Job Boards still play a central role in talent attraction, but outside of the job board industry, there isn’t much discussion or debate about their current state and future potential. So are they still fit for purpose, how are they evolving, and what can job board statistics tell us about the current talent market?
My guest this week is Dave Jenkins, founder of Wave. Wave publishes Wave TrackR, a regular independent report that uses job board data to track recruiting trends, which means Dave has a wealth of insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The current state of the job board market
• Pricing models and programmatic adoption
• Geographic market differences
• The importance of the active audience
• Are there still more jobs than candidates?
• How to get the best out of job boards
• Mindset change
• What’s the future of job boards?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Fountain (0s):
Support for this podcast is provided by Fountain. As the market leader in high-volume hiring, Fountain helps its customers find qualified candidates and move them from application to onboarding quicker, reducing time to higher from weeks to days, or even hours. Fountain’s all-in-one platform, not only simplifies the screening, interviewing, and hiring experience, it also ensures applicants remain engaged and that companies have pipelines full of ready-to-work hourly talent. Hundreds of customers use Fountain Solutions to hire over 3 million workers annually in more than 75 countries.
Fountain (47s):
Ready to find the best hourly candidates for your needs? Visit www.Fountain.com to learn more and get in touch.
Matt Alder (1m 15s):
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 480 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Job boards still play a central role in talent attraction, but outside of the job board industry, there isn’t much discussion or debate about their current state or future potential So are they still fit for purpose? How are they evolving and what can job board statistics tell us about the current talent market? My guest this week is Dave Jenkins, founder of Wave. Wave publishes Wave TrackR, a regular independent report that uses job board data to track recruiting trends, which means Dave has a wealth of insights to share.
Matt Alder (2m 3s):
Hi, Dave, and welcome to the podcast.
Dave Jenkins (2m 6s):
Hi, how are we doing?
Matt Alder (2m 7s):
Very good, thank you. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Dave Jenkins (2m 15s):
Yes, thanks, Matt. I’m Dave Jenkins, CEO and founder of Wave. Wave is a recruitment technology business. We’ve been around for 20-odd years and we are very much in the job board space and so really kind of looking forward to getting tucked into some chat around that. We have our own technology in Wave TrackR, which is a multiposting job board tool and we also build websites as well. So we’re kind of right in the thick of recruitment technology and all things kind of around it.
Matt Alder (2m 48s):
Fantastic stuff. Now what’s really interesting is I look back over the last sort of few months, even sort a couple of years actually of episodes of the show and I haven’t covered job boards for quite some time. And it’s interesting because it’s such a fundamental part of recruitment advertising and something that I’m sure everyone who’s listening is using Job Boards to a greater or lesser extent, but actually, outside of the job board industry and the job board technology industry itself, there isn’t as much conversation and discussion about job boards as they used to be and as there should be. So give us an update from the world of job boards in terms of, you know, what’s going on, how have job boards developed since the pandemic?
Matt Alder (3m 30s):
What’s different from a few years ago?
Dave Jenkins (3m 35s):
I guess, Matt, in some areas there isn’t a huge amount of difference. I mean if you look at some of the job boards and what they looked like 15 years ago and then you look at what some of them look like now, you struggle to find a difference in visually how they are. And I think that’s probably one of the, I guess, complaints if you like, around the job board industry that they haven’t moved on that much. Although if you dig underneath the surface a little bit, I mean in the last few years, job boards have fallen into two camps, I guess. We have the likes of Indeed and kind of aggregator-type job boards where you pay per performance and it’s all around your cost per click.
Dave Jenkins (4m 25s):
And then you have I think what you would, I guess now call the traditional job board, which is your total jobs or CV library monster where you, you pay for a number of jobs that you are buying and that’s kind of the two kind of camps that job boards have fallen into and some have switched from one side to the other. But really, the requirement of a job board is the same as what it’s always been, which should be to match the right candidate to the right job that’s been posted kind of irrespective of how you pay for it, how you buy.
Dave Jenkins (5m 9s):
So the mission of a job board is the same, but there has been some developments in terms of how people go and go about purchasing those job boards.
Matt Alder (5m 20s):
And I suppose the discussion that we have in the industry is about that change programmatic job board advertising and, you know, how that’s changing the world. But what’s the actual reality in terms of how employers are using job boards and the type of job boards that they’re using and the type of approach that they’re taking. What’s actually happening in real life beyond all the hype?
Dave Jenkins (5m 47s):
I think and you’re absolutely spot on with the hype of programmatic and for me it’s actually less about that and it’s more about making sure that you are being relevant. And I think, I mean we as an industry and I guess the wider recruitment industry, we love that the next big thing and the next new shiny, you know, piece of tech or whatever it is. So we get quite excited by that. But fundamentally, you know, recruiters or employers, really what if you sit them down and ask them what they really want?
