Job boards have been connecting candidates with employers for over thirty years, but the relationship that made them work is fundamentally breaking down. Candidates are getting frustrated by applying for roles that may already be filled or have been taken off the market, while employers are receiving hundreds of identical, AI-generated applications they can’t meaningfully evaluate. The Job Boards sitting between them are trapped in business models that reward volume over quality, which only makes the problem worse.
The result is a trust crisis that threatens the entire ecosystem. When neither side believes the process is fair, the whole system starts to unravel. So what would it actually take for job boards to rebuild that trust and stay relevant?
My guest this week is Lou Goodman, a job board strategy expert who recently partnered with Jobiqo to produce a major new report on the future of job boards. In our conversation, she explains why the industry is stuck repeating the same patterns, what job boards can learn from other platform businesses, and whether evolution or extinction is the more likely outcome.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Why job boards still matter in today’s market
• The trust crisis threatening the ecosystem.
• How AI is amplifying weaknesses rather than fixing them
• Procedural justice and why fairness matters more than outcomes
• The shift from quantity to quality
• Where job boards can add value in the process
• Why short-term fixes become long-term patterns
• Lessons from other two-sided platform businesses
• What is the future for job boards?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Trust is collapsing in the job market. Candidates don’t believe job postings are real, employers are drowning in AI generated applications, and job boards are caught in the middle. Can job boards evolve before something else replaces them? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiter’s AI powered companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant, handling all the time consuming admin work so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions. From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective.
01:00
Matt Alder
Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there. Welcome to episode 765 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Job boards have been connecting candidates with employers for over 30 years, but the relationship that made them work is fundamentally breaking down. Candidates are getting frustrated by applying for roles that may already be filled or that have been taken off the market. While employers are receiving thousands of identical AI generated applications they can’t meaningfully evaluate. The job board sitting between them are trapped in business models that reward volume over quality, which only makes the problems worse. The result is a trust crisis that threatens the entire ecosystem. When neither side believes the process is fair, the whole system starts to unravel. So what would it actually take for job boards to rebuild that trust and stay relevant?
02:24
Matt Alder
My guest this week is Lou Goodman, a job board strategy expert who recently partnered with jobico to produce a major new report on the future of job boards. In our conversation, she explains why the industry is stuck repeating the same patterns, what job boards can learn from other platform businesses, and whether evolution or extinction is the more likely outcome. Hi Lou and welcome to the podcast.
02:49
Lou Goodman
Hi. Lovely to be here.
02:51
Matt Alder
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please can you introduce yourself and tell.
02:57
Matt Alder
Everyone what you do?
02:58
Lou Goodman
Yes, my name is Lou Goodman. I am a marketing strategy consultant. These days I’ve worked in and around recruitment for a really long time. I started my career at places like Barkers and TMP and then worked at a large media agency called Mediacom, running accounts like the army and Shell Recruitment. And most recently I was at Monster. Until last year, my Last role there was as heading up the global B2B team.
03:27
Matt Alder
Fantastic. So as a consultant you have just authored incredibly comprehensive report about the job boards and the future of job boards. Just tell us a little bit about the report and what you’ve written.
03:42
Lou Goodman
Yes. So this has been in partnership with Jobico and actually it came about after I met Martin Lentz from Jobico at Job Boards Connect last year and were chatting during our breakout session and he asked me to write a couple of articles for him and then he said he would like to continue this and I said to him that I had been thinking about the future of job boards after that Job Boards Connect meeting and he was really interested in, you know, all the challenges they were facing rather than the future because it’s, you know, I don’t think anyone can predict the future. Martin was really interested in that topic and then I kind of came back to him and said, you know, I’ve been thinking about this and I’m not sure an article is enough space. And I wrote 20,000 words about it.
04:31
Lou Goodman
So yeah, it went quite differently from being an article, but it really was the inspiration for it came from that Job Boards Connect breakout session. I mean, obviously when I left Monster, I’d been thinking for quite a long time after that, you know, I had a lot of time on my hands and was thinking what had happened with Monster and you know, the challenges that they faced. But there was a comment that was made or a couple of comments were made in this breakout session where were, Martin and I were talking about the need to focus on candidates and candidate experience and getting the right balance and you know, the role of why thinking about your brand is important. And there were a few comments along the lines of, well, you always balance, you know, you always prioritize the employer needs over candidate needs.
