The Future of the Job Board?

[Paul Jacobs]

With the frenzy surrounding the social web as a recruitment tool, will job boards survive? Some commentators are predicting their demise.

Do job boards need to become “social” or should they stick to their knitting? Is the act of broadcasting a job board’s vacancies on a social networking platform enough to call them “social” or should they evolve further?

It would be great to have some discussion around this very topical subject.

[Keith Mockett]

As a seller of job board and recruitment management technology this is a topic that I follow and think about. My view, at this stage, is that Job Boards will survive but will also evolve, in order to survive. I believe that they will become more specialist (industry, skills). They may become more social in the context of being a place where other industry related news will be presented, which will make them more of a portal. I guess that might be where TribeHQ is heading.

Social networking on the other hand is perhaps in danger of being overrun with the job vacancies, creating a lot of irrelevant noise for most of it's participants. Who would visit a social networking site to "meet" with friends etc only to be swamped with job "ads" and with the important stuff buried? Most people wouldn't, they'd move on. Those who are looking for a job will be active participants up to the point they have the job, then a large number of them will stop visiting the social networking site because its fulfilled its function for them.

[Kevin Chappell]

I remember when Job Boards were launched and I for one saw them as our nemesis. How wrong I was! In many ways they have been our life-blood, and have allowed us to respond in a JIT fashion. But the biggest problem is that, like many concepts, they haven't adapted to meet the market. Part of the problem Job Boards have is that they only target the people who are actively looking.

Those of us who have been around a long time will recall the power of the newspaper advertising features and pages of display advertising and how easy it used to be to see the plum jobs. But it was slow and expensive and not responsive to today's (and yesterday's) demands. But one thing they did was grab the casual looker. How often is the best person someone who wasn't looking? And why has search survived?

One thing that social network sites does is engage people, something Job Boards don't do, and never will do unless they change, which they probably won't because the people who run them seem to know better! I've always felt that people being able to create a demand for themselves for companies to peruse will be the way of the future, and in many ways, Social Networking sites almost do that, but miss a key point. They are just that - social networks - and they need to take the next step and become business networks.

Now before you all jump down my throat and say "But that's what they are?", they aren't, and even this site has some dubious "profiles" that make me wonder why those people are on it! So in essence, a web-based network environment that engages people for business reasons and attracts both the active job seekers and the casual lookers, and keeps engaging people on this basis, will be a winner.

[Carey Eaton]

There seems to be a pervading assumption in debates on this subject that 'social recruiting' is a threat to the existence of job boards. This assumption says that jobseekers will chose social platforms as a preference over job boards as their primary way to look for work. Alternatively, the asumption says that employment advertisers will stop advertising as a way to attract candidates. There are some strong arguments that neither of these assumptions hold water.

The data (in Australia) does not support the idea that jobseekers are chosing social platforms as a primary way to look for work. While the visitor and member numbers to social networking websites and channels have increased at a fast rate over the last few years - for reasons that are nothing to do with job hunting - there has been absolutely no corresponding decline in visitor numbers to job boards. Quite the opposite in fact. Traffic numbers to all Australian job boards as measured by Neilsen are at all time record highs and continue to climb. Year on year growth numbers are above 20% for the major Australian job boards. Application volumes are at absolute record numbers with very high growth over the last year. Downstream traffic analysis from Nelisen shows quite clearly that job seekers are not choosing social networking websites as a destination for job hunting above job boards in any meaningful way.

There are significant structural barrers that prevent social networking sites becoming a primary or even secondary destination for jobseeking activity. There no shortage of research that jobseekers really want two things in a jobsearch: access to all the opportunities in the market whilst job hunting, and secondly they want to control the job seeking process in an active way.

It is counter intuitive to suggest that jobseekers will simply become a member of a social networking site and leave the decisions about what jobs they see and don't see to the site's matching capabilities or their friends' whims. Jobseekers want to actively access the market of all opportunities, and control their selection of what they're interested in applying for. They like to see as many opportunities as possible in a web experience in order to make important judgements about what's available and what's not. This research aspect of jobseeking behaviour is something that social activity can only provide in very small part when a contact exposes an opportunity that might not otherwise be known. Whilst this is a very powerful and attractive form of connecting jobseekers and advertisers when it occurs, it does not occur in any volumes that threaten the job board as the primary destination for jobseeking activity, and increasing the volumes of these contacts will destroy the social value of the platforms.

