A real alternative to job boards
13. May, 2009 
4 Comments
From Cheezhead.com
“Sometimes when something is popular and successful for a long time it becomes a defacto standard, or something that is just accepted, no questions asked. Over time, other people and organizations try to catch hold of the coat tails of this success by copying (sometimes with slight variations, often with none) the original idea.
There comes a point when everyone is too busy admiring this “something” to notice that times have changed and the world has moved on. Such is the case of the ubiquitous job board.
There have been many massive market shifts by inventors and free-thinking people in history. Think of the first automatically sliced loaf, a buzzer when you leave your car lights on, Dyson and the vacuum cleaner industry. All were big revelations: the kind that make you think, well, that’s obvious.
It’s the same in the recruitment industry. The job board market is lazily jogging along (fat from its profits) unaware that its nemesis the “people board” is about to sprint past it and leave it for dead (quite literally).
You see, times have changed. The Internet is now much more people focused, much more open. People/users demand more from Internet services and they want these services to be free. Any Internet service that is going to succeed in a massive way must focus on the benefits for its users, open its doors and let the people in.
Job boards simply do not focus on their users. What they do is, in fact, the reverse. Many job boards concentrate on two areas: job advertising and proprietary CV (resume) databases.
For job advertising, the job boards charge a lot of money for employers (or agencies) that wish to advertise their job vacancies. It’s a pretty blunt weapon (and poorly aimed), but it can attract large volumes of resumes.
The other side of the job board website, the resume database, is a little odd. Essentially the premise is that users can send their resume (free of charge) to the job board. At first, this sounds like a reasonable deal until you realize that the resume database is locked down. Only employers who register with the job board and pay (far too much money) will be able to search for your resume.
There are three fundamentally bad things here:
- The job boards are selling YOUR data and you gave them it for free.
- The job board has effectively restricted access to companies who can afford to pay for the service.
- Your data is only visible for those periods of time when companies pay for it and actively search for some skills.
People boards are the reverse of this and bring benefits for those actively looking for work, those not actively looking for work, employers and even agencies.
So what is a people board?
Here’s my definition:
A people board:
1. Enables people to promote their skills
2. Enables people to publish their availability and references
3. Enables people to control how their data is presented and how they can be contacted
4. Allows ALL employers to search for people
**1-4 MUST be free of charge
We don’t need to over-complicate the recruitment business. There should only be two sides to it: employers seeking candidates and candidates looking for roles in businesses.
The objective of a people board is to make it much easier to put both sides of the recruitment equation in touch with each other, no matter what the business, no matter what skills the person has.”
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Your perspective on online recruitment in South Africa is very interesting. However, I am sure you are well aware that in South Africa most job boards / online recruitment websites to NOT allow employers to have access to their CV database at all – not even for a fee. This privilege is usually only offered to bona fide employment agencies. People do NOT want employers to freely search their CV’s in fear of their current employers finding out that they are on the market. What about protecting the candidate’s confidentiality? Who is looking after the candidate’s best interest? Furthermore, candidates willingly register on these online CV database knowing full and well that there details are being made available to subscribing RECRUITMENT AGENCIES only and understand that their confidentiality is looked after within the environment of a legitimate online portal.
I agree that if job boards do not adjust their way of thinking and move out of their comfort zones, that they do face the risk of becoming redundant.
As the owner of a “Job Board” I realise that we need to offer more value to candidates (who don’t pay to access this value) than simply collecting their data and ‘selling’ it – as you put it.
a) We provide protection of their data and do not publicly make it freely available to all.
b) We offer career management tools – which they don’t pay for.
c) We enable the candidate to make use of job alert tools and bring the jobs to the job seekers – which they don’t pay for.
If you are in the job market, you will choose to make use of a job board (yes, it’s your choice) knowing that you benefit from all the services (and more) that I listed below to assist you in actively finding a job – you choose to be where you know the recruiters are!
I also agree that “Job Boards” should be more than a job board in that they should stop placing so much value on the size of their CV database, because a job board should be focusing on the following:
1) How can a job board add value to the job advertiser by taking the job ad to beyond the job board, i.e. to the passive candidate market, thereby finding the hidden talent wherever may be for the clients.
2) How can they apply filtering tools to only deliver applicants that match the job requirements exactly.
So when an online services invest s this much time and resources into delivering these levels of functionality and automation to make the process smoother for both the recruiter and the job seeker, then why should this service not be paid for? It is a business (service delivered in return for fees paid). And as the saying goes: ‘Something for nothing is worth nothing’.
Thanks for your response, valid points indeed.
This article comes out of the States, and the perspectives are mainly focused on their market, however in a globalised economy its all relative.
There is no doubt that if companies like yourself are not adding significant value to the candidate or employer,business will be taken elsewhere – especially in the modern economic climate where all