I hadn’t been to Nashville in several years so the 2 hour flight from NY was an easy decision to head down to Jobg8’s annual U.S event. Over 100 job board pros gathered for a day and a half of networking and learning. For me it was a chance to reconnect with old friends such as Jeff Dickey-Chasins, Francis from Talroo, Matt from Appcast and ever present colleagues like Joel Cheesman, Steve Levy and Gerry Crispin.
This year is the 10th anniversary of Jobg8. If you are unfamiliar with them they help job boards by letting them buy traffic or provide backfill.
Here are some bullet point take aways from notes and observations at the show.
- Recruitment blogger Matt Charney shared a picture in his keynote that revealed something important. Facebook may be working on a candidate matching tool and API hooks for applicant tracking systems. He could not reveal the source of the info but it definitely intrigued the group.
- ZipRecruiter’s rep says they have paid out $50 million to date in affiliate earnings.
- Zip has 40 million monthly visitors
- Matt Charney also said recruiting is “not broken”. His evidence? The fact that employee churn (people changing jobs) is up these days with the job market being so tight. Recruiters are doing their job.
- Retention is recruiting
- Voluntary turnover is around 26% in the job market
- Average job tenure is 3.8 years.
- I met more staffing firms who have or want to build their own job boards. I sense a trend.
- Lots of AI talk during the show.
- Matching seems to be the best thing job boards can do to improve themselves. Show relevant candidates from your database once the employer posts a job.
Jobg8 setup a networking room for attendees so we could meet each other. I love that aspect of the conference as it is the personal connections and potential clients that draw me to it.
I also made several new connections and had some great food and wine thanks to Gerry Crispin and guys like Chris Murdock who let me and a few other attendees hang out in the office of IQ Talent before our flights. Most of us New York bound had our flights scratched due to weather. As I write this I made it as far as Atlanta and crossing my fingers I can back home tonight.
