The future of job boards has been an ongoing debate in our industry for years. A debate that has been dominated by predictions of their demise. These predictions have so far proved to be erroneous. But what is their future?
Who to better to ask than my guest this week Peter Weddle. Peter is the CEO of TA Tech, the trade association for the global talent acquisition technology industry. He has been a close observer of the job board market since its inception in the 1990s and has some great insights to share.
In the interview we discuss:
Peter’s history in the industry and some of the changes he has seen
Why talent acquisition vendors are looking at solution stacking and building partnerships and alliances
The potential of programmatic advertising and what recruiting can learn from mistakes made in e-commerce advertising
The challenge of transitioning from duration based advertising to performance based advertising
Other ways that Job Boards are changing.
Peter also shares his views on the future and gives us details of several unique events being run by TA Tech during 2017
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:06]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 88 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The future of job boards has been an ongoing debate in our industry for years, a debate which has been dominated by predictions of their demise. These predictions have so far proved to be erroneous. But what is their future? Who better to ask than my guest this week, Peter Weddle. Peter is the CEO of TA Tech, the trade association for the talent acquisition solutions industry. He’s been a close observer of the job board market since its inception in the 1990s and has some great insights to share.
Matt Alder [00:01:50]:
Hi, Peter, and welcome to the podcast.
Peter Weddle [00:01:54]:
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:01:55]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Peter Weddle [00:02:03]:
Well, my name is Peter Weddle and I am the CEO of TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. We’re the trade association for the global talent acquisition technology industry. So our members encompass job boards, social media sites, aggregators, recruitment, advertising agencies, mobile app developers, SaaS, platforms, applicant tracking system companies, virtually any organization that produces a technology based product or service for talent acquisition. And right now, collectively, the membership powers or operates just over 70,000 sites worldwide. And I don’t think there’s a facet of talent acquisition that one of our members doesn’t offer a product or service for. So it’s a very heterogeneous group and also one that is changing by the minute.
Matt Alder [00:03:05]:
Absolutely. Before we sort of get into, you know, get into those changes and speak more about that, I think it’d be interesting to get a bit of history on you in the industry. Tell us, you know, how have you come to this role and, you know, what does your sort of history in the industry look like?
Peter Weddle [00:03:26]:
Well, way back in the dark ages of the mid-1990s, I was operating a staffing firm which used computers to match people to jobs. It was arguably one of the first in The United States, and certainly the largest. We supported over 400 professional societies and associations. I sold that business to a large, larger staffing firm and decided that I wanted to pursue another passion, which was writing. And I was lucky enough to land a job writing a bi weekly column for the Wall Street Journal about this new thing called the Internet and this new industry called job boards. And I did that for over a dozen years and met a lot of the early pioneers in this industry and had the good fortune to watch their organizations grow and evolve over time. And in 2007, it just seemed to me that the industry had grown mature enough and large enough that it deserved a trade association. And that’s how I ended up where I am.
Matt Alder [00:04:42]:
And I suppose, you know, there’s obviously a huge amount of change from the. From the mid-90s to 2007, but the last 10 years has obviously seen a lot of. A lot of change as well. How, you know, how would you sort of describe that change, what’s happened from 2007 to where we are now in talent acquisition technology?
Peter Weddle [00:05:07]:
Well, I think actually you have to look in shorter time increments to really get a sense of what’s going on. I think the change that we’re seeing today is disjointed. It comes in bursts, and those bursts hit us much more rapidly. So it’s important to look at, I think, shorter time horizons. And I would say that in the last three to five years, we’ve seen some extraordinary dynamics in the marketplace. One might best be characterized by some recent survey results from LinkedIn. They surveyed recruiters at the beginning of this year, and 56% of the respondents said that they expected their recruiting workload to increase this year. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that 66% of those recruiters said that they expected their recruiting team to either stay the same size or get smaller. And what that has meant is that the ability of our customers, those recruiters and employers out there to do the kind of shopping that they have historically done for talent acquisition products and services has been significantly impacted. And in fact, increasingly those customers are looking for portfolios of products and services. They just don’t have the time anymore to go to company A for this product and company B for some other product, and company C for a third product. So one of the major dynamics in the marketplace is what might be described as. As solution stacking. And what that basically means is that companies today are very much in the business of forging partnerships and alliances so that they can go to an employer and say we have these sourcing products and these recruiting products and these assessment products and the employer can then tailor a suite of products and services to their particular recruiting challenge. Think of it as sort of a one stop shop, if you will, for recruiting products and services. And certainly that’s had a dramatic impact on the way many companies in the industry operate today. You know, it used to be that we could reliably build a business as the best of breed and that’s obviously still important. But even a best of breed company has to have other solutions available in its kit bag or it will find that those overworked recruiters simply haven’t got the time to pay attention to them. So certainly I think that’s one of the major dynamics that we’re seeing in.