Dave Jenkins (6m 30s):
Do they wanna pay a certain amount per click or have a programmatic approach to their advertising and where they get placed and when, I think that they probably look at you fairly blankly, and actually, their eyes will light up much more if you say, you know, kind of forget all that. Do you just want really, really good candidates? And I think we sometimes get lost in the delivery, of how to deliver advertising and actually forget sometimes that it’s really about finding the right person for the right role. So I think that’s the reality and a lot of recruiters don’t really mind or don’t really care how they go about paying for it as long as you’re delivering good candidates.
Matt Alder (7m 21s):
And what’s your perception in terms of the differences between countries? So obviously, you’re based in the UK, deal with lots of UK employers, but are they and job boards behaving in a similar way across the world? Is it different in other countries in Europe? Is it different in North America?
Dave Jenkins (7m 38s):
Yes, it is and it’s quite funny because you tend to often look beyond, you know, UK shores and you assume that everyone else is either doing it significantly better or significantly worse depending on where you’re looking at and who you’re looking at. But they are quite different. The markets are very different. Even if you look at the UK market, we have been– Traditionally, we used to have like five or six main job boards in the market and they would all compete with each other. That’s where kind of your generic job boards and then, you know, there’s plenty of niche boards whereby its specific sector.
Dave Jenkins (8m 28s):
Within Europe, you tend to only get one or two job boards in those markets. So the competition is less, which does mean that prices are traditionally a bit higher. I always found it quite interesting when you have a UK recruiter that wants to expand to Europe and there’s just shock and horror on their faces when they see the prices. But on the other side, the delight of Europeans when they discover the price of the UK job market is significantly less than what they’ve been paying.
Dave Jenkins (9m 11s):
I had one guy once sort of, you know, looked at me like I was crazy. And then US-wise, I mean they’re very, very much driven around the programmatic and performance side Indeed and Zip Recruiter and, you know, those guys are pretty big over there, but then that also changes state by state as well. It’s easy to forget how big, you know, America is.
Matt Alder (9m 40s):
Sure. Industry by industry as well.
Dave Jenkins (9m 42s):
Yes. Yeah. You know, very, very much so. And, you know, we’ve seen sort of the rise of the niche job board, especially kind of since Covid cause they’ve really, I’m not gonna say that generic job boards didn’t look after their community, but a niche job board is absolutely nothing without its community. So we’ve seen the niche job board, sector-specific job board, you know, really kind of grow. Maybe it’s candidates are a bit more loyal to their own sector and more transient with the generic job board. I’m not entirely sure, but yeah, yeah, sector by sector as well, of course.
Matt Alder (10m 29s):
So I think one of the interesting things that I find from talking to people who run companies like the company that you do is the access you have to such a large amount of data in terms of things like job board performance and role performance and those kind of things that can really give us some insights into what’s really going on in the market at the moment because it’s a very confusing time. We’ve got, you know, recessions, threat of recessions, we’ve got skill shortages. We’ve still got low unemployment, you know, high levels away from vacancies in many, many sectors. So it can be quite confusing sometimes to get a sense of what’s really going on.
Matt Alder (11m 8s):
But you have access to data that can sort of shed some light on what’s going on in the market, don’t you?
Dave Jenkins (11m 14s):
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And we started sharing this data around Covid and really one of the things that we wanted to do is, like you said, there’s so much confusion. I mean there’s always been confusion about which boards to use because everyone is all sort of scrapping around for the same, same budget. So it’s been difficult sometimes to know which job boards should be used for which industries and which will perform in certain areas of the country. So we started collecting data around applications and placements and hires what was working for where. And so we started publishing this data as well because we really want clients and businesses to get the most out of their job board budget rather than kind of, you know, the old saying that keeps coming back around and, you know, job boards are dead and they’re rubbish and they don’t do this and they don’t do that, but you know, they have the active audience that is, if you need to find a job seeker, they’ll be on a job board because there’s no real other reason for them to be on there.
Dave Jenkins (12m 24s):
But it’s about making sure that you are advertising the right job at the right time to the right person. So we try to, we wanted to be an independent source of data and now, you know, we monitor things like the number of jobs being posted, applications being received, you know, the length of your job ad, what days are most popular for candidates. And that seems to change as well because, you know, traditionally it was a Monday or a Tuesday, and latest data that I’ve I’ve seen is that most active day candidates is now Thursday. So we really are just trying to make things independent and easy for people to try and get the best out of the boards that they’re using, whatever boards that they’re using, wherever they’re recruiting.
Dave Jenkins (13m 15s):
And it’s, you know, you sort of mentioned about pending recession or whatever, whatever is coming, who knows these days, but I was looking at some numbers earlier, around number of jobs available in the UK, and I think we all know it’s pretty high, 1.2, 1.3 million. Well, I had a little look back and 2009 it was 400,000, you know. So quite a lot more jobs that are available. So that’s quite a lot that candidates have access to. And if you are now one of the 1.3 million, you’ve got a lot of competition there.
