I have written a lot about the future of job boards over the past few years. After doing some research I picked out some quotes from others in the industry on this topic.
FROM: TalentDrive
TalentDrive, the creator of the on-demand resume sourcing technology, TalentFilter, today released the results from the recent Talent Sourcing Forecast survey, exposing top concerns, priorities, and budget capacities for Staffing Firms and F1000 Companies as they enter Q4 2009 and plan for 2010.
Over 8,000 F1000 Companies and Staffing Firms were surveyed. This survey was conducted between August 27, 2009 and September 22nd, 2009.
The survey first discovered the number one sourcing challenge facing companies currently, with 51% of companies responding ԓfiltering through the mass of resumes and increased number of applicants as the number one issue.
When asked what the top strategic action companies are taking to improve their talent acquisition efforts and conquer the sourcing challenge is for 2010, 58% of those surveyed said revamping their interview process to reduce time spent with unqualified candidates as the top priority. Additionally, 31% of the respondents plan to implement sourcing technology to help improve their online talent sourcing efforts.
Despite filtering through the online resume pandemonium ranking as a top challenge for recruiters, when asked if, once the resumes had been located, the quality of candidates met or exceeded their expectations, over half (54% of those surveyed) said yes, the quality of candidates was of the caliber they required. The survey shows that despite the chaos created by the increased number of applicants online, one of the best ways to locate qualified talent, especially young talent and recent graduates, is still in habitats they are comfortable- social media and online job sites.
The survey went on to ask, if not online, what is the number one method for connecting with top Talent. 59% replied that their number one way of pinpointing top Talent is through employee referrals. The surprising statistic – 98% of the companies surveyed did not find Talent from within the existing Company ATS.
FROM: Eric Shannon of Latpro
Here’s what I see coming in the job search business:
The strong become powerful – I was surprised not to see any high-profile bankruptcies last year. So what’s happening? Just as economic wealth has become highly concentrated over the past 30 years. Data from tax returns show that the top 1% of households received 8.9% of all pre-tax income in 1976. In 2007, the top 1% share had more than doubled to 23.5% — similar trends are at work online. Watch for power to concentrate in the hands of today’s heavyweight job search entrepreneurs. The competition coming from every direction won’t matter as much as the competition coming from a handful-or-so of companies.
Consolidation – acquisitions will accelerate and outpace all previous activity. Whereas acquisitions used to be mostly for the largest companies, even small job boards will be active in the future on a smaller scale.
Risks and rewards are magnified – there will be fewer moderately successful job boards as the cost of remaining invisible rises and the rewards for succeeding rise. This will make for a very volatile and noisy marketplace with lots of outlandish marketing.
Video arrives – if keeping a blog and running a social network separate the men from the boys today, tomorrow it will be video content. Sites without good video will feel stale.
Small is beautiful – small job boards have always been somewhat virtual companies relying heavily on contractors. There will be a new crop of larger scale virtual companies as entrepreneurs respond to the lessons of the great recession by minimizing infrastructure and maximizing revenue per employee.
How do you thrive over the next five years in this environment?
Spread your bets – get diversity. You don’t want to depend critically on any customer, vendor, partner, employee, traffic source or technology. If you have anything you can’t afford to lose, make changes!
Make new friends – socialize. In a volatile market, you can’t afford to be the last one on the block to know what’s happening. There are always individuals at the forefront of every change and opportunity. Sometimes these folks are 10 years ahead of the pack. Timing is everything and the right clue at the right moment can change your business and your life.
Put down deep roots – make value the cornerstone of your business. If everyone loves what you do for them, your unavoidable mistakes, failures and missed opportunities won’t matter as much. You’ll expand your options and opportunities.
FROM: Jeff Dickey-Chasins, The Job Board Doctor
In my role as a consultant, I am often asked what lies in the future for job boards. Well, I’m not a fortuneteller — but I am willing to make a few educated guesses about what lies ahead.
Continued expansion of niche and micro-niche job sites: Finding niche sites is easier for job-seekers as search-engine technology grows more sophisticated. At the same time, these niche sites have become more adept in the use of search-engine optimization, social media, and search-engine marketing to increase their visibility. The transformation from a simple search-and-apply site to a full-fledged career hub is how many job sites will remain competitive.
Growth of the freelance sites: Freelance sites such as eLance and Guru have grown significantly since the onset of the recession in 2008. Many professionals previously employed by companies have shifted to self-employment. The freelance sites have benefited by providing the ‘go-between’ functionality needed by clients and freelancers.
Integration of more social-media features into job sites: Evolution of social-media services and sites threaten established job sites, so expect to see those sites co-opt key social-media features by integrating features into the sites. In particular, I anticipate the integration of social-media information about job-seekers for employer viewing, the integration of “broadcast” social-media services such as Twitter into the job-posting process, and the creation of branded job-site search tools designed to integrate into key platforms such as Facebook.
Growth of employer branding: The onslaught of social media has been a wakeup call for many companies with regard to their “employer brand” — it’s out there, whether they like it or not. Thus, you will see more companies actively engaging job seekers, and managing their brand in the process. Job sites that leverage this trend by offering more opportunities to promote an employer brand will benefit.
Job boards that don’t evolve will fade away. Job boards are in a unique position – they have the opportunity to expand their market…or lose it. Smart sites are already integrating social media (emphasis on ‘social’) into their offerings – and transforming themselves into the vendor of choice for social media recruiting.