There is also the rather important factor of the economy. In the current down economy, ad volumes on job boards have halved roughly speaking. Whilst SEEK is still posting a new job every thirty seconds - plenty of opportunity - the reality for jobseekers in some markets is that its much tougher to get a job than it used to be. Jobseekers are going to be exploring all sorts of alternatives to maximise their chances - we've even seen job hunters in the U.S. buy billboard space on major roads for their CV when the unemployment rate heads over 10%. The question is whether this is sustainable. Only a madman would consider setting up a billboard company for jobseekers at this point in time. The demographics of Australia are such that we're at 5.7% unemployment - even if we head towards the 8% mark, the current economy does not trump demography or the future. In a tight candidate market that is certainly in our future, jobseekers are not going to need to broadcast their availability or even want to - it will generate too much attention from desparate employers and recruiters. Social media platforms are therefore exposed to much more downside from economic fluctuations than job boards due to the economic weighting on jobseeker preference for destinations to job hunt.

Accessing the entire market of relevant candidates is also critically important for employers and recruiters. It can certainly be argued that if the entire population ends up putting their work related details into social platforms or other online media, then these become highly attractive destinations for employers and recruiters. The absolute attractiveness of this idea is what is fueling the hype around social media.The attractiveness of this one factor however does not cover the full nature of the reality of channel choice when it comes to generating candidates. The attractiveness of this idea may in fact reduce the size of market opportunity for job boards in the same way that the size of spend in the transition from print to online has reduced from around a billion dollars peak to around $500 million in the Australian market. More likely, social media will reduce the amount spent on recruitment firms by employers from around $20 billion (according to the RCSA). ie recruitment firms have more to lose than job boards. The data in the U.S. clearly points to that. But that's a whole other conversation, although if job boards are in anyway at risk here, its because their recruitment clients will be cannibalised by social recruitment. Lots of arguments either way and early days on that so I won't digress too much on that one.

For social media recruitment to cannibalise over job board ad placement, it would have to be a.cheaper and b. easier than using a job board. Neither of these is the case when you include both advertising and productivity costs of using social media compared to using job boards. As well as the cost realities between these two channels that weigh in favour of job boards, job boards have two very strong further structural advantages. The first is that on a job board, you know that the candidates are both interested, available and easily contactable. This is a very significant barrier - surmounting it presupposes that all contingent recruitment firms and HR departments are going to have to become search firms. It presupposes the idea that the activities involved in search-and-selection or headhunting are cheaper and more productive than those activities involved in contingency recruitment. There is at least 30 years of data that shows that this presuppositions is simply not true.

The second is the barrer of scale. For recruitment companies (which control the vast majority of opportunity in the Australian market) to embrace social media as a replacement for jobboards, social media platforms would have to be able to deliver the scalable distribution power of job boards. What I mean by this is simple: on SEEK you can distribute a million jobs an hour to a universal audience in theory. On social media you can distribute conversations as well as jobs - OK - but certainly not to 100 a day per person. Possibly not even to 5 a day per person. This massively limits market accessibility by both jobseeker and advertiser for social media.

The notable exception to this is obviously Twitter, which can clearly scale to the same degree from a distribution point of view. The clear weakness for now is searchability and control, but as soon as you add those things you get a set of listings with a search engine ie a job board. Albeit one with much less content, much less utility, and no transactional elements. Twitter could therefore be considered in the same way as you might consider aggregators: lots of content, but no revenue model and a worse user experience when it comes to the transactional elements of making contact with employers and recruiters.

All this is not to say that social media has no relevance to the future of the job board: far from it. If jobseekers are not going to choose social platforms as a primary destination and advertisers are not going to either, what is the relevance of social media to recruiting and why all this hype?

The answer is quite simple: social media platforms represent complimentary tools to job boards, HR departments, recruitment companies and jobseekers. Not replacements. Social media can massively enhance the ability to communicate through space but also through time with jobseekers you already know or employers / recruitment companies you'd like to stay in touch with and exploit at a later date. The latter is the key point - once you have 'generated' a jobseeker from a job board, social media may mean that you don't need to 'regenerate' that jobseeker information again.

A likely change is that job boards will become responsible for generating initial contacts, candidate-availability and job-interest information for advertisers as well as the job-availaibility information they currently distribute to jobseekers.

