Last week Jakub Zavrel posted a fascinating piece on ERE.net asking the eternal question: Are Job Boards Still Relevant for the Future of Recruiting?  I strongly encourage you to read it (and definitely check out the comments – Steven Rothberg has some pertinent thoughts, too!).

In a nutshell, Zavrel discusses the role of search technology with regard to job boards’ longevity. Are two search boxes (one for title/skill, another for location) adequate? Is this the best that can be done? Or are there better alternatives? Not surprisingly, Zavrel – who runs a search technology company – believes that semantic search offers better results. He also believes that if job boards adopt this technology, they’ll be around for a while longer.

I’ll be completely upfront – I agree with him. Sure, the current paradigm works, more or less, for certain groups of people – those who have been trained (even at some basic level) to know how to search. But did you notice all those qualifiers I threw in there? More or less, certain groups, etc.? Many times I’ve sat in a room with job search ‘newbies’ and watched them struggle with the current search model. How much information do they put in the skills box? How do they know which skills to put in? What does the location box mean – where they are now? Where they want to be? And what if the results aren’t what they wanted - then what do they do?

In the old days, people were actually taught how to search. I believe the discipline was called ‘information science’. The courses were typically aimed at those who would become the high priests of information – librarians, programmers, and researchers.

Guess what? It was that very formal discipline that led to the creation of our current search model. Yes, it can work. No, it isn’t always obvious or pretty. And yes, a lot of people out there get left in the dust.

So what?

Well, for job boards to maintain and expand their current position as a key method for employers and candidates to find each other, they need to innovate. That could mean integrating semantic search into their systems. That could mean aggregation of job content across multiple sources. That could mean peer review or crowdsourcing of candidates to provide more sophisticated profiles.

What’s the alternative? Well, job boards could just sit on their hands and hope things get better – magically.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s gonna work.

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One of my goals at Job Board Doctor is to provide resources for job boards. My first attempt was the listing of job board software (which has been updated many times!). I also hope that my blog posts serve this function – at least some of the time.

But I’ve also know that there are many other types of services out there for job boards that don’t fall under the guise of job board software – things like aggregation, site optimization, affiliates, and so on. So I’ve now embarked on a new resource page: Suppliers. I’ve started the list – but I know it will grow (and I hope you help me with your suggestions). The descriptions are free of fluff (at least, as much as I can make them) – they are just there to help you figure out the type of service offered. So far, we have a few general categories of services:

• job aggregation
• PPC advertising
• job posting/distribution
• outsourced sales/marketing
• job wrapping/spidering
• social media services
• ad campaign management
• resume parsing
• resume creation / modification services

But it’s early days yet. And I (as always) need your help to make this resource better. So contact me with your suggestions/changes/whatever. And – I hope you find this resource useful!

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I got caught up in surveys and what not (What? You haven’t seen the 2013 Job Board Trends survey?) and fell a bit behind on the news. So here is the latest and greatest in the far-flung world of online recruiting:

• LinkedIn acquires mobile news reader: LinkedIn continued its acquisition-oriented spring by purchasing Pulse, a mobile platform for viewing news items, for $90 million. Content appears to draw more users than Groups, it seems. In other news, it announced an update to its search function.
  
• eQuest and Work4 partner up: eQuest, a job posting distribution company, has partnered with Work4 to provide the latter’s Facebook job posting technology to all eQuest clients at no charge. The deal will help eQuest gather candidate data on Facebook users.
• Indeed tops sources of external hires: Big data, indeed: the latest iCIMS analysis of their internal data indicates that 27% of external hires came from Indeed. The results – derived from 1.5 million job postings – also showed that 22% originated from ‘traditional’ job boards.
• Evenbase makes more money: Digital recruitment group Evenbase Recruitment has seen a year-on-year rise in turnover by a fifth to £32.7m in the 12 months to 30 September 2012, while profit doubled. Profits of £5.41m were more than twice the 2011 total of £2.56m. Amazing what a rebrand can do!
• CareerXRoads releases its source of hire report: Referrals, career sites, and job boards once again led as the primary sources of hire for companies surveyed in the 2013 Sources of Hire Report. Social media? Not so much.
• CareerBuilder Acquires Oil and Gas Job Search: CareerBuilder purchased Oil and Gas Job Search, headquartered in Manchester, England, and the oil and gas industry’s leading online job site outside North America. In other words, CB is still going niche.
• Dice meets earning expectations: Dice reported that it earned 12 cents a share on $50.4 million of revenue, which put it mostly in line with what Wall Street was expecting and what the company predicted in January. It also projected Q2 earnings at $2M less than previous expectations. A slowdown? Dice also added Shravan Goli as President of Dice to guide Dice, ClearanceJobs and the Slashdot Media brands.

