Are Job Boards ruining what could have been a beatiful thing?

Jamie Leonard recently wrote a great post on "Recruitment Relationships: It's not me, it's you" where he took a tongue in cheek look at the various advertising / engagement channels open to recruiters.

The bit that really jumped out at me was the piece on Job Boards:

"Job Boards

Now 5 or so years into their married , the job board and recruiters are still very much going strong.  Their relationship is one based on trust, equality and understanding, but how long will this marriage last?  Well that really depends on both parties. Relationships relying on honesty and with the market now picking up, the job board market are certainly the one “trying to make it work”. The market is over crowded, to say the least, and recruiters have a lot of other options available.

New and appealing alternatives are appearing on the horizon and things could get rocky for this young married if both parties don’t understanding each others needs, quickly."

Now there's nothing I like more than kicking the bejesus out of an analogy , so I added my following thoughts / observations and thought I'd bring them across here too:

The way I see it is that the Job Boards are perhaps about to get caught out playing away from home – cheapening the beautiful thing that they and Direct Recruiters had been working at (a route to engage and promote themselves to potential applicants) through some ill-conceived extra marital fling: namely the pants down volume deals.

Yeh – sure it felt good for the job boards for a while – like visiting a lady from that oldest of industries for some “on tap gratification” (in this instance numbers of jobs advertised), followed by perhaps a swing in traffic and SEO-sexiness. Win-win surely?

Not really.

Why? Because the job board becomes dependent on this part of their world. But like all too many failed marriages have proven – you can’t keep the two apart (not even if you’re an overpaid footballer or a member of Take That!). It used to be offered to those REALLY big buying Rec Cons, then in a slow month it was offered to tempt some of the smaller Rec Cons, then businesses started springing up (largely from the cash rich Rec Cons) buying up these cheap postings and flogging them to the Direct Clients directly. And so (to complete the analogy) the dark side of the errant Job Boards life suddenly encroaches on the “respectable” part, obliterating any perceptions of value in their relationship.

I think it could also be argued that it’s potentially self defeating in terms of the candidate experience too – because using these broad brush aggregators puts the emphasis on spreading the message wide as opposed to getting the message right. And in a market where there’s so many “non ads” (in terms of content and/or actually existing) from Rec Cons, surely a job board should be showcasing their “real” jobs to candidates. That’s what keeps engaged, builds the brand connection and gets them to come back? No?

Reckon it’s time Job Boards took a good long look at themselves and worked out who they are, where they’re going and what they want out of life – because your partner always finds out sooner or later (doesn’t she Ashley Cole?), and when that happens then you really only do have yourself to blame, whether they walk away because of the superficialness of your relationship (high volume, low quality response because you just went after the easy option every time) or perhaps they decide to have a play away from home themselves (the massive cost disparity sending them to low cost Job Board aggregators) rendering your relationship obsolete as they decide they like the other side of the fence better too. Are Job Boards truly aware of the implications of a double lifestyle?

(Oh – and BTW – this is all COMPLETELY from my imagination and in NO WAY a reflection of my real life! )

Comments

[bill]

You've hit on a real issue in the user experience of job seekers.

We have millions of jobs indexed across our network of sites and a real technical challenge for us is how to assign a "quality of job post" rating to a job to build into our relevancy algorithm. Unlike movie reviews, where users are incentivized to help the quality of rankings, job seekers are less likely to help others find the better job posts.

We use crowd sourcing techniques to grab revealed preference data and look at other proxy data but we are always looking at new ways to address this issue.

Bill
http://twitjobsearch.com

[Rob]

Interesting and thought-provoking post. We're at the beginning of our adventure (a community of young professionals who want to do something different) and we have a job-board angle to our platform. As we look to spread the word about what we're building we hope that our niche is appealing enough to recruiters and individual organisations for them to use us alongside or instead of the aggregators... because we're about quality over quantity. We'll see!

[Jamie Leonard]

Nice follow-up mate. I love a comment that’s actually bigger than the original post! I disagree, but only from my market. In the really senior end of the market, its only head hunters that have these jobs to put online, as the companies themselves wont advertise them. So in that context, if we never aloud staffing agency / head hunters to post, those jobs would never appear online. That said, we are working with a lot of companies at the moment and leading them to a place where they’re not scared to put a £150k job online, as themselves. For the generalist job boards though, I agree. You should at least have the option to Search All or Search Direct Only. I like what Workthing did, but can’t see many of the other generalist sites doing it.

[dom sumners]

nice post - the deals that i dont understand a job board doing are the ones with the cheap webrecruit type business (Networx, easyweb,webrecruit and about 10 others)- you have direct clients who want to advertise and the stinky aggregator deal you have done (with what is a v small account) means that direct client is getting your board for about £10. Also the client makes no distinction between you - mr quality job board and gisajob tip tip job etc etc. which kills your brand too.

[the jobhunter]

We are building a brand slowly for people looking for
jobsinsales

and allow candidates to showcase their talent

trouble is with low cost Job Board aggregators they dlute brands, where anyone and everyone is applying.