The 'initial contacts' aspect is worth noting as a major change. The lifetime value of a candidate's information is quite different to the immediate transactional value of the same information. You could see a scenario where job boards will have to price on the basis of the lifetime value rather than the transactional value of the candidate's application. There is already a shift in this direction - rather than pricing on a per-listing basis, Hotjobs and others have changed to a per-application basis.

Above all of these ideas is also an assumption in many of the arguments that job boards will not evolve to embrace the new opportunities provided by social technologies; ther is an assumption that job boards products have reached the zenith of their existence. This is patently a ridiculous idea. They're only just started. The Future of Job boards is not one where they distribute a bunch of newspaper ads with a search engine with the ads remaining permamently as they were in 1910.

Applications to job board ads still consist of a Word document with a brief history of someone's working life, distributed by email. This will change.

It is absolutely the case that the form, format, content and structure of job ads, job applications, job alerts, company profiles, resumes, portfolios and other information characteristics of job boards will change.

Competitive job boards will always be thinking about how to move forward in these areas and it is quite likely in the future that yes, a job board application will consist of a LinkedIn or Facebook pre-connection (though many recruiters and employers don't want to be 'friends' with job rejects - another barrier to adoption). There are also tremendous leaps in the sophistication of search and recommendation technology that are already in train in most job boards: Careerbuilder, Monster, SEEK, Yahoo, Zhaopin, MyCareer and many others have all made very significant investments in search technology platforms in the last couple of years - mainly FAST, Endeca, Lucine or Trovix in the case of Monster. The value of those investments is yet to be fully harnessed and realised in job board products.

In summary, job boards are very likely to remain the primary destination for jobseekers, employers, recruiters and recruitment advertising dollars for the indefinite future, whilst their products continue to rapidly evolve and take advantages of emerging social platforms.

[Grant Foggo]

Interesting article in business week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_27/b4138043180664.htm
reporting that a Corporate recruiter who used to spend up to $4 million a year with job boards has reduced her annual spend to $60,000 with LinkedIn. Will be interesting to see if this is a successful decision or not.

[Suzanne Kendrick]

Anecdotally the recent vacancies I have worked on in the last six months I have chosen not to use job boards. Simply in this market, as a specialist recruiter I am already flooded with excellent candidates. If I was short, a job board ad would just create a lot more work as I handled all of the applicants. More time efficient to search and use the social net to go after the skills you are looking for.

Suzanne Kendrick

[Clayton Wehner]

I agree that social recruitment will increase in volume over time, but it won’t replace the direct advertising model overnight. I think that Carey is correct when he says that social recruitment will complement existing job boards, rather than take their place.

One only has to look at the continued (albeit shrinking) use of newspaper advertising for job vacancies as evidence that advertisers move slowly - online job boards have been around for a while now and offer a much more cost-effective and convenient way to advertise, yet many employers still spend thousands of dollars on newspaper ads. Because it’s the way that it has always been done and most people are conservative, risk-averse and loathe to change the status quo.

The Federal Government, who we deal with regularly, is notorious for this - the amount of money that is spent on print advertising is ridiculous and it is a real chore to convince government agencies to advertise online, even though the cost savings are apparent. Imagine trying to convince them to drop all of their existing methodologies in favour of a pure 'social recruitment' strategy?

But the shift from newspapers is clearly on and we'll continue to see advertisers choose online job boards over print advertising in coming years. It's pretty clear that the standard newspaper business model is unsustainable and many papers (not all) will be in dire straits unless they reinvent themselves. It will be some time yet before we see a major newspaper go down in this country (several major papers have bitten the dust in the US and it will likely happen here too).

That said, there are a good percentage of people out there that have never used SEEK to search for jobs or to advertise a vacancy - I don't believe that these people will skip straight from print advertising into the uncertain world of social recruiting. Job boards represent a good first alternative to print - basically it's a cheaper, editable, controllable form of direct advertising with a sustained exposure to the target audience. There's significant growth yet to come for job boards, although job boards that fail to continually innovate may find themselves in the same shoes as the newspapers...

[Simone Baird]

That is interesting that you should say this Clayton especially given your position. A lot of what you have said is exactly what I was trying to get across in my showcase last week. The point is that we can be a bit slow to take new initiatives up and as a result print advertising will continue (albeit declining) and the job boards will become more likely to be a part of any campaign.