05:17
Lou Goodman
And I, that just really stayed with me in the days afterwards. That was kind of what started me thinking about it because Monster had always, you know, I think from Jeff Taylor onwards, they’d always had the focus on, you know, get the candidates and then the employers come because you have that. But also from my time working at Mediacom, you know, I was at Mediacom when Facebook launched, you know, when LinkedIn was, LinkedIn had, you know, not when I joined after that, but through, I was out there for 10 years through the growth of these platforms and I just remember thinking, I just don’t think that’s how two sided marketplaces work. And that was really kind of a Catalyst for it. And then, yeah, I just kept kind of thinking about it and working on it and kind of organized it into this.
06:04
Lou Goodman
And Martin was very interested. Jobber company were the perfect partner for it. And you know, they, they wanted to work with it on me. And then I spent two to three months kind of writing it.
06:16
Matt Alder
Job boards were always about the candidate first when they first launched. And if that thinking, the opposite thinking has become pervasive, it kind of does explain a lot about what we’re looking at today. So I mean, let’s sort of dive in because I’m really interested to sort of get your insights around a number of things with jobs job boards. So I suppose the first question is why do we need job boards today?
06:37
Matt Alder
What are they for?
06:39
Matt Alder
And how has that changed from maybe a few years ago?
06:42
Lou Goodman
Yeah, I mean, it is a great question. Another thing that I thought about with this report was there was a conversation, as I think, I’m sure happens at a lot of job board events all over the world. There are job boards dying. And I was thinking, well, should they exist? You know, like if we think about flipping that question on its head, should they die out or should they exist? And I do think that we do need job boards. I think the work is more complex than it’s ever been. There’s, you know, fluid careers, hybrid working or remote working and portfolio employee employment. And people are moving around much more quickly. People want different things from employers now. And so I think there is a need for a trusted, you know, trusted intermediary. I think that need is higher than ever.
07:32
Lou Goodman
But I do think that job boards don’t automatically kind of keep the right to be that intermediary. I think there is an evolution that is needed. You know, there’s a lot changing. The economy is really tough at the moment. Job openings aren’t tracking GDP anymore for I think the first time ever. Technology, you know, is bringing in loads of changes with an awful lot of workforce reductions planned. And I read in some research and the sources in the report, but you know, last year 1 million UK workers left over flexibility. With the changing kind of flexibility needs that they have people wanting different things. And the pandemic of course changed everybody’s idea of what was possible with that. And you know, what we’ve got to is where kind of trust is collapsing on both sides.
08:31
Lou Goodman
And I think just we’re in this kind of perfect storm at the moment. It feels like of all of those things going on and then the thing that Used to be the proxy for quality, which was volume. Generally, if you got enough applications, you would find people. And that has really. That’s kind of really broken down. And so I think that’s the key challenge at the moment. I think one of the other changes as well has been around less audience ownership that the job boards have. And so when hiring returns, because obviously we all want the economy to get better and hopefully for hiring to get better, you know, are job boards going to find themselves trying to monetize an audience that they don’t have anymore?
09:15
Matt Alder
I kind of really want to dive a bit deeper into the whole trust aspect of this. And I suppose before we do that, just to kind of set things up really, what promise is it that job boards are kind of implicitly making, I suppose, both to employers and to candidates? And where is that breaking down at the moment?
09:34
Lou Goodman
That’s a really interesting question, isn’t it as well? So I think that the implicit promise is that they will connect qualified candidates with relevant opportunities. And there’s kind of two challenges in there. So, you know, I think that the name itself, job board, is a promise in of itself probably mostly to candidates. It’s, you know, find a job here. But there are other things. So, you know, I think the job posting as an artifact really is saying that, you know, this opportunity is genuine, that it’s accurate and it is what’s needed. And I think the implicit promise in that on top of those things is that it’s worth your time because, you know, applying to jobs takes a very long time these days, particularly when there’s a job scarce market, it means that you’re having to apply to lots of jobs.
10:26
Lou Goodman
And so finding a job is like having a job. There’s also the search and the matching element of it, which is saying that, you know, these results, the promise is if you put these limited search results in, like a job title and location, we’re going to serve you the best results that we’ve got available, which means that our rankings actually serve your interest. And then there’s other things like job alerts where, you know, we’ll service the most relevant opportunities for you. And then for employers, I think the big one for employers is that, you know, application volume in the past has been a meaningful quality signal, you know, and things like screening tools people put in, you know, if you can put in questions, there’s kind of an expectation then that would people be able to override that and apply anyway.
