Almost every week I see another blog post or story about a trend, product, or development that will doom job boards. Let’s be honest – writing about the death of any institution, especially one used by millions of people worldwide, is a great way to gather eyeballs and readers.

But as I was considering my latest snarky response to such an article, it occurred to me: What exactly is a job board these days? To wit:

• Is LinkedIn a job board?: its primary function seems to be helping people find jobs (or, rather, find people who can find them jobs). It has job postings. It has ‘Apply’ buttons. It certainly has resumes. But….it also has Groups, Direct Messaging, news feeds, and some aspects of interactive social media sites. So: is it a job board?
• Is Indeed a job board?: Up until a couple of years ago, Indeed was an ‘aggregator’ – it aggregated jobs from thousands of job boards, theoretically making it easier for job seekers to find said jobs. But it is now divesting itself of job board jobs, focusing on direct employer jobs instead – and has recently added a (paid) resume search. So: is it a job board?
• Are matching sites job boards?: Sites like RemarkableHire, Identified, Jobsync, and Jobbook (and there are dozens more) all claim to be able to match candidates to employers using various combinations of profiles, resumes, social media, and skills testing. Some contain job listings (somewhere), some do not. Some use conventional resumes, some do not. There are even networks that focus on matching (RealMatch). So: are they job boards?
• Is StartWire a job board?: How about a site that pulls a job seeker’s social network connections together, tracks job applications, and points out relevant job sources? It doesn’t look like a traditional job board – yet it’s connecting job seekers and jobs.  So: is it a job board?

Here’s what I think: the term ‘job board’ is a term coined during the dawn of online recruiting for sites such as Dice and Monster. It was a way of putting tactile terms onto a virtual world, helping us understand there was an electronic board out there in the ether, covered with jobs.

Fast forward almost two decades: the term is still around because: a) humans are creatures of habit; b) humans are lazy; and c) it is still, in some very general way, accurate. Yes, all of the sites mentioned above (and tens of thousands of others) are much more than electronic ‘job boards’. But at their core, they exist to connect employers and job seekers.

Consider the question another way: if you removed the ability of all aforementioned sites to connect employers and job seekers, what would remain? Would they still be functional? Profitable? Durable?

I think not.

So, call your site what you will. Maybe you’ll coin the great new term that replaces ‘job board’. But remember – it’s not a bad word, an epithet, or a thing of the past. It’s simply a commonly used term to describe an incredibly wide, diverse, and useful collection of sites that connect employers and job seekers.

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A few weeks back I was lucky enough to host a webinar (sponsored by RealMatch). I talked about the various and sundry challenges facing job boards in the coming years. Judging from the number of attendees AND the number of questions, it was a smashing success – so thank you! I had a limited amount of time to respond to questions that day, but I did promise to try and answer as many as I could afterwards. Little did I know what this would entail! There were a LOT of questions.

Nonetheless, a promise is a promise – so below you see a decent percentage of the questions. I did not answer all – some were too vague, some were specific only to a particular site, and some were structured in such a way as to entail a book-length response. So, with that caveat and without further ado, here goes:

Q: How much video content are you seeing with job boards as far as video resumes and video interviews?

A: Very little. A few sites, such as GetHired and SparkHire, specialize in video resumes/profiles/interviews, but most sites either have never offered them, or have tried and dropped them. Why? As far as I can tell, employers are either skittish about the technology and/or liability, or they simply don’t see the need. I do see real value during the hiring process for using video interviews for certain types of positions.

Q: Job description challenge is decades old. Can you share any tips to get employers to improve their job descriptions?

A: Getting better job ads from employers is a never-ending challenge. There is often a disconnect between the hiring managers and those in charge of writing and placing the ads. Job boards that get the best results from their clients do so by: a) gathering and promoting the data on how good ads produce great results; b) showing their clients how to make the ads better; c) providing additional support materials (via white papers, case studies, webinars, etc.). Yes, it’s time consuming. But it produces better results – which often means more revenue and renewals.

