First of all this isn’t another generic all job boards are doomed blog post. I wanted to put some recent thoughts I’ve had in writing that I truly believe represent the issues job boards are facing or about to face. My credentials to do this are 12 years experience of working with job boards in the UK market as opposed to mere speculative opinion!
This post starts about 10 years ago. Back then I was one of the few professional buyers of job board space in the UK and my day was always a whirlwind of presentations from new job board launches. Some of sites don’t exist anymore; many more of them are now mainstays of the UK market. The one thing they all had in common though was innovation. Everyone was going to change recruitment for good, everyone had a new and interesting model, everyone was a disruptive force in a recruitment space that was over priced, old fashioned and out of touch with jobseeker and client needs.
Business models and market share were established and the job boards did indeed change recruitment, not as quickly or by as much as the initial optimism suggested but they were a truly disruptive force. However the dot com bubble bursting, a relatively small UK internet audience (back then anyway) and limitations in technology did take the edge off a lot of the promised innovation
Fast forward ten years and Job Boards are indeed a dominant force. With this though have come severe product commoditisation and a rather alarming establishment mindset that is personified by the frequently heard mantra – “but there will always be job boards”.
There in lies my issue because it’s not true; job boards have no more right to exist than the traditional publishers they have slowly been displacing. Don’t believe me? Then ask anyone over about 35 and if they think about it they’ll remember a significant period of their career when job boards just didn’t exist. The industry is far too young to have such a “you’ll never cope without us” attitude
Ten years later I’ve moved on as well, I don’t buy job board space anymore but nevertheless as a consultant to the industry I’m getting a strange sense of déjà vu. Once more a series of wide eyed keen young start ups are seeking me out for advice and presenting business models designed to disrupt the recruitment status quo. This time the perceived status quo aren’t traditional publishers it’s the job boards themselves. Then there is LinkedIn probably the biggest potential disruptive force in our space that I’ve ever seen. Any job board owner who says it isn’t a threat to their business is either lying or hasn’t thought about it deeply enough.
Add in the embryonic force of social recruiting that is seeing progressive clients proactively undertaking activity with the aim of reducing or even eliminating their job board spend and you’ve got a heady mix of forces that should give job boards all the motivation they need to innovate and take their offerings to the next level.
What absolutely amazes me though is that with a few very notable exceptions (keen market observers will spot them!) this innovation isn’t happening. It seems to me that most job boards are expending all their energy either denying that there any threats to their model or doing whatever they can to maintain the status quo and in so doing are potentially taking their business models into a commoditised death spiral
I’m not writing all of this because I want to see job boards disappear in fact quite the opposite. I truly believe that they have a small but significant window of opportunity to innovate and thrive. Once the window closes though I’m afraid there will be no way back. So this is my challenge to the job board industry, put more of your energy into planning for the future and make me eat my words by creating some innovative disruptive business models that will drive the industry forward. I know you can do it because I still remember the year 2000 and how we’ve all been in the same position before. This time though the audience, technology and timing are all perfect……
July 14th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
you have prompted me to maybe put my own thoughts (at greater length) out there on this hot topic but i think my main reason why i am very optimistic for job boards (yes – they need to enhance/modify/innovate) is they provide an efficient marketplace for certain candidates and to meet certain employers. Print classified is dying as it is slow and inefficient – i am not sure the job board ad model in its purest sense could be more efficient and fast. So that role will persist for them. Now as to their role as a resume database that is up for grabs and as for the quality company seeking quality or browser audience they have always struggled a bit there anyway and that is social’s possible window of massive opportunity. anyway – i need to think – expect me to contradict all words above tomorrow.
July 15th, 2010 at 8:25 am
Hi Matt – good post as always. I’m interested in your views of the “notable exceptions”. I would say personally to name only a few:
CareerBuilder’s forays into social networking space with facebook (although still a bit too “push” for my liking from what I’ve seen so far), Simply Hired’s facebook viral referral tools (if you’re counting aggregator sites in with Jobboards in any sense), Monster’s work on semantic’s with 6Sense to make searching easier and more responsive, Monster’s career guidance tools based on career path analysis of their 15yrs of CVs and application data.