11:21
Lou Goodman
And I think kind of where that you see that kind of breaking down most often, which is the ongoing challenge that job boards have is when it comes to the moment of application, you know, that’s when the transaction should complete, and it should be that both sides are, you know, satisfied that the transaction is completed in a way that it doesn’t mean you’ll get a job, but that’s a real job I’m applying for, and this is a candidate who matches my requirements.
11:49
Matt Alder
And I suppose it kind of really plays into the problem that we have with trust at the moment. I mean, trust really, to me, is one of the biggest themes of this year, and it’s certainly a big theme of the podcast at the moment. I mean, it seems to be missing everywhere from hiring at the moment. What is it that sort of drives trust down or, you know, more importantly, drives trust up in the job board experience?
12:16
Lou Goodman
I think there’s something. There’s something I introduced in the report called procedural justice, which was something I learned about on a leadership course I went on a few years ago. And it’s the feeling that something is fair even if you don’t get the outcome that you want. I think that seems to be missing on both sides. I would say mostly for candidates, because it’s a lot more personal for candidates. You know, getting a job helps them pay their mortgage, you know, feed their families. So that can feel a lot more. Can maybe feel a lot more personal. But I think what drives trust is there is the transparency element. So why am I seeing this? And, you know, for that’s, why am I seeing this candidate and why am I seeing this job? How does the ranking work? What happens to my application?
13:08
Lou Goodman
You know, why am I getting these. Why am I getting these candidates sent through? There are quality signals as well. So, you know, match confidence seriousness indicators that could be gathered by job boards on both sides. And I think that a key one these days is what do I get for sharing data. Again, I think that’s maybe more on the candidate side, but, you know, what am I getting for this? Accountability is a key one that we see in other platforms. So are platforms going to act on systemic bad behaviors or fake jobs or fake applicants? But I think quite often it’s more about fairness mattering more than the outcomes.
13:56
Matt Alder
It’s interesting because, you know, like you, I’ve been to lots of job board conferences over the years, and I think that there was one I went to a few years ago where I could just really see that shift where people weren’t talking about candidates or even Employers anymore. They were talking about traffic and trading traffic with each other. And it just, that to me just seemed to be the beginning of the thin end of the wedge to where we are now. Which I suppose leads me on to my next question. I mean, the problems are sort of pretty obvious if you’re an employer using job boards or from a candidate perspective as well.
14:33
Matt Alder
If the problems are obvious, why are.
14:34
Matt Alder
Job boards stuck repeating the same old patterns rather than evolving?
14:39
Lou Goodman
It’s a really tough market for everybody at the moment. Even though there is, you know, more flow of candidates than ever. If job, you know, if employers don’t want that many candidates, you can’t monetize it. And I think at the moment, and I, you know, I went through this at Monster and I wasn’t in the position of having to make the really tough calls. But making any changes that reduce short term revenue often feels really impossible. You know, when you’re firefighting, it feels really hard to stop focusing on fire prevention when you’re in the middle of firefighting. And what happens then quite often is that short term fixes become kind of long term patterns. And so a lot of, I think what happens is that rational short term decisions kind of can still contribute to a long term crisis.
15:28
Lou Goodman
But I think at the moment it’s really about how tough it is. But also it’s a big shift from quantity to quality is a really big change. And it can be really hard to make those changes when any quality filter that you put in can reduce down, you know, you get fewer applications, which means you take a revenue hit. And it’s uncertain whether these things are going to work. You’re going into a new area, are customers going to want those things? And I think we also have to remember that. Indeed. And LinkedIn really and in markets like Germany, Stepstone, they set the tone with what they do.
16:09
Lou Goodman
And if they’re not using their, the leverage that they have to put some of the things in that would help drive better quality, you know, like salary, for example, is a great way to help people understand whether it’s the right role for them. But if you have the market leaders not putting that in place and you are, and that’s not something, you know, you want to put that in place, but that’s not something that employers want to put in place themselves, it becomes really hard to do it. So I think it’s a lot of job boards can see this, but you know, it’s revenue is really under pressure, clients are cutting budget and the day to Day just really takes over. And that was, you know, when you’re at.