Q: How important is content marketing for job boards?

A: I believe that content (other than job ads) is very important for job boards, for several reasons: a) it improves your ‘stickiness’ with job seekers; b) it improves your SEO; c) it provides additional opportunities for revenue; and d) it helps distinguish you from competitors. The catch? Good content takes time and effort – and you must continually refresh it. One solution? User-generated content.

Q: Can you talk about ways a site with an existing brand can work to strengthen it?

A: See the answer above re: content marketing. Also, look hard at your visuals – the site, the logo, the overall look and feel of every customer-facing thing you do. Are they coherent, attractive, and distinctive? Also, think about what kinds of things you want your site associated with: charities, contests, publications, etc.

Q: Do you think it is possible to gain critical mass with a brand new board from scratch, or would it be better to purchase another board and revise/promote?

A: It depends. If you’re going into an existing, crowded category, you may be better off purchasing a board. If you have a truly unique technology or approach, perhaps creating a new board is better. If you’re a content expert for the niche, creating a new board may make sense as well.

Q: for a med-large biz looking to build board, would you recommend Commercially available Off-The-Shelf software or build in-house?

A: Again, it depends. If you are not doing anything particularly unusual, AND you don’t have any in-house tech talent, you’re probably better off buying job board software (and remember, almost all vendors provide customization). Job board software is deceptively complex and hard to do well. On the other hand, if you have lots of in-house techies and lots of special demands, you may want to roll your own. Q: Am looking for a resume search engine for employers. I have custom fields such as security clearances, etc., that need to be added.

Q: How do you compete against Craigslist?

A: I wouldn’t. They are in a different world. If you’re losing your clients to Craigslist, you need to look hard at how you’re running your site.

Q: Question about RealMatch – do they cover the UK?

A: Not at this time – they are focused on the U.S. and Canada.

Q: Is it important to have a lot of advanced search options for job boards, or do they not necessarily matter?  What seem to be the most beneficial for candidates?

A: Search options are very important. Remember, the search engine is one of the primary tools you give job seekers to access your jobs – so you need to make it as flexible, powerful, and easy to use as possible. The traditional model of a ‘simple’ search box with an option to ‘expand’ to an advanced search page is good – and job seekers expect it. I also like the way Indeed and SimplyHired offer a left-side menu of additional search refinements – very easy to scan and use. How do you know if you’re getting it right? Look at your analytics – the number of searches, job views, and time spent per unique visit should all go up. If they aren’t, you need to do more.

Q: Where do you think job boards will be 5 years from now, extinct?

A: See this post - it sums up my thoughts nicely.

Q: Who pays better for backfill, Indeed or SimplyHired?

A: They’re comparable, in my experience.

Q: What are some of the most important metrics we can use to measure our job board?

A: The most important metrics are usually tied to candidate activity and engagement, in my opinion: number of unique visits, time spent per visit, number of pages per visit, number of jobs viewed per visit, resumes uploaded, jobs viewed per job search, and the ratio of job alerts to registered candidates. On the employer side, your renewal rate is most critical.

Q: Explain using LinkedIn for login

A: This is a convenience issue for job seekers. Rather than having to create a new username and password for your site, they can simply use their existing LinkedIn info. By making it easier – lowering the barrier – you should see more registrations and more usage.

Q: Do metatags and keywords still play a major role with the big search engines?

A: They still play a role, but they’re not as important as the overall site content and structure. So make sure not to focus exclusively on these 2 aspects.

Q: What is the best way to allow candidates the ability to share jobs via social media?

A: Really, if you allow them to share via LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, you’ve covered the important ones. Depending on your niche, there might be some social media channels that are equally popular, and if so, you should include them, too. As always, follow the candidate!

