvious and dead easy, there won’t be a big change.
We early adopters can see the possibilities, but HR depts and candidates in the main, will lag well behind.
good stuff Matt – probably in stephen’s camp above as content – (jobs) have always been relatively open to all and not owned – the skill of media (or any intermediary) is in the matching of the employer to candidate, something which social,at present, is pretty poor at. We are running a number of pilots for companies with Twitter pages – automated or manually uploading jobs and i can be open and say we are not getting the high quality CVs (or indeed much volume at all) but are getting lovely feedback and goodwill (put that in the ROI column!) and both us and client are learning loads without spending much (any) cash.
And when we discuss this – we should all keep in mind that
- most UK corps stil use print media in some form
- most use job boards badly still
- most do not use CV databases or linkedin
- most do not do any form of SEM
- most do not use any proper form of email marketing
So JobCloud may make the HR person’s head explode but i love this stuff and it does and should really make us think about what we do.
Great article Matt.
From our perspective, it has always been about engagement, and even when we launched and had ZERO jobs, we were still able to aquire 1000′s of followers just by engaging with people.
Messages back then included things like “hey, we’ve got no jobs, but we’re going to be really cool – tell your friends, we’re coming soon..”
Whilst automation and feeds do a job, you’ll find that using an automated twitter account for jobs actually uses about 1/4 of the opportunity out there for twitter.
Communication rather than broadcast is the golden nugget that agencies/employers continue to reach for, but struggle with the time involved with their other day to day activities.
Feeds are the first step for many – engagement, interaction and all those over used words are the keys to building a sustainable network.
Of course, i’d say that as I founded the largest multiplatform social job site in the world, but we only grew (and continue to grow) simply because of conversation and the way we can help people through communication to the masses and individuals alike.
Jason
TwitJobs
Hmmm interesting stuff. How it will come together is anyones guess but the notion of the jobcloud is where the conversation should be heading. I know what Jeff is saying about aggregators, but that isn’t what you mean i think – is see the context of the job cloud as very different. Aggregators and most job sites are still approaching this from a ‘content’ or ‘ad’ perspective, looking to attract, rather than enable.
Also, i just read Simon Lewis’ latest blog post and Steven Rothberg made some interesting comments, including the subject of the CV database. To Keith’s point, i can see that very soon the CV database will not be within a jobsite. Whats the point? Its potentially out of date as soon as the CV is uploaded and its duplicated. With a LinkedIn profile, its a single copy in one place. OK, still some way to go in terms of usage etc, and logistically it could be difficult just to rely on one online profile. Nonetheless, its a potent force and there are a hell of a lot more active Linkedin profiles than there were a year ago.
Apologies – reply posting FAIL! forgot my contact details for my reply above.
Matt
Well, as you know I have been streaming jobs to Twitter for a small number of clients for a while and have been tracking it accordingly. Of course I was considered “off message” for this but have to say it is showing to be a worthwhile exercise in generating applications but due to the inadequacies of tracking technology and ATS processes cannot categorically state what volume of hires we have had.
But there is a much bigger point here. Unless we can accurately track from source to hire without any direct integration (e.g. posting to job boards) it is all a big dirty secret and no one really knows. I know how to solve this and in the next month or so will share it with all thereby letting the dirty laundry be seen by all.
Great post.
Peter
I would agree that you don’t want to bulk twitter post out to the twitter world, but if you tweet out critical jobs so they stand alone then I believe the quality will be there especially if you create twitter groups that specialize in a certain field. I can post an IT job out on twitter that reaches out to people with the special technical skill
Over the last few months, I haven’t tweeted articles because of the spam, auto-tweets and bs that were coming across tweetdeck. I stopped learning which is what I was praising twitter for a year ago. Auto generating job posts and then setting auto responses should not be happening. My point is, you will open the tweets that have true appeal to you. If you are a job seeker and there is a “#jobs” at the end, the reader is going to open it. I also think it depends on what you say in your tweet to attract job seekers. Companies like AT&T and Sodexho do a great job. I saw this great post by Matt so I clicked and read it because it had meaning.
In the end, I can see the Twitter Job Search tool ending up in partnerships with ATS systems in the very near future. It makes perfect sense. Will it be free? Don’t know. Appreciate the post!
Having been a founder of job boards in 10+ countries for almost 15 years now, we decided to create http://Emp.ly/ – a tool to post jobs and share them on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. I am a strong believer in social media recruiting growing in coming years. Will it replace job boards? Not any time soon. Is it a good addition? Sure. It’s part of the larger sourcing toolbox. How will small business owners vs large corporate recruiters / HR staff use these tools? Very differently.