Matt Alder [00:08:09]:
The industry today that makes perfect sense from a, from a buying perspective. And obviously, you know, the buyers are the people who ultimately help shape what these solutions look like. I suppose one of the other things that influences the industry is technology itself. Are you seeing any particular technology trends that are having an effect on what your members are doing or are likely to have an effect in the near future?
Peter Weddle [00:08:37]:
Yeah, I think the other major dynamic that we’re seeing is a movement away from traditional duration based advertising and more towards performance based advertising. I’m not one that believes that duration based advertising is going to go away altogether, but I think its slice of the pie is going to be considerably smaller and that more and more employers will turn to performance based advertising. And when that happens, I think the technology of programmatic ad buying is going to have a significant effect. We’re still in very early days with regard to the application of that technology in our industry, but we have the good fortune of being able to see how it played out in more traditional E commerce advertising. And if we’re lucky and if we’re smart, we’ll avoid some of the mistakes that they’ve made and hopefully introduce that technology in a much more efficient and effective way. It has the potential, I think, to dramatically improve the return on investment that our customers get from their advertising. The challenge of course, is for our industry. How do you transition from a traditional advertising business model that’s based on duration based ads to one that’s based on performance based advertising and not completely cannibalize your whole business. And that’s really, I think, where we are today, trying to figure out how to make that, that transition without sinking the ship, if you will, along the way.
Matt Alder [00:10:28]:
And in terms of performance based advertising, what is that? What are the discussions that you’re hearing saying about that in terms of what, you know, what these ROI triggers can be, I mean, what is performance in digital recruitment? Advertising is applications, is it hires, where do we draw the line? And ultimately what should employers be looking for?
Peter Weddle [00:10:55]:
Well, of course, with traditional advertising, you make a decision about where your ad is going to be placed and there it sits for the duration that you’ve paid for, whether it’s 30 days or 60 days, whatever it might be. In theory at least, what happens with Programmatic is that the software allows real time adjustments to ad placement. So if you decide to place your ad on sites A, B and C and site C is just not delivering the candidate stream that you want and need, then the computer will recognize that and automatically move that ad to another site where the prospects of getting a more reliable candidate stream exist. And all of this happens in milliseconds, so that the click stream that’s generated by the candidates is directly focused on delivering the number of people, the number of prospects that an employer needs. If they historically have found that they need to get 25 candidates to make one hire at a sales management position, they’ll know that, you know, that the computer will move the ads to various sites until it generates those 25 candidates. But equally as important, when it gets to those 25 candidates, when the computer realizes that the set number of applicants that the employer wants has been reached, it will turn off the spend. So employers are not wasting money advertising for candidates they no longer need or want. So that’s the theory, whether we can actually make that happen or not. As I said a couple of minutes ago, we’re still in very early days with all of that. But there is some pretty strong evidence, at least on the US side of the pond, that this can and does work very well for employers. Unlike in E Commerce. You know, there’s been a lot of, a lot of dialogue recently about the issues that Google has faced when it used programmatic ad buying and placed ads of very well known and reputable companies next to content on the web that was posted by people who were writing about things that could damage their brand hate speech and so forth. And the advertisers justifiably were upset about the placement of their brand next to that kind of content. Well, that’s not happening in the employment space because these ads are being placed only on employment space sites. So the probability that it would be placed next to, or an ad would be placed next to some quote, bad content or content that could hurt an employer’s brand is Relatively small, if non existent. But you know, that’s an example of the kind of challenge that we have to be careful about. We have to keep our eye on as we introduce this new technology that.
Matt Alder [00:14:16]:
Makes perfect sense, you know, and I’m already seeing a number of employers who are looking at, you know, programmatic techniques to find candidates kind of, you know, outside of the, you know, outside of the kind of traditional employment advertising space. So, you know, I think it’s very interesting to see how the, how the industry actually kind of adopts this and makes it, makes it their own, basically. So you have obviously been in this space for quite some time. What, what’s kind of really surprised you in the last few years about the way the space has evolved or perhaps the way the space hasn’t evolved?