Q: In light of Indeed kicking off job boards, where should we go to buy good quality traffic to keep our unique visitor counts up (notwithstanding improving SEO)

A: Indeed does not seem to be eliminating all job boards but it would probably be unwise for any job board to rely on them as a primary source of traffic. There are of course other aggregators, including TopUSAJobs, Juju, SimplyHired, and Jobs2Careers. These can all provide similar traffic. Also, I should mention that the sponsor of the webinar, RealMatch, has its own network of sites and can drive traffic to your site.

Q: Can you talk more about Mashups?

A: Mashups are just a new way to talk about combining different types of content and services into one site/service. So, for example, instead of a standard job site with a database of jobs and the ability to upload your resume, you might have a job board PLUS a HuffPost-style news area with user-generated content PLUS a Glass Door-style area that looks at employers from the job seeker’s view. What you decide to ‘mash up’ really depends on your audience – what would work best for them, keep them engaged over the long haul, and offer the best chances for monetization?

Q: what is your thoughts on the new Facebook app “Branch Out”  its new, any initial thoughts?

A: See my post on BranchOut.

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Getting jobs from an employer and onto a job board has been a challenge from the earliest days of the industry. Initially, the only way to do so was manually – the employer filled out a web form and submitted the job ad to the job board. Needless to say, this method (which, of course, is still widely used) was time-consuming and provided many opportunities for typos, dropped information, and other inaccuracies.

Needless to say, job boards didn’t like this arrangement – the harder it was to post jobs, the less likely their customers were to buy more job ads than absolutely needed. Employers didn’t like it, for it was tedious, slow, and yet another task for their (under-staffed) HR departments.

As more employers created their own websites, the first section they added – after the obligatory picture of their dynamic management team, of course – was a careers area. In addition to tidbits about benefits and working conditions, the careers area had job postings. These were created in exactly the same manner as those posted to a job board – via a simple web form. Almost immediately, HR managers everywhere began to wonder: “Why should I enter this information twice? Why not figure out some way to have it automatically transferred to the job board of my choice?”

Solutions quickly emerged. With a bit of programming, jobs could be ‘fed’ to job boards vis a RSS or XML file. For many companies, however, the ‘bit of programming’ was a stumbling block – they lacked programmers, time, money, or all of the above. Occasionally job boards would jump in and create the feeds for their clients. But by and large the responsibility fell on the employer to either create a feed or enter jobs the old-fashioned way.

Then along came a spider (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Job ‘spidering’ is the ultimate ‘hands-off’ solution as far as employers are concerned. The software visits the employer site on a periodic basis (usually every 1-3 days), gathers the job data, then posts it directly to the job board. From the job board’s perspective, spidering involves either working with a 3rd party vendor or utilizing internal tech time – each time an employer’s site is added, the spider must be set up to read the correct areas of the site, then match the data fields to corresponding fields in the job board’s job posting database. In a perfect world, the spider is set up and then it just runs. In reality, spiders often require ‘fine tuning’ before they work – and if the employer changes their careers area, the spider must be changed as well.

So – is job spidering (or site scraping, or whatever you prefer to call it) a ‘must’ for job boards? A luxury? Or neither?

Well…it depends. Are you losing clients because they find it difficult or tedious to post jobs on your site? Are you losing revenue by making the posting of multiple jobs more difficult? Are your competitors offering spidering? (Don’t forget – some aggregators actually spider employer sites prior to making a sales call). The answers to these questions will determine whether spidering is a nice option – or a necessity.