For job cloud, it is similar to sharing of many other social media objects. You have to go where the people are, and there is no one single site. For video, I always suggest to post not just on Youtube, but also tens of other sites. Like statistics show, the long tail of sites is huge and it is wrong to assume everyone go to one leading site. Which is also true for Twitter: it is just one of many social media sites people visit. So you have to post and share your jobs on any other social media sites as well.
There are many reasons to love Google Buzz, but an important one is the Buzz API, which tries to make objects open and shareable across services. Much more open than the closed silos we have today. An object like job ad could then be shared across the web, across the countries and sites, as one object. Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström wrote on this at http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2010/02/24-hours-of-buzz.html
We would appreciate feedback and suggestions from anyone trying out http://Emp.ly/
Jüri
Emp.ly
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Hi Matt,
thanks for drawing my attention to the further development of jobpostings on twitter. My question would be – who will be the target group for your “Job Cloud”?
Currently a big share of jobs on twitter (in my home-country Germany) are either primarily IT- or web2.0-related or offer internships or trainee positions. Do you think the target group will expand – both vertical(ly?) as well as horizontal(ly?) – with the growing “Job Cloud”? Do you see any reverse effects towards the job search engines?
Also, where do we find all these Communications-HR specialists who text the perfect job ad with 140 letters
?
Nice article. Thought provoking. I’m a specialist recruitment ad writer, so the times sure are changing for me. Many thanks for your perspective, Matt. Best regards, P.
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Hi,
Interesting article. I thought it might be worth noting that one way you saw so many responses with so few followers *may* have been through the inclusion of that feed on twitter lists. I’ve seen similar things before, and lists has been the main reason.
Also, in the comments above someone mentioned ‘if twitter were to die tomorrow’ (or something similar). On this point, whilst I don’t see that happening anytime soon, a healthy discussion on handing over control and ownership of this content to other companies is worthwhile.
To that end, it is good to see efforts like the one here: http://rsscloud.org/walkthrough.html – it is pretty technical, but basically it is trying to build a framework that allows people to have the functionality of something like twitter without having to rely on a single company, like twitter.
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Martina, you should just try posting on Facebook, Studiviz, Twitter, Xing, LinkedIn etc and then measure and analyze. Use different positions, for some do the sharing just yourself, for some ask all your employees (including top management!) to retweet/share/forward, for another position ask also your personal friends to forward. Then measure, how much the ads get clicked on all those services and how it differs for various positions. Social media is not about theory, it’s about experimenting and learning from analysis.
I don’t agree that social networks and microblogs in Germany are used only by IT people and related fields. There are a lot of people from any field. But again this can be seen from measuring the results from different job ads shared there by you.
For content creation, I don’t think Twitter’s 140 char limit is so much harder than any other good recruitment marketing copywriting. Best thing: you can try different ways and see what works for you.
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Thanks to everyone for their comments. Rather than reply here I’m going to post a follow up to discuss some of the issues raised
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Hi Matt,
I believe twitter job sites like Twitmyjobs and twitajob will play bigger role in future. Even all job boards will have their skill specific twitter channels.Twitter search will also become a fav place to find job.
I have posted my detailed opinion on this matter in my blog. Please go through it and give your valuable inputs.
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Hi,
Great article!
I do see the benefits of using twitter to advertise your jobs as the content that is used is search able in the twitter search engine. Add keywords in the content to make your tweets more searchable for job seekers.
I have custom skins to make the job seekers visit more user friendly and I am already seeing results.
Hi,
It’s over a year since you wrote this article. Twitter has taken off massively in that time. It would be great to hear your thoughts a year on!
We have a twitter jobs feed from our site we see quite a bit of traffic coming to us from it. We’ve also had other sites grab out twitter feed and publish the jobs on their sites – which is great.
Fiona
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I co-founded http://www.executiveplacements.com in South Africa about 14 months ago. I focus on internet technology and I am fascinated to see if job boards is going to go the same way as print media. However in the short time we have been in existence over 50,000 resumes / Cv have been downloaded from the site. I do not know the ratio of placements to CV downloads but I am certain many placements have been made. It seems logical to me that some value has been added via the technology and according to economic theory profit should be made even if not super profit.
I’m not sure if Twitter is ‘the’ future of Job Boards, but it is certainly an important part of the overall strategy for recruiters when they are marketing their vacancies.
Twitter needs to be a part of the overall marketing strategy, but I’m not sure it will suffice on it’s own.
thanks,
Jane