Well with December here things (aka sales) will soon be slowing at job boards around the world. This time of year always brings a slowdown as HR budgets have been depleted and recruiting slows to a crawl. And as we enter a new year I cant help but think that job boards are under more pressure than ever to prove their worth.
With Linkedin and other social media upstarts getting all the buzz, tried and true job boards dont really have momentum on their side. Today’s recruiter now has multiple sets of tools to find talent. A job board is just one of those.
So what do? I think the answer is a combination of better marketing, getting more social (and mobile) and staying close to your clients. Niche sites will remain a strong recruiting force but they need to evolve with the times.
Marketing: get better at it. Hold offline events to back up your brand and make a personal connection with seekers and employers. Invest in better graphic design. Good looking sites make more money.
Social: think of ways to add social into your site. Allow candidates to login with facebook or linkedin. Use Linkedin’s APIs to interact with your site. Get on twitter if you arent already.
Clients: take your clients out to dinner, throw a party, sponsor an event. Over-deliver on your promises. Here’s a great example.
WHAT ELSE IS NEW
* I had dinner with execs from JuJu.com and Ziprecruiter last week. Check out JuJu’s new redesign. The #3 aggregator did a great job creating a simple but beautiful page. I especially like how they did the google ads along the right.
We talked a lot about the industry that night. About how SimplyHired’s CEO Gautam got the boot, about Google Panda, which has hit virtually every job board in the industry except for Indeed. We all agreed that Google’s new algorithm sucks and only serves to make the rich get richer. Hence, Indeed gets a shitload of first page results.
* Ziprecruiter which is a massive job distribution platform or ‘ATS’ is now on a mission to get job boards to outsource their email alerts to job seekers. They have a tight relationship with Indeed.com that could be tested in the coming year. If I were an employer I’d rather use Ziprecruiter than Indeed. They deliver more value.
* I may be switching JobsinSocialMedia.com to the webJobs software platform in an effort to keep all the revenue and not split it with Jobamatic. The site is doing well and I want to get that money. If I do it I’ll switch to Indeed backfill since it s supposedly pays a little more.