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You can’t say it’s been dull this past month. As the mercury has risen, so has the buying fever in our industry. Revenues seem to be rising as well, which will create even more acquisitions, I suspect. So, without further ado, here’s what happened:

• LinkedIn adds new tools for more engagement and (natch) revenue: LinkedIn has added a couple of new features (and probably more as I type this): Targeted Updates, which allows companies to spa- um, I mean email, their followers; and Follower Statistics, which delivers data on a company’s followers. In other news, LinkedIn saw an increase in revenue during Q1 of 101%. Wow.
• Evenbase acquires Jobrapido: In interesting action overseas, Evenbase, which includes Jobsite, Broadbean, and OilCareers, purchased Jobrapido, an Italian job search tool that is currently #2 in international job search.  This makes sense strategically for Evenbase, and I suspect we will see additional acquisitions over the coming years.
• CareerBuilder buys Brazil’s biggest IT jobsite: CareerBuilder bought CEVIU.com.br, the largest information technology job site in Brazil, the first such foray for CareerBuilder into South America. This is the 21st non-US market for CareerBuilder. Smart move. They also acquired Top Language Jobs, a leading global site for multi-language jobs and candidates.
• Monster doubles profit estimate: Monster reported higher profits despite revenue drops in its North American, advertising, and international sectors. How was the money saved? Staff  reductions and general restructuring.
• BranchOut lands $25M and a few users, too: BranchOut, the career network app for Facebook, closed $25 million in additional funding while at the same time surpassing 25 million users. About 50% of the new users are coming from outside of the U.S., and much of the growth seems to be coming from key partnerships. It appears to be the one to beat on Facebook.
• Dice Holdings revenues rise 15% year over year: Revenues for the quarter ended March 31, 2012 totaled $46.1 million, an increase of 15% from $40.1 million in the comparable quarter of 2011. Dice.com’s revenues increased 21% year-over-year, while Rigzone grew 32% year-over-year. Those increases were partially offset by a revenue decline of 5% year-over-year at eFinancialCareers.
• eQuest expands job posting ability in South America: eQuest  announced expansion of its job delivery network in Central and South America, to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
• Dot what? Oh, right – dot Jobs: The legal battle that is .jobs continues. The International Court of Arbitration appointed a third, and final, member of the hearing panel. No hearing schedule has been posted. I’m on pins and needles….

BranchOut was one of the earliest ‘job hunting’ apps available on Facebook, and it has parlayed its early mover advantage into significant signups (25 million users and counting) and investments from venture capitalists (they picked up another $25 million last week – yow!). It has portrayed itself as ‘LinkedIn for the Facebook crowd’ – a place where you search for workers from the 75% of the population that isn’t on LinkedIn.

In other words, it’s a job board that lives in Facebook.

But it’s more. Since it exists inside the social network, it has the ability (as it is always reminding you) to pull your Facebook friends into your BranchOut network. Why would you want to do that? Referrals. As we know from CareerXroads and numerous other studies, referrals can be a powerful hiring tool – so (if you know the right people) your own personal network can help you get hired. That’s the theory, anyway.

I decided to investigate. For the past several months, I’ve been using BranchOut, pretending that I was in fact looking for work on several occasions, and at other times pretending I wanted to hire someone. Here’s my 2 cents.

• The type of friends you have determines the kind of success you have: I’m a desultory Facebook user at best. I limit my friends to people I actually know. I keep my professional ‘friends’ over at LinkedIn. Thus, my BranchOut network was pretty useless. Maybe if I was a different kind of person my luck would be better?
• The interface is pretty cool: It’s easy to use, intuitive, and slightly pushy without being annoying.
• The job listings are, umm, limited: I know they claim millions of jobs listed, but when I went looking for a marketing job in Iowa, I found one. That’s right. That was interesting, as I believe they’re in a partnership with CareerBuilder. At any rate, when I ran the same search on Indeed, I managed to gather up 2,071 listings. I don’t know about most job seekers, but in my book, if I don’t find jobs, I’m not interested.
• Posting a job at no charge: That’s right, you can post a job to your network for nothing. Again, if you have the right kind of network, that’s pretty cool. If your company page has thousands of followers, that’s good too. But for my money, a posting would do better at LinkedIn – and better still at a targeted niche board. But, as you know, I’m biased.
• Social Job Board, CareerConnect, and RecruiterConnect make sense: In other words, BranchOut is selling the right things, in my humble opinion. These are exactly what any employer would want and need if they wanted to test the Facebook recruiting waters. Believe it or not, providing the correct services is not always easy. Many providers get this wrong.
• Mobile app is very good: As in, easy enough to use that they’re generating a ton of new registrants via mobile. It is captive at the end of the food chain (i.e., ‘Apply for this job’) to the employer or job board’s mobile solution (or in most cases, non-solution). But BranchOut understands that mobile is the direction that Facebook – and their audience – is heading, and has adjusted accordingly.

I predicted many months ago that Monster’s Beknown would swamp BranchOut. I was wrong. I suspect that BranchOut will continue to prove many of us wrong – and continue to dominate the employment world on Facebook.

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In a recent presentation with Dr. Charles Handler, I discovered that although both he and I focused on the ‘quality of candidates’ – as does anyone involved in recruiting – we weren’t able to find much data on exactly which recruiting techniques delivered the best quality candidates, according to HR and recruiting professionals. As I was preparing the annual Online Recruiting survey, I decided to ask a few questions about that specific topic. The answers were interesting:

• When asked to rank recruiting sources by the quality of candidates they produced, respondents ranked the following with Excellent or Above Average results: LinkedIn (69%), Referrals (57%), In-house recruiters (53%), Niche job boards (41%), and 3rd party recruiters (36%).
• The top reasons that respondents use job boards included: Quality of candidates (vs. other sources) (68%); Ability to interact directly with job seekers (51%); Ability to search the resume database (49%); Ability to create an employer brand (46%); Integration with ATS (46%)
• When asked which recruiting channels/tools they use most frequently, respondents said: Social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) (75%); Referrals (66%); Company career site (58%); General job board (53%); and ATSs (43%).
• The biggest challenge in meeting recruiting goals is still lack of qualified applicants (51%).

Check out the survey yourself by clicking here (it’s free, but you must register to download).

Thanks to everyone who participated!

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Hey folks – I will be conducting a webinar on May 2nd at 11 AM EDT, and I’d like you to attend! I’ll be talking about the many challenges facing job boards these days – and what you can do to ensure that your job board will not only survive, but thrive. This webinar is courtesy of RealMatch, and it’s completely free.

To register, click here.

The presentation is about 30 minutes and I’ll also be taking questions. So go ahead – register now! And I’ll see you in May.

Almost every week I see a blog post or tweet claiming that job boards are dead or dying.

We’re talking about the top source for hiring outside of employee referrals here. A tool that almost every employer uses to locate some or all of their job candidates. A fixture on the recruiting scene for over 15 years.

So what’s with the bad rep? Well, given my business name, you would expect me to give you a biased answer – and after reading the rest of this blog, you may think I did. But based on conversations with recruiters and HR professionals (and several years of survey data), I actually believe there are some factors that have nothing to do with the actual performance of job boards that drive the ‘ooh! job boards!’ movement. Let’s take a look:

1. Job boards aren’t new and shiny: Let’s face it – new things are usually more interesting than old things. Job boards have been around for over 15 years – an eternity in the internet/technology/recruiting world. There’s a reason why the car companies rework their designs every year…
2. Those who decry job boards have their reasons: Social recruiting ‘evangelists’ are exactly that – people who believe social recruiting solves almost every problem that currently faces the recruiting world. That’s ok – it’s their opinion, of course – but that’s also why they employ the common (and as many politicians will tell you, effective) technique of ‘going negative‘. It can be much easier to run down ‘job boards’ for their alleged failures than it is to demonstrate whether social recruiting can actually produce better results.
3. What is a job board, exactly?: The term ‘job board’ is a catch-all that gathers such disparate players (in size, techniques, and effectiveness) as the big general sites (Monster, etc.), aggregators (Indeed, etc.), niche sites (Dice, etc.), social networking sites (LinkedIn) and classifieds sites (Craigslist, etc.). The phrase is so vague as to be meaningless – I’ve heard more than one recruiter say ‘Job boards are awful’, then follow up with a glowing recommendation of a niche site. They were obviously disenchanted with the large general sites – but not so much the smaller ones. I don’t expect ‘job board’ to fall out of common usage – it can be useful shorthand – but a bit more qualifying and precision of exactly what kind of job board is being discussed would be appreciated.

Those are three factors that don’t have a basis in actual job board performance. But there is a fourth factor that does:

1. Sometimes job boards don’t work very well: It’s true. You put up a posting and get poor results. You search the resume database and don’t find what you need. Sometimes you use a job board whose technology remains firmly rooted in the mid 1990s. You know what to do in those situations? You quit using the board that sucks, and find the one that doesn’t. The failure of one job board does not make you immediately decide to drop all job boards, everywhere. That would be akin to going barefoot because you had a bad experience with a single shoe store. Instead, you look at the data – 20% of hires (plus an additional employment branding effect) comes out of your job board usage. So you adjust your buy and use the ones that work.

A final comment: I think job boards – specifically, niche and general sites – have not done as good a job as they might have in talking about their strengths. They haven’t always been aggressive enough in adopting and/or developing new technology. And they – like other players in the online recruiting world – sometime lose track of the real goal: to bring the right candidates and employers together, as quickly, cheaply, and effectively as possible. In a nutshell, they must evolve.

So….what’s in a name? A lot.

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It’s time to dig into the past month or so and see what interesting, unusual, and mind-blowing things have happened of note in the online recruiting and job board world. Let’s see, now….

• Jobvite and JobTarget team up: Clients can now use JobTarget’s OnePost to send jobs to appropriate JobTarget job boards and social media venues, all in one fell swoop. But it seems like they should call it something like “JobTargetVite”. Yep, rolls off the lips.
• Layoffs at SimplyHired – what do they mean?: According to Jonathan Duarte, SimplyHired has laid off their COO, VP of sales, and much of the sales team. Is this simply a refocusing of the aggregator, or a sign of other changes to come? Only time will tell.
• Indeed tops the list for hiring effectiveness: Indeed beat out both general and niche job boards in an analysis of 200,000 job postings by SilkRoad. This data is useful because it is automatically tracked via OpenHire, rather than relying on client and job seeker reporting.
• Job ad spending down – in places: Recruitment advertising spends are down for print and general job boards – but not so much for niche boards. And, amazingly, it’s up for outdoor advertising.
• Who are the likely buyers for Monster?: Now that Monster’s CEO has made it official, let the speculation begin – who will buy it? Some say LinkedIn, some say CareerBuilder. What about Google, for that matter? Then there are HR software and services firms, such as SuccessFactors, SAP, etc. that might consider an acquisition worthwhile. One thing’s for certain – this is a gift to bloggers – like myself!
• Bullhorn cranks it up: The recruiting software company Bullhorn had 35,000 recruiters sign up for Reach, its social recruiting service. It also added 400 new clients in 2011. A very good year indeed.
• TheLadders introduces its mobile app – and it has a name: TheLadders rolled out its mobile app for recruiters, appropriately named “Recruitable”. It’s only available to recruiters with a full Recruiter License, and only on the iPhone. Sorry, Androidies.

That’s it for now folks – see you next month!

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As I mentioned last week, the results are in from the 2012 Job Board Industry Survey. With over 190 responses from every category of site, including aggregators, general sites, niche boards, and networks, I believe that there is  useful information for all. If you participated, you should have received an email from me with the complete report (and if not, let me know!). For everyone else, the report is free and available for download – just register here (you can also access early reports at the same time).

One thing that stood out in this survey was a renewed sense of optimism by job boards – and a recognition of the competitive forces at play in the industry. I expect to see many startups in the coming months as well as new initiatives from established players.  The trend toward integration of social media and recruiting into the job boards’ offerings has continued, as has the growth of niche and aggregator sites.

It will be an exciting year! Thanks to everyone who participated, and please – take a look for yourself.

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