That’s it for now, folks!

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The results are in from the latest Job Board Trends and Online Recruiting surveys – and they’re interesting. This year 319 job boards, 79 HR and recruiting professionals, and 108 job seekers participated – that’s a lot of responses! It also took a while to gather up the data and put it into report form – but it is now available in the Research area of the Job Board Doctor website. I encourage you to take a look (free registration is required to download the reports).

Here are some highlights from the surveys:

• Lack of response from employers continues to be the top frustration of job seekers
• Most HR/recruiters are planning to increase spending on their company career site, mobile recruiting, and referral programs
• Quality of applicants, quantity of applicants, and price are the top 3 factors for client renewal for job boards around the globe
• Over 70% of job boards surveyed use aggregators in all regions
• Only half of the HR and recruiting professionals surveyed actually track the cost per application
• Higher percentages of UK and European job boards have mobile-friendly sites than do job boards in the rest of the globe
• Over 90% of HR and recruiting professionals surveyed that are currently using social media for recruitment are using LinkedIn

There is, of course, much more. I encourage you to download the surveys that are most relevant to you. You’ll find them in the Research area of the Job Board Doctor website. Thanks again to everyone who participated – I appreciate it!

(Note: I will be discussing the results of these surveys in more detail at the JobG8 Job Board Summit in June. Details are here.)

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I wanted to let you know about some exciting things happening here in Job Board Doctor World:

• Next week I will begin releasing the results of this year’s Job Board Industry Trends survey. There was great response – over 300 job board responses worldwide, plus response from HR professionals and job seekers. More similarities between boards around the globe than differences. I look forward to sharing this information with you.
• Also, on Tuesday, April 30th, I will be conducting a webinar (courtesy of RealMatch) on “Revitalize Your Job Board (And connect with HR Needs & Budgets”. I plan on covering how you can turn what HR needs into solutions that they will buy – and of course I will give you lots of practical advice on getting started. Click here to sign up.
• Finally, I will be presenting the results of the Job Board Trends Survey at JobG8′s Job Board Summit, June 20-21 in Chicago. They have a good roster of folks lined up, including Gerry Crispin, Kevin Wheeler, Joel Cheesman, and Michael Marlatt. It promises to be a great couple of days for learning, networking, and (perhaps?) partying. Click here to sign up.

Man, I’m getting tired just looking at that. I better grab another double Americano!

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It seems that Monster is continuing its long, slow fade as the ‘big dog’ in the job board world (funny how long-term lack of leadership can do that to you). But there are plenty of services vying for the leadership role: Indeed, CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn come most immediately to mind. Of these, the latter two have shown the most consistent efforts to offer new services. Since what happens at the top of the industry often filters down to the rest of us, let’s take a look at what these two job boards have introduced in 2012-13:

CareerBuilder

• Introduced a service that allows you to compare your ad’s results with other similar ads on CB – including qualifying demographic info about applicant pool. Nice use of the infamous ‘Big Data’.
• Integrated an OpinionLab tool that allows job seekers to provide feedback via mobile devices
• Created a Supply and Demand portal that allows employers to determine where certain types of candidates are – and are most plentiful. More ‘Big Data’.
• Provides advice to employers on finding skilled workers from closely-related occupations (via, yep, you guessed it – ‘Big Data’).