Matt Alder (13m 53s):
I mean, tell us, we’re sort of recording this, you know, right at the end of October, going into November 2022 for people listening a long time in the future, give us a little bit more of a kind of a snapshot into what’s going on in the market. So jobs are up, what about applications, what else can you track? What other insights can you give us?
Dave Jenkins (14m 13s):
Jobs have been up. I mean,
Dave Jenkins (14m 53s):
And with slightly less jobs being posted, then that’s meant that applications per job have increased a little bit. I think we’re up to sort of 12, 13 on an average basis. So every job that you advertise, on average will get 13 responses. But earlier in a year, that was something like five or six. So, you know, it was really hard, hard going, but there’s no getting away from it. They’re just not so many candidates around. And so the ones that you get, you’ve really gotta nurture and look after and not let them get lost in the system like, you know, perhaps have in the past.
Dave Jenkins (15m 38s):
I think, we’ll see the number of jobs available decrease a little bit, but, you know, it’s gotta fall a very, very long way, which we don’t also really want to happen for it to get to the point where we’ve got, what would you call a candidate-rich market. So I think it’s gonna be tough for some time on yet, you know. Days of people queuing around the corner to apply for your job maybe far into the future.
Matt Alder (16m 13s):
I mean, absolutely. And that really tallies with what a lot of the employers who’ve been on the show have been saying about, you know, still very, very tough to fill their vacancies and recruit people. With that in mind, and, you know, sort of taking the view that that’s where we’re gonna be for, you know, at least the medium term, if not the long term. What advice can you give employers in terms of how they’re using job boards to really get the best out of it and give themselves the best chance of getting the candidates they need?
Dave Jenkins (16m 45s):
There’s quite a big mindset shift that’s needed and this is before we even get into any tech or process. But I think accepting that it is a candidate-short market is probably the first thing you can do. You know, there’s still stories of employers using all the different job boards because the previous one didn’t work, using lots of different agencies because the previous ones weren’t any good and actually it’s not quite, it may be the case, but it may also be the case that actually the candidates are in pretty short supply.
Dave Jenkins (17m 29s):
So I think the first thing to do is to recognize the fact that it’s a tough market. We then have, you know, still a lot of challenges with ATSs and the long process that employers have had to or have had implemented and they sort of push candidates through with a bit of an old-school mentality. Well, I think it’s an old-school mentality of, you know, if they really want the job then, of course, they’ll spend 40 minutes on an online application but they won’t. That’s the truth. So you have to make it easy to apply and I realize you have to collect certain elements of information to get onto a system.
Dave Jenkins (18m 11s):
That candidate, you’ve spent the money getting them to on a job board or with an agency or whoever, and you spent the money getting them to land on your ATS, you know, don’t lose them now because your investment’s been made partly. So I think a mindset shift, making it easy to apply, a bit of old fashioned stuff that’s been around forever, but good feedback to candidates, speaking to candidates, communicating to candidates seemed, and I think this may be something that even you wrote, Matt, at some point in your illustrious past of technology has seemed to have made the recruiter and the candidate even more separate than ever.
Dave Jenkins (18m 60s):
And I think we need to try and put them a little bit closer and take down some of those barriers. There’s a starter for 10, I could probably talk for a long time.
Matt Alder (19m 14s):
No, absolutely. But as a final question, we talked about innovation in job boards and how, you know, there are some very interesting initiatives around, but actually, you know, adoption is patchy particularly, across different geographies, and also about the fact that, you know, job boards really are very slow to change for whatever reason. What do you think the future does look like? How will job boards evolve over the next couple of years?
Dave Jenkins (19m 44s):
I think we are going to see a quite a sharp increase in evolution of job boards. And you’re right, you know, they’ve been fairly similar for a very long period of time, but I think we may not see new sort of features and functionality that the job boards will come out and try and, you know, sell us all. I think where a lot of the smart money for a job board is going is in the matching technology. You know, you can call it machine learning or AI or whatever, but I think the more that a job board can monitor the behavior of the candidate and really understand what jobs they’re applying for and understand their movements and perhaps understand when they move from being sort of semi-active on a job board to, to suddenly being active, and understanding the candidate really, really inside out and therefore, being able to search its own database of jobs that are on the job board and putting the right job in front of that candidate.
Dave Jenkins (20m 58s):
I think they’re the ones that will win. And then however the recruiters or employers pay for it is secondary because if you source a way of getting the right candidates through the job board understanding that candidate better, I think they’re onto a winner. So I think we’ll see maybe cosmetically, will we see job boards change significantly? I don’t know, but I think we are all starting to expect to have more accurate matches in the responses that we get. I think we’ll see a lot behind the scenes rather than something else that just looks different, but is the kind of the same underneath
Matt Alder (21m 46s):
Dave, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dave Jenkins (21m 48s):
Thank you very much.
Matt Alder (21m 51s):
My thanks to Dave. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram where you can find us by searching for Recruiting Future and TikTok where you can find us by searching for Recruiting Future Pod. You can search all the past episodes at RecruitingFuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to receive our new monthly podcast newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