16:49
Lou Goodman
When I was at Monster, everybody was working so hard to try and turn things around. There was lots of stuff that everybody wanted to do that we knew we wanted to do, but it just was so hard to do it.
17:03
Matt Alder
The quantity quality thing is interesting because I can kind of remember back to economic dips, recessions in the past, and job boards always kind of struggled with that flip from actually, you know, the number of applications that we’re sending across is now not the most relevant thing. I mean, it never was in the first place, but. But then what’s happened is the economy’s always turned and it has become kind of relevant, so they’ve kind of sort of plowed through it. But with AI doing what AI is doing, that’s not, you know, the application issue is now permanent, I think. So. I mean, AI is everywhere in hiring, or certainly talked about everywhere in hiring at the moment. I mean, is it fixing problems? Is it making things worse? What’s going on from a job board perspective?
17:45
Lou Goodman
I think it’s both at the same time, as we find with so many things at the moment. So it is fixing some problems. But I think that if procedural justice is missing, for example, then actually AI just helps you to scale injustice. I think that what it’s doing is it’s amplifying weaknesses, and so therefore, quite often it’s just making dysfunction more efficient. So I think that there are some AI could help to fix problems if there was, you know, if there was a clear path to, you know, oh, if only we had something that could do this more efficiently, if we could have taken a human out of the loop, and that would help us here. But a lot of the problems are, you know, they’re kind of more. They’re deeper than that.
18:36
Lou Goodman
And I think that what we see with the volume problem at the moment when candidates had AI tools that were put in their hands, you know, we’ve seen this growth in the sea of sameness of applications that employers are with. But those tools, those AI applied tools fill. They fill a need. You know, candidates wouldn’t be using them if they weren’t filling a need. I think, you know, candidates have learned that it’s a numbers game. And so what that’s where we’re seeing. I think it’s really amplifying weaknesses. But there are great opportunities with AI at the same time in how you can automate some things, too. So, for example, keeping candidates more up to date should be easier than ever now with AI getting that right? How do you make sure that people understand? So I think it’s both.
19:25
Lou Goodman
I think for me it’s really the application. Yeah, it’s devalued the application, which is, I think the key problem that job boards and everybody is facing now is that the, the application is not really as helpful as it was. So that’s an AI exacerbated problem. How do we, you know, I’m not sure that more AI, it just becomes a race to the bottom if we just keep adding in more AI without addressing that.
19:55
Matt Alder
I think that’s a really good point. And I think it’s also funny because AI tends to solve a lot of problems that AI has caused as well, which doesn’t really get us anywhere.
20:05
Matt Alder
So let’s talk about what could change.
20:07
Matt Alder
So what do job boards actually control in this? How can they use that to sort of build more value for themselves in the. As part of the process?
20:17
Lou Goodman
Yeah, well, one of the key themes or key inspiration for the report is mentioned in the introduction is something called marketing myopia, which is making sure that, you know, you’re focusing on what your customers are really buying and customers meaning candidates and employers. And really I think there’s a focus on applications because that’s the mechanism through which the value gets created. But matching, you know, sourcing and matching is the real product or, you know, that’s what job boards are really doing. So I think if you look at it from. One of the arguments I make is that if you don’t have things like disposition data that help you understand more about the quality, then what you have to do is really get the value back into what you do control, which is up to the point of application.
21:10
Lou Goodman
So I, There’s a chapter where we look at other platforms and what they, what, you know, how they do it. And I think we need to take learnings from there. So, you know, they have quality standards on both sides, you know, and I think that’s something that job boards haven’t done in terms of, or maybe haven’t gone as far as they could. And this might be more needed with employers, you know, so as well as candidates, you know, how do you crack down on fake applications? But how do you crack down on fake jobs? And that doesn’t need to mean refusing jobs, but there are things like, when was it posted? How many times has it been reposted? You know, how do you give people information? There are transparency requirements. So I know salary is obviously a really difficult one.
21:56
Lou Goodman
And I, I do think that it’s going to be very difficult for a lot of job boards to say that salary was mandatory unless The Indeed or LinkedIn did that. But you could, for example, put a filter in that candidates could filter and only see jobs with salaries. So it becomes a choice. And then what you can do is report back to employers and say, you know, at the moment a lot of candidates might not use that filter because they would know how many jobs got cut out. But in, you know, when it comes back to hopefully better hiring and the economy improves and everybody’s rolling in money again, you know, more might use it, but you use that as a data point to influence behavior, accountability.