I would also say that another threat to jobsboards comes from CV and “online profile” search and aggregator tools out there of which there are now many. Since a lot of these dip directly into the CV databases of many of the main jobsboards anyway (Broadbean’s Stream tool for example), the boards are missing out on upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
In general, work I’ve seen on mobiles is adding channels, but not actually changing business models or toolsets in any way.
And fully agree about LinkedIn. The jobsboard aspect is currently very limited in my opinion – they need to (and I’m sure will) do a lto of work on it yet. However of course the single best feature of LinkedIn is the sheer amount of quality candidates, high numbers of whom are passive, who are happily building up an online CV and perhaps unknowingly making it fully searchable by premium members. Plus of course in many ways it’s even better than a CV as it’s a “living profile” with blogs posts, testimonials, interest and groups membership info, sector contribution info (i.e. group postings)..
Jury’s definitely still out on which of the plethora of social recruiting models and services out there will survive and prosper, but it’s highly interesting to see the innovation happening at the moment.
July 15th, 2010 at 8:50 am
I think you are being a little harsh on so many job boards who are doing all they can to stay in business. It’s an easy mistake to make in that situation, as the natural inclination of professional business managers is not to rock the boat in stormy weather.
However, the entrepreneurs running these boards need to remember that they got to where they are by innovation and by taking risks to challenge the status quo. As Old/New Labour used to say “They are at their best, when they are at their boldest”.
Wherever possible, I believe every established job board should have an internal department dedicated to disrupting their own model. If they don’t do it, then someone else will.
July 15th, 2010 at 9:26 am
sat to the side of an interesting conversation on Tuesday. Up shot was that the two ladies both believed that there was no point applying to jobs advertised online as they were generally “gone already” – something both they and their husbands had found from personal experience.
Where they gone or was it just a Rec Consultant giving a quick fob off? Did they ever exist at all?
But the upshot of the conversation was that their preferred method of job searching these days was printed adverts – because they new that if someone had gone to the trouble and expense of advertising then it had to be a real role,
I’m afraid that the low cost of advertising on job boards has cheapened the whole experience for the end candidate to a point where it’s actually turning them off – job boards and specifically the practice of pilling it high and selling it cheap has, for what may be a %age of their target audience, reduced their value to 0. Now this is of course just anecdotal evidence from 4 people (although I wouldn’t put that beyond some organisations/people to use as a sample to quote against: http://digitalrecruiting.typepad.co.uk/digital_recruiting/2010/07/lies-damned-lies-adobe-surveys.html), but I think it’s still pretty interesting.
July 15th, 2010 at 10:05 am
I come from the other side of the argument. I manage our jobs board, we are a niche jobs board for the media sector.
From day one we made it a rule not to allow recruitment agencies to post jobs on our site, allowing only companies to post their jobs
This has kept the integrity of our jobs board intact, with only real, active and available jobs being advertised. This model has made us the first port of call for people wanting to work in media down here in Sussex
Many companies have now done away with their own careers sections on their websites, they now link back to their jobs that are advertised on our site
As we are niche we also post jobs across to relevant groups on linked, RSS feeds to networking groups and also have an active and well followed Twitter feed too.
I agree that the mass posting, generalist jobs board need to look at their business models, but the niche ones, like us, are continuing to thrive
July 15th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
[...] services that have altered the job seeking process. Every time I read a post like Steve’s or Matt’s it reminds me that we’ve already made some big steps into making job hunting just a little [...]
July 16th, 2010 at 8:10 am
I agree that the Job Boards are a young industry but I dont think they have an attitude, I think they are like all industries and especially the recruitment industry in that you learn onthe job what your company is going to be.
The problems I see for job boards are as follows;-
1
July 16th, 2010 at 8:31 am
1
SEO strategies are random for most of the 1500 job boards we have looked at, they either have the best SEO or in some cases none at all.