In my experience, clients in the social sector seem to have a strong demand still for print advertising. They seem to be reluctant to let go and feel that they need to be transparent in their advertising and feel that print is the best way to achieve this.

Over time this will change (as I don't think newspapers as a whole are prepared to get innovative and stop this) and the job boards and then social media will be come the norm.

[Keith Mockett]

There have been a number of excellent points made in the discussion so far. My conclusion at this point is that the job boards will evolve to incorporate some of the social networking developments but they have a long way to go. At this time they are really a replacement for print advertising, offering additional "benefits" of speed, timeliness, reach, number of jobs, and ease of applying. With downsides for the advertiser such as a deluge of applications for other parts of the world.

Social networking is perhaps a means of finding out about jobs that were never advertised anyway, the ones that people had previously found out about through their personal networks. It also provides candidates with another source of information if they research the company and it's people before applying for a job. But lets face it, how many people go to great lengths to research the company they are applying to? Many (most?) are probably thinking that it's got to be better than the job they have (there must be some unhappiness with their current situation, otherwise they wouldn't be in the job market) or if unemployed ("any job is better than no job"). So the potential of social networking in the recruitment space is perhaps for parts of the job search.

One thing that may have an advantage in social networks or Twitter is Temp and/or Contract work. This is where the need to act fast (because the opportunity is for say, 1 days work tomorrow) makes the responsiveness of tools like Twitter useful. Or for lumps of contract work e.g. "Does someone know of of a good graphic designer to do a logo for me?".

[Tim Latham]

I think that Keith Mockett's initial comment pretty well hits the spot for me - job boards will survive but need to evolve and should become more industry specific with a "social element" to them. I'm not going to claim that I'd fully thought all of these issues through, but I am delighted that all of those themes are concurrent with what I've been working on for a couple of years, and launched earlier this year (2009).

We have positioned Prefio.com as the place for commercial property jobs - it isn't open access but is a network / community of commercial property pratitioners.

[Keith Robinson]

Having been an early job boarder, 98 I have seen the dramatic change in how we recruit, but in the UK print still takes 50% plus of the recruitment media cake (including database $$) and all over the world that "old medium" is still around (agreed not in the way it was). So will JB's die? ANSWER no.

Very rearly does a new medium or channel completly kill of what it or market sentiment intends it to replace, print, radio, TV,poster etc etc all stil,l in one way shape or form exist.

Channels, and that is all job boards/social networks are, get more and more fragmented (a la TV) and their is a danger you ending up in the long term paying more to target the same audience/community.

Social media just channels, Facebook wants to compete with Google ( it wants to be a media business NOT a social network) not a Linkedin or other "recruitment led social media". I suspect for Facebook recruitment will be just another a revenue line amongst many and when that focus shifts will recruiters then get the "product attention they crave" answer no.

Jobs boards do need to evolve and fast. At the end of the day they were and still are "recruitment classifieds on line!!" well within reason. Social is about "engagement, relationship, transparancy, honest and authenticity" that is in no way a Job Board "zone" at the moment.

But like the print owners, who had the $$ and needed to survive they went out a brought the first generation of job boards, where will the old money end up.

A much bigger threat to Job Boards and potentially the social networks are if recruiters adopt the "social approach to recruitment", use the tools provde by social media (the channel is what we see, but the tools are what power it/them) to build not corporate career sites but candidate relationships networks (CRN).

One prediction Facebook will buy a job board and use it's traffic as a "driver" in the same way Yahoo acquired Hotjobs!! wow putting it out their.

An old Brit on hols in France....

[Kunal Malhotra]

social recruitment? but isn't recruitment already social?

anyways, in my opinion job boards will continue but will become less relevant as other mediums become more effective such as Linkedin and Facebook (not twitter at this stage I think... jury is still out on this one in my opinion...) or will become subsets of such sites as it is for Linkedin.

The thing is (especially if you a perm employee), then finding a job has been and will always be a transactional activity which once completed, you wouldn't want to repeat that often. So, the job boards will only stay relevant till the time this action is completed. This action is the "common thread" which ties every job seeker together and after that we are again individuals with different needs, passions etc. Linkedin, facebook and other so called social networks then tie the other interests together nicely, and hence people don't frequent job boards anymore...