22:41
Lou Goodman
You know, I think showing on both sides, like, how are you filtering out people that, you know, are maybe, you know, spamming applications? There was a, it was Lee Biggins at Job Boards Connect back in May last year where I think they’d seen a candidate had submitted 325 applications in 24 hours. So they put something in place to limit, you know, to manage that. And, you know, transparency, note over ranking. I mean, there’s certain things, you know, transparency, you don’t want to be giving away all your IP and, you know, how you do things, but telling people why they’re seeing things and using behavior on both sides to help people understand that they’re a match. And I think that is, those things do become challenging because obviously they can risk revenue.
23:35
Lou Goodman
But I think that if you aren’t going to get disposition data, which I think is kind of flawed, you can’t just look at disposition data anyway. There has to be more of a matching element. And, you know, then saying to employers, well, this is what you told us you wanted, so we’re going to deliver you the people that you said you want. And here’s all the things that we’re going to do to make sure that they match. And, and then what’s the value of these people?
24:01
Matt Alder
It goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning. There is a role for job boards to be that trusted thing in the center, which candidates can trust that these are real jobs and their application is going to go to the actual employer and the employers can trust that they’re actually going to get applications from real people that fit their criteria. And, you know, yeah, it just seems like a space that we’re desperate for someone to fill at the moment. So I suppose as a final question, I know you don’t like predicting the future, but just your kind of opinion on what you’re seeing if we.
24:35
Matt Alder
Look Ahead, do you think job boards will be able to adapt or is.
24:39
Matt Alder
Something else going to come in and kind of replace them and sort of take that role that we’ve just been talking about?
24:45
Lou Goodman
Yeah, I mean, I’d love to have a crystal ball. I could make a lot of money if I had a crystal ball and could tell people this. I think the key thing is that the need isn’t going anywhere. So it has to be the job boards or something has to come and replace it. I think maybe it might be a bit of both. I think what there’s. I do quote someone else in the report called Thomas Ottawa. He coined a phrase called application tourism. You know how a lot of the big tech companies keep coming in and out of saying that they’re going to do recruitment.
25:18
Lou Goodman
And so I think what makes me believe that job boards, this is really about an evolution of job boards rather than an extinction is that if job board’s been around for a long time, it’s 30 years, isn’t it? Over 30 years, yeah.
25:34
Matt Alder
Don’t make me feel old now. I can remember when lots of them launched, but yes, it’s a long time.
25:39
Lou Goodman
Yeah, yeah. I can remember fighting to get job boards on media plans and, you know, this Internet thing won’t take off. Does make me feel very old. But, you know, it’s been a long time and someone hasn’t come in and disrupted. And Thomas Otter has a great article on it about what the challenges are with doing that and why it isn’t as easy as you just, oh, we’ll just come in and do this. So I think the job boards are in the best position. They understand the market, they understand what it needs, they have the experience, they have the technology. And companies like jobico are committed to keep evolving that technology. You know, I’m taken on a role of board advisory member on the, their advisory board for this, which is really exciting.
26:28
Lou Goodman
But I think there are people that are really committed to moving this on and I think that job boards are actually best place. It doesn’t mean that there’s not real challenges for all the reasons that we talked about in the previously, like legacy revenue and you’ve got a running business. So in some cases it is much easier for somebody new to come in that doesn’t have all of that kind of history and baggage and, you know, legacy revenue. But I still do believe that job boards have the knowledge and the history to best placed to do it. And I do think that if someone was going to come in and change it. They would have disrupted it by now. But that’s not to say that someone you know won’t come back in. I know you interviewed Jeff Taylor recently.
27:13
Lou Goodman
I was at the TA Tech event where you interviewed him as well. You know someone, he’s someone who’s got history. I mean, he arguably kind of started the category. So it might be like an ex insider like Jeff that comes and changes things. But I do think disruption is coming. But I, I think job boards have a role to play and I hope that enough of them can adapt absolutely well.
27:35
Matt Alder
It’s going to be interesting to see how it all develops. Lou, thank you very much for talking to me.
27:41
Lou Goodman
Thank you for having me.
27:43
Matt Alder
My thanks to Lou. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show.
28:04
Matt Alder
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