Head terms are what most try to compete for, some work on shoulder terms only a handful work on long tail terms. If your over 35 you likely to use head and shoulder terms in your job search if your under 35 then you will for sure be using long tail and at present that counts for 300 million searches a month of which only 20% go to job boards.
2 Threat is coming daily now from companies who will optimize corporate’s own career sites, and bring them traffic direct. We have spoken to most of the major job board groups and other than offering to buy us to do the same none have an answer for the change in approach. Companies like Hot Lizard after a decade of selling websites to recruiters are now selling websites to corporate’s and SEO strategies that will compete with the recruitment space.
Nick its cool you work with only clients, but if the agencies want to change that, they have only to take you to court as happened with one of the major boards, and you will be forced to sell them space if that the way they want it as the legal president exists due to that case. Even so if the service is not challenged then you still have the issue of SEO which means the micro sites for the clients will be redundant if the jobs don’t get spidered. Based upon the 1500 boards we have studied if the majority offered their own technology as a micro site for clients then this would be the outcome.
3 Job boards have an easy in, east out relationship with their candidate users. Only now is it clear to Job Board owners that they need to do more with candidates to have them interact with the board and keep their data live for the long term.
Data is the key and the killer for all recruitment firms, take BT for example on its tier one preferred supplier list for recruitment it normally has the top 10 recruiters from our industry, why does it need all 10 when in most instances they will have access to the same data? Its because it takes a factor of 10 to manage that data, just as the relationship is tailing off with Fred Bloggs for one recruiter, he has been called and updated after 3 years of being fallow with another. Job Board databases suffer the same issue, no real need for candidates to come back after they have found work, if they don’t find work soon enough etc.
4 Job boards have de-skilled the recruiter. When I was a recruiter we had advertising but it was not the way we fond most candidates, mostly we found them by networking and headhunting.
I have met over 5000 individual recruiters over the past few years and most agree that if the recruitment company they work for took away their job boards they would leave and move to a new firms as they would not be able to get candidates any other way. While this level of skill exists in the recruitment sector the Job Boards are more than safe and the 300 million they make collectively in advertising revenues is safe as houses.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Hi Darren
I think we may be a little different to traditional niche job boards as we are a members organisation for the media community in Sussex, and only allow our members to post
We have been going for over 10 years, our SEO is strong due to the links in and out of our site, the reputation we have etc. Therefore we rank highly in Google and in some situations rank higher for our member organisations than their own websites.
I agree totally with the recruitment consultants side of your comment. I have been an agency and in-house recruiter and to rely on job boards to find candidates is to die very quickly as a recruiter. Networking is king, and keeping those relationships with candidates and clients running far into the future is how you make a name for yourself as a competent and talented recruiter
It would be interesting to see what would happen to the agency recruitment industry if the job boards disappeared overnight. I think it would be a great way to weed out the crap and have some fun while it happens
July 16th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Hi Nick,
Yep to be clear to all I was not suggesting your SEO is not great as I have not tested it, but Job boards in general. I know one Board owner who has 40+ sites who has an SEO spend of just £2000 a month for the hwole network and another who has 90+ who has nil spend on SEO.
The membership part sounds cool.
July 16th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Matt, Great post, and everyone, good discussion! I think Matt is absolutely right about innovation – job boards have to evolve or die. That’s true, by the way, of almost every industry, not just job boards. One of the most interesting evolutions are those boards that are becoming ‘interest hubs’ – adding more content and interactivity so that their job seekers use the site routinely – not just when they need a new job. The jury is still out, but I know that some sites in the US have found this model very successful. It’s a great time to be in the industry!
July 16th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Matt, this is totally in line with something I’ve been thinking since last September when I was involved in the judging of the National Online Recruitment Awards. The first category to be judged was generalist sites. There we 5 or 6 contenders (exactly who you’d imagine to find) and I can honestly say that I could barely find any difference in their sites from when I’d done a through review of them the previous year for the same awards.
I found more innovative activity in the niche sites to be honest.
Just the other day I was wondering what I’d find this time around!
