You’re a job seeker. You pay LinkedIn $29.95 per month for a “Job Seeker Premium” membership so that, when you apply for jobs, you can artificially “move your job applications to the top of the list as a Featured Applicant.” But the employer sees a “badge” beside your name and knows you paid for the position. Do you feel a little slimy for doing it, or wonder what the employer thinks of you now? More to the point, did that 30 bucks pay off?
Ten years ago, Monster and CareerBuilder were the starting point for any respectable job search candidate or recruiting professional. Companies posted ads, job seekers responded, and within a day recruiters had a cache of potential hires to choose from. But over the years, the boards seemed to sabotage their own value proposition by becoming too easy to use. Job seekers flooded companies with applications even if they weren’t remotely qualified for the positions, and recruiters, overwhelmed by the deluge, stopped reviewing them all together. This caused serious seekers to abandon the big boards, turning instead to social media, referrals, and niche recruiting sites for job leads, leaving recruiters with a less and less compelling candidate pool for their job posting dollar.
We are increasingly living our lives and our businesses within the digital community which is causing traditional marketing guidelines to blur. Marketing is now becoming more personal and targeted, it is no longer about throwing information at users, but rather creating conversation with consumers and engaging with the lives they lead. In fact studies show that 70% of people state that they would rather get to know a company via articles rather than advertisement and 60% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site.
I’ve been doing lots of reading (and re-reading) in preparation for this fall’s workshop on Branding, and it has me thinking about why companies thrive, just get by, or fail. I’ve been personally involved in all three types of businesses – and I have a few thoughts for you to consider.
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Job Board Industry is just getting the right momentum at the moment for 2015 though it was difficult to recover after the financial events of 2008. But since 2011, things are merrier, and Industry is prospering at a growth rate of 20%, a perfect reason to continue.
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In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of overlap and blurring of lines between what had previously been distinct needs, functions, and uses. Terms like “recruitment”, “applicant tracking” and “job board” are now—sometimes confusingly—used interchangeably. There’s good reason for this, however, what with all the blurring and overlapping going on. But their nuanced differences can still be very important, and can affect the core of what your organization’s business and technology needs are or may become.
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It’s no secret the job market has heated up, and recruiters are evaluating and assessing new as well as tried and true strategies to improve their hiring efforts. The first virtual and online job board was created more than 20 years ago in 1994. The movement from the classified job ads section of the newspaper and the physical “job board” or bulletin board message center to a virtual and online job distribution platform has certainly changed.
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Several leading business journals have recently declared the job itself, as a vehicle for packaging work, to be on the endangered species list[i]. Commenting on the same phenomenon, Savage describes “the rigor mortis of the industrial era” where the division of work and managerial supervision represented “structured distrust.” As the industrial era is replaced by the knowledge era, he predicts, both jobs and managers will be gone[ii]. Thus, making the need for the position description redundant.
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Job boards are a tricky business. They have two types of customers, and in many ways they aren’t buying what you offer–they’re buying what they have to offer each other. As a job board owner, you are the facilitator, the venue through which they are able to find each other. You create and maintain a space that attracts both parties.
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I am continually amazed by the enduring power of words in our oh-so-modern world (and I say this of course as an unrepentant wordsmith). For example: last week I watched a webinar by GlassDoor in which they talked about ‘traditional job boards’ – i.e., everyone but GlassDoor – and ‘modern job boards’ (yep, that would be GlassDoor). Traditional versus modern. Gee, which one should I pick? What a great piece of reframing, eh? (And I’m not picking on GlassDoor per se, so don’t come after me with pitchforks!).
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Innovation and competition have always gone hand in hand, and the recruiting technology industry has historically been no exception to this rule. One has to look no further than only a few years back to see evidence of a trend that, like most history, seems to be repeating itself, as “job boards” rebrand, retool and reinvent their positioning – forgetting that other maxim that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Which might explain why we still suck at candidate experience.
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The ‘traditional’ job board is evolving – but as science tells us, every instance of evolution isn’t always ‘successful’. There are plenty of dead ends in nature – and business. Same in the job board world – often because the sites in question failed to adapt.
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