LinkedIn is a job board. OK, that wasn’t a universal opinion – but it’s certainly mine. LinkedIn is more than a typical job board (think Groups), but I’d be surprised if there was any other business out there giving large and medium size job boards more heartburn. (However, the fact that it has become a recruiter’s playpen also makes it less attractive to candidates – a problem that Linkedin will have to solve soon).
FROM: Simon Lewis, UK Marketing Network
Job boards, by tradition, provide a platform on which recruiters pay to advertise their vacancies then wait in anticipation for applications to flood through to designated in-boxes. There is nothing particularly deliberate about the service and the reactivity is both its strength and its weakness.
But in the current climate there is little room for limitations, so whilst reduced-cost recruitment solutions will continue to feature in most recruiter’s budgets, technological development dictates that unless job boards embrace more innovative strategies, they could see their status stifled by the sophistication of integrated products such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), CV parsing and the prospects of disintermediation.
In good times desirable candidates are comfortable, entrenched in their positions and paid well. They are confident. They don’t reach out and share because they see no purpose in it. Conversely, in bad times, everyone feels the need to share, so recruiters are inundated by CVs, most of which are either irrelevant or wholly generic; the latter being as bad as the former during a time when standing out from the crowd is so important.
So what should job boards be doing to ensure their users receive a service that will make them return? What is the future for job boards and how will they tackle the undoubted challenges that lie ahead?
The recruitment landscape now is about conversations. Web-savvy jobseekers are communicating in language that is natural, open and honest, sometimes even direct; more direct than recruiters might wish them to be. Everything is changing. People are connecting and working together. The Internet is enabling these conversations and there is nothing corporations or recruiters can do to stop it. What they can do though, is embrace it: for joining them and showing innovation is surely the only way to preserve.
For some job boards social media has come at just the right time. It provides them with the means of providing information (e.g. advertising jobs), building relationships (with clients and candidates) and conducting forums for discussion on how they can improve as an industry. Most importantly of all, however, social media allows job boards to get messages out from their clients to a far wider audience than many other recruitment channels. And these messages are delivered real-time, with accuracy.
If a job board operates in a niche sector the dissemination of this information is even more specific, so even more relevant. A jobseeker looking for marketing jobs in the UK, for example, should be better served by a job board specialising in the marketing field. They return to job boards where the content (and the current age is all about content) is targeted at them. People see tangible value in subscribing to newsletters and feeds, contributing to forums and joining groups if it directly benefits them. Generalist sites, whilst clearly valuable, cannot offer this exclusivity. Their unique visitor stats may be high but they are unable to harvest customer loyalty. Return rates are relatively low.
Sector-specific job boards are also far more likely to be empathetic to their clients. They hear where they are coming from, understanding their frustrations and working to their needs. For niche job board owners it is essential they engrain themselves under the skin of their market. Generalist sites have multiple variables and bigger margins for error. If a niche board fails to engage with its audience it will soon lose its unique identifier and will be dropped in favour of a more meaningful competitor. This is the same for traditional recruitment generalists.
The word ‘traditional’ is an interesting one. When does something stop being contemporary? Job boards have been around for ages but are still commonly classed as modern-day recruitment mediums. With the advent and development of social media, however, do job boards now fill a void between traditional recruitment companies and en vogue employment media? Irrespective of the answer it indicates challenging times ahead.
Job boards offer a low-cost but highly speculative place for employers to advertise their vacancies. Job boards offer recruitment agencies a platform from which to attract talent and develop brand identity. Two separate entities, two different purposes. But whilst the impression is one of mutual exclusivity there should be no reason why the pair cannot develop symbiosis via a job board. By the same token why should recruitment agencies view their competitors as foe? In an age where sharing information and being transparent are the currencies of social engagement, perhaps a job board provides the perfect place to perpetrate a fee-sharing mechanism.
Referral-based recruitment will dominate the employment landscape within two years. In the same period social media will evolve and, with it, opportunities to network will be met by a larger number of experienced social-engagers. These people will be accustomed not only to integrating with social space but using it to find a job and developing their careers. They will also be used to earning fees from recommendations.
Job boards can be a vehicle for recruiters to attract a better quality of candidate to their vacancy by advertising the role with a cash incentive for recommending someone to it. This serves two purposes: firstly, few recommendations are offered lightly so the recruiter will receive endorsed applications – always a winner. Secondly, recruitment consultants can become referrers, working on vacancies with cash incentives, collecting fees they would not otherwise have been able. There are multiple benefits: recruiters always have new briefs to work on; a recruiter-registered jobseeker has more job options; it reduces the number of speculative calls/applications to the employer/recruiter.
Any niche job board embracing the referral model will add stickiness to its site and through an undoubtedly vast people network can ensure it is the oiled handle of this multi-cogged mechanism. Referral-based recruitment links all the staffing components together and manages to cohesively combine social media, social networking and innovation into one malleable solution.
As employers seek the feasibility of disintermediation, job boards and recruitment consultancies continue to prove their worth. But isn’t the true middleman the traditional recruiter? And if so, where would that leave job boards? Because if the figures are correct more than 50% of job board advertising revenue comes from recruitment agencies. Removing them would mean a huge reliance on direct employer spend, something they are trying to reduce. It is a merry-go-round of conjecture and hypothesis but one thing is for certain, as and when the economy flourishes again it will be the job boards with value-added customer retention schemes that will benefit and profit most.
When the economy recovers it will be the innovators who thrive. Statics will die. There are too many potential landmines out there for a ‘traditional’ job board to remain reactive. Get with social engagement or get ready to fail.