In a nutshell, CareerBuilder’s purchase of EMSI in 2012 has generated several new services – and I suspect they’re just getting started.

LinkedIn:

• Introduced a tool to measure brand awareness on LinkedIn of a given employer – and increase awareness.
• Updated its LinkedIn Recruiter service and added a talent-matching feature (a recommendation engine, actually).
• Added mobile-optimized ‘company pages’
• Bought mobile news reader Pulse and presentation tool SlideShare
• Added ‘endorsements’ for LinkedIn profiles

So what’s really going on with these two very large companies? Despite the general press buzz, we of course know that LinkedIn has been around for quite a while, and is thus a much more mature company than its PR (and stock price) might indicate. LinkedIn has been rolling out a steady stream of minor modifications to its site that make it more useful, both on the web and on mobile devices. It is also trying to make itself into the primary hub for everyone in corporate America (and beyond) – a Facebook for people that actually work. At the same time, it’s trying to add revenue-producing services to satisfy its stockholders – and the vast majority of those seem to revolve around recruiting and job search.

CareerBuilder of course is even older than LinkedIn(gasp!), but after many years in the #2 slot behind Monster, seems to be assuming a leadership role – particularly with the actual implementation of big data in recruiting. It almost seems from the outside like the addition of EMSI has reinvigorated the company – and of course it has certainly turned its focus to the development of how employers can use all that data that CareerBuilder captures. At the same time, CareerBuilder struggles with a legacy that it is just ‘another big job board’. It is a bright spot for its corporate owners – but financial pressures from above could stifle ongoing innovation.

So it’s not quite like Mothra versus Godzilla, but the battle between CareerBuilder and LinkedIn for the deep pockets of the world’s recruiters is quite interesting. Until the EMSI acquisition, I would have given the edge to LinkedIn – now I’m not so sure.

What do you think?

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Have you tried applying for a job lately? If the employer is of any size, you will probably be directed into an applicant tracking system (ATS), where you will fill out many pages of questions. It can be a time-consuming process – and this is prior to actually applying for the specific job.

It is complex, and it is a pain.

What happened to the wonderful old days when you submitted your resume and cover letter, and called it good?

“But Jeff, making the job application simple just generates more applications – many of them unqualified. If you make it time-consuming, then you weed out the riff raff.”

Yeah, but…you also weed out qualified candidates who do not have hours each day to fill out forms that will probably result in little or no response from the employer. If you’re a qualified, skilled, competent candidate, you already have a job. Maybe you stumbled over the job ad and thought it was interesting…until you hit the ATS. Hey, life’s too short. The candidate moves on.

“But Jeff, we need that info from the candidate to figure out if he or she is qualified.”

Yeah, right. I don’t buy it. You need that info because your ATS allows you to collect it. So you do.

Look around you. Simple always conquers complex. There were digital music players before the iPod. But the iPod made everything simple – and became the big digital music success story.

Now, I’m not saying that simple isn’t complex. In fact, simple is often hiding great complexity. Think about the coding and engineering behind the iPod - that’s complex. But the operation of the thing is simple. The genius of simplicity is often in how it hides complexity.

So where can job boards reduce complexity and increase simplicity? (And how will they convince employers to go along?):

• Search: I ask you – why must a job seeker know Boolean to get good results? And why must they type? Why can’t they just submit their resume and have it turned into a search query?
  
• Mobile: No, the job seeker does not want everything on the mobile site. Just the good stuff.
• Apply: Maybe the job board has no control over the ATS, but it does have control over the application process for employers without ATSs. Keep it simple.
• Register: If the job board wants candidates to register, then keep it simple – name and email. The rest of the info can come later.

And as far employers and ATSs go – please, folks: think hard before you add those 45 questions to the application process. Do you really need them? Your (qualified) candidates will thank you!

Bottom line: as a user, give me simplicity. And if you must give me complexity, please cloak it in simplicity.

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One of the most common questions I get from startups is whether they should ‘buy or build’ the software for their job board. It’s a question that wasn’t that common 10 years ago – simply because the options for job board software were, well, limited.