Peter Weddle [00:14:58]:
I don’t know that I would say I have been surprised, but I have been concerned about the gullibility of some segment of our customer population. You know, we’ve been through a number of waves of the next big thing in our industry. And many of those waves had been built on the notion that, quote, job boards are dead or job boards are dinosaurs. And the employers and recruiters that are who are our customers seem to be willing to accept those statements. Even though all of the evidence, survey after survey, research report after research report indicate that job boards continue to be a primary source of external hires for employers literally around the world. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have to evolve and change with time. But innovation is alive and well in the job board segment of the marketplace. There are job boards doing interesting things with artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as programmatic ad buying and recruitment, marketing and social recruiting and a whole host of other things. So I guess I have been disappointed that our customer isn’t more sophisticated about, you know, these claims that burst on the horizon that is going to change life as we know it on planet Earth. And we go running down that rabbit hole until we discover, oops, well, maybe not exactly. And good old job boards are there, just as they reliably have been. But the good old job board of today is vastly different from the good old job board of 1995, 1996. When I first started writing about them. Back then, they were basically nothing more than traditional newspaper classified advertising repurposed on the web. And they were largely aimed at the active job seeker. Today, employers, most employers have their own corporate career sites and job seekers are pretty savvy. They know if they’re actively looking for a job, they know they can find those jobs on the website of most major employers today. So companies increasingly don’t need job boards to reach out to the active job seeker population. What they need job boards for are to reach into the so called passive population. The people who in theory at least, aren’t looking for a new job. And in order to do that, job boards have become much more like career portals, a place where people go to advance themselves in their profession, craft or trade. And when they feel ready and right, they will look at an employment opportunity as well. So these new job boards are really, I think, positioned to continue to be a very central part, not the exclusive part part. There are lots of other ways to reach out to candidates, as you well know, but, but certainly an critical part part of any employer’s go to market strategy for talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:18:30]:
Now I know one of the things that your association does is, you know, brings, brings companies together to talk and sort of debate and move the industry forward. And I know you’ve got some events coming up, coming up soon and indeed later in the year. Could you sort of tell us a bit more about what you have planned?
Peter Weddle [00:18:51]:
Yeah, thank you, I’d like to do that. We conduct four conferences a year, three in North America and one in Europe. And our conferences are different, I think in two ways. One, they are completely, totally focused on talent acquisition, technology and business. So they are not human resource conferences, they are talent acquisition technology conferences. And secondly, they are designed specifically for the CEOs of talent acquisition technology companies and their direct reports. So we don’t aspire to throw conferences that will have four or five or 6,000 people walking through drafty exhibit halls. We don’t even do exhibit halls. Our conferences are designed to bring together 2, 3, 400 senior executives and provide a forum where they can do two things. One, collaboration. They can interact with one another to explore partnerships, to look at doing business with one another. And two, thought leadership. They can connect with some of the best thinkers in our field and test their own ideas and have their ideas stretched and expanded so that when they go back to their businesses, they’re able to lead them more successfully at the bottom line. So our first event is coming up on April 22nd, 23rd. It will be in Chicago. It’s our Spring congress and we really have a wonderfully powerful program there. And you can find the agenda if you go to our website, which is tatech.org, you’ll see the events tab and all of our conferences are listed there. So the first coming up is in April. The second conference is going to be in Europe in Barcelona in fact, on May 17, 18 and 19. And it will begin with a half day mini summit, if you will, a pre conference workshop on programmatic ad buying. And then we’ll continue all day on the 18th and a half a day on the 19th. Again that’s in Barcelona in May. In June we are doing a leadership summit, which is what we call a one day one topic conference that will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 1st. And the topic will be Programmatic Ad Buying. This is our third in an annual series. We have some wonderful speakers coming for that particular event, people who really know the business of programmatic ad buying and talent acquisition. And then finally we are hosting our fall conference and World Job Board forum, which on September 27th, 28th and 29th in Denver, Colorado, which is one of the top tech hubs in the US and this event is modeled with some humility after the World Economic Forum in Davos. We want this to be the largest gathering ever of senior executives in the global talent acquisition technology market. And we already have a who’s who of speakers committed to coming to that event and exploring their vision for where talent acquisition is today and where it’s likely to be in the next 36 months.
Matt Alder [00:22:26]:
Peter, thank you very much for talking to me.
Peter Weddle [00:22:28]:
Thank you for having me, Matt. I appreciate it.
Matt Alder [00:22:31]:
My thanks to Peter Weddle. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes on Stitcher or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for recruiting future in your app store. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me.
Matt Alder [00:22:57]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:22:58]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