July 18th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
[...] Original post here [...]
July 19th, 2010 at 9:04 am
Hi Matt.
Are we not in a world where all businesses need to innovate or die?
I was working in the recruitment industry when job boards said they would destroy the recruitment industry, however, all they did was enhance it!
To say job boards are dead or dying is similar to this situation and it’s interesting that many social media platforms see jobs as a mechanism to monetise their platforms.
Job boards do need to innovate but so does every business. There are also some good boards and some poor boards, which carries in all industry sectors.
Job boards will come and go, so will recruiters and so will players in all markets. It’s innovation that keeps businesses in business and emerging channels emerging.
I strongly believe that job boards are a single channel of an integrated recruitment strategy which will always include, print, job boards, social media, online recruiters and traditional recruiters to drive candidate flow; they will just be used in varying levels for each hiring need.
I also believe Corporate’s will leverage their own properties more effectively; Intranet, Corporate Website, Referral’s and ATS’s to control the promotion of their employer brand and employee value proposition, so media need to evolve their thinking to incorporate providing the correct types of candidates, not try to impress by promoting the volume they have or can provide.
There will naturally be new channels emerging in time which will impact the situation.
Some job boards will die but others will flourish, especially if they get the corporate offering right and understand are needs are more strategic than those of traditional recruiters.
July 19th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Agree with you Colin and I certainly wasn’t saying that all Job Boards are going to die. I do find it interesting though that most seem to be doing no innovation at all. That’s not healthy in any industry and particularly not one that has so much increased competition and innovation going on in the space round it
July 19th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Thanks Matt and totally understand and agree.
Great post, it really gave me the chance to have a bit of a Monday morning rant.
July 20th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
The niche sector of job boards is about to come into it’s own, the big players have added content and in some cases it is difficlut to find the jobs…..
I believe that candidates are looking to corporate recruiters to use job boards more and many are starting to do so. This means candidates can apply to real jobs and get some real feedback on how their applications is progressing or not …
It never ceases to amaze me how many recruitment consultants do not even acknowldge applications.
This is the main bug bear of applicants.
Organisations that have understood how to build an employer brand and make the most of their careers web sites are the ones that will get the wuality response to their open vacancies.
Innovation is all well and good but it has to be innovation that enhances the offering of the board not what marketers think applicants are looking for.
Great discussion and a great initial post.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:34 am
Good thoughts Anil. I agree about both – candidate response rates and communication can be attrocious and most people I know (perhaps except those at the top head hunter target level) do not like using recruitment agencies. Not all agencies are like this however and the best do take very good care of their candidate resource.
On the niche boards front – I fully agree, there’s a lot to be said for them. Even generalist players like Monster have made a lot of moves towards niche “interfaces” into their database. The MAIN KEY as well as adding content is building community and interaction however. As one example, OnlyMarketingJobs has actually done this very well with a community site alongside their jobsboard, and a very well used LinkedIn group and sub-groups. In one respect LinkedIn can be thought of as a jobsboard with community built around it, although most would still think of it the other way round.
The key to all that interaction and community building is encouraging passive candidate interaction, persuading the users to inadvertently build up a professional profile(semi-CV), allowing employers to search not only this information but also the “proof of domain expertise” info contained in blog posts and forum comments, and subtly targeting jobs at them via the data built up from their interactions.
That is how LinkedIn is winning, but at the end of the day, it’s still a pretty generalist community, so there’s plenty of room for others to use this model in a more niche fashion.
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:06 am
[...] Source: Recruiting Future [...]
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:59 pm
[...] Now let’s explore the recruiter’s perspective and look at some of the job board innovations over the last couple of years to address their needs and [...]
August 20th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Another view on this ongoing debate here: http://www.ere.net/2010/08/20/job-boards-still-evolving-after-all-these-years/
September 22nd, 2010 at 8:20 am
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September 23rd, 2010 at 11:55 pm
An interesting addition to this topic here on the future of jobs boards: http://www.globalrecruitingroundtable.com/2010/09/22/future-of-job-boards-2020/