Things have changed. If you take a glance at my job board software page, you’ll find dozens of offerings. Most are stand-alone packages, while a few are designed to work with WordPress. Every one of them provides the ability to post jobs, and most offer much more. In fact, it’s entirely possible that the current plethora of suppliers has driven up the number of job boards out there. After all, if launching a job board is as simple as buying software, configuring the site, and going live, then why the heck shouldn’t you start your board? (Well, of course, there are LOTS of reasons, but that’s not the focus of this post. Another time.)

So, again: buy or build?

1) Buy: There are several reasons to consider buying your job board software:

• You can test it out ahead of time, thus ensuring that it works and that it has the features you want
• You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Although a job board is simple on a conceptual level, it is actually a fairly complicated bit of programming.
• You have safety in numbers. In other words, if your supplier has lots of clients, they also have steady demand to maintain and upgrade the software. That isn’t always true with a custom solution.
• You can focus on sales and marketing. If you’re not worrying about tech issues all the time, you can spend time building your business. That’s always good.
• You don’t have to worry about finding, managing, and retaining tech talent. IT folks are in demand – and good ones are always hard to find.

But (and there is always a ‘but’) there are some drawbacks:

• You’re at the mercy of the supplier. If they don’t get that upgrade out, there’s not much you can do but wait.
• You don’t (usually) have access to or control of the source code. So customization can be limited (although not always).
• You may outgrow the software. When that happens, you’ll be right back to the ‘buy or build’ question.

2) Build: So what are the reasons for building?:

• You have a highly customized or non-standard site and/or services. An off-the-shelf solution just won’t work.
• You have a robust internal tech staff that can build and support the site for you (or you have an ongoing relationship with a 3rd party IT consulting firm that can build and support the site for you).
• You have lots of previous experience in job boards and know exactly what you need and what you don’t.
• If you are building multiple sites, your costs can be lower, as they will be amortized across the sites – prebuilt software will charge you on a per-site basis.

So what are the drawbacks to building?:

• You’re in uncharted waters – a ‘built solution’ can take months if not years to finish.
• Time is money – which means that custom solutions usually cost more than the off-the-shelf stuff.
• It can be difficult to find technical staff that understand the complexity of a job board.

For the vast majority of start-ups, I think this is an easy decision – you ‘buy’. As I mentioned above, reinventing the wheel is not profitable, particularly if your site is not doing anything out of the ordinary. If you’re an established site, you may want to migrate to a ‘buy’ solution simply to avoid the technical headaches of maintaining and upgrading custom code. But for sites with unique offerings or extremely complex services, your only choice will be to build. As a veteran of many custom site builds, all I will say is, ‘Bite the bullet, take two aspirin and call me in six months.”

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Things have been happening in our neck of the industry, and it’s about time I ran them down. And yes, theoretically it’s almost spring, although you’d never know it from the snowfall we had today! So with further ado, the news that is:

• Domains never sleep: Both CareerBuilder and TaxTalent picked up some new domains – JobsInMotion.com and TaxBytes.com, respectively. Interesting.
• Monster sells ChinaHR: Monster officials announced the sale of most of its stake in ChinaHR, and said the company had pulled out of Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. In related news, revenue was up, but profit was down.
• Is TheLadders a scam?: Candidate-pay site TheLadders is being sued in a New York federal court on allegations that the company promises users access to exclusive high-paying jobs that don’t actually exist. The site built its business by offering ‘only $100K jobs’ – a claim it has since given up.
• Indeed is the most trafficked job site: comScore said that 17.3 million visitors descended on Indeed during January 2013, making it the top employment site (although if LinkedIn were classified as an employment site, it would be the top dog).
• New Facebook-centric recruiting service launches: The Zurich-based online recruitment firm Silp has signed a strategic partnership with x28, another Swiss recruitment technology firm. Silp has job seekers ‘opt-in’; then it extracts relevant info from the job seeker’s Facebook profile, combining it with other information from linked services such as Twitter, GitHub and About.me. Silp claims to have had a million people sign up within its first three weeks.
• Is LinkedIn going to buy SilkRoad?: LinkedIn is making lots of money, which of course keeps its investors happy – but with great revenues comes an even greater demand for more revenue. Rick Summer with Morningstar thinks that SilkRoad would be a smart acquisition in 2013. Other possible candidates include Monster (natch), Viadeo, and Quora.
• Gild gets some more gold: Gild just completed its Series A financing totaling $8 million. Gild scours the web for information on developers, including their public code and contributions to developer forums, and then utilizes patent-pending algorithms to score the skills of the millions of developers it finds. Very interesting.
• Some Europeans job boards are growing fast: eQuest reported a unique list of European job boards showing extraordinary growth between 2011 and 2012. These included: Jobup.ch,  Jobs.ch,  JobIndex,  Catererglobal,  Kariyer.net, and FinnJobb.
• Monster gets accessible: The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) reported that as a result of an agreement between Monster Worldwide, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and NFB, Monster will soon be the first in its industry with a fully accessible website. Monster is in the process of making its desktop and mobile websites fully and equally accessible and will have its mobile applications accessible within two years.
• LinkedIn evades a class action suit: Any damage done to LinkedIn users over the massive June 2012 data breach was abstract, not actual, a US judge ruled. Thus did a $5 million class-action lawsuit against the networking site get dismissed, before the case ever breathed the air of a court trial.
• CareerBuilder offers new employer tool: Does your job ad suck? CareerBuilder’s new tool can tell you by providing metrics on how it does compared to similar ads. Great idea.

Wow! Wonder what’s brewing next?

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Last May I wrote a post about  the concept of a ‘job board’, in which I asked the eternal questions, “Is LinkedIn a job board?” and “Is Indeed a job board?” It was one of the more popular posts of the year, with 158 shares (and counting). At the end of the post I considered the possibility that perhaps – just perhaps – the term ‘job board’ was a bit outdated.

Guess what – it’s almost a year later and the term is just a bit more outdated. To wit:

• The term ‘job board’  encompasses every type of service, from a free-to-post one to a large general one like CareerBuilder where you pay for everything; from a site where you can only post a job, to one where your job is turned into a  query that searches not only the site you’re using but everything public on the web; from a site with minimal technology, to one that include social, mobile, matching, and more. In other words, ‘job board’ really doesn’t mean what it says – a ‘board’ for ‘jobs’.
• The term carries negative connotations in some quarters – a site where the employer ‘posts and prays’, where candidate applications go to die, and where the cost of hire is high.

So is it time for job boards to get a new name?

Before we answer that, let’s ask another question: Is my first question dumb?

Maybe so. Think about it – how hard is it to change a term once it has become lodged in the popular mind? You’re looking at the end result of hundreds of millions of mentions in the press, online, in person, at career fairs, and by the sites themselves – and any marketing pro will tell you that repetition works. Want to get someone’s attention? Say the same thing 100 times. Eventually they’ll get the message.

So is it even worth talking about a new name for job boards, when it will be VERY difficult to change the term’s use by the general public (not to mention the heartbreak and pain it will bring this writer’s own website)?

Yes. Because, as they say, if the shoe doesn’t fit, find another shoe.

The term ‘job board’ just doesn’t fit for the vast majority of – ahem – job boards out there. It’s dated, limiting, and carries too much baggage. It’s served its time.

(Don’t think it can be done? Ask scientists who decided that ‘global warming’ wasn’t getting the job done – and began using ‘climate change’. It made a big difference.)

If ‘job board’ doesn’t cut it, what does? There have been plenty of ideas submitted:

• employment websites
• candidate acquisition sites
• career sites
• career management sites
• career hubs
• employment networks
• career communities

(And you can easily substitute ‘services’ for the word ‘sites’ on any of these – after all, much of what happens on a modern ‘job board’ doesn’t actually happen on the site).

What are your ideas? Submit them below. Let’s get this conversation going, because once we can get behind a better moniker, then we can put our collective resources toward making it the dominant term.

And I will have to change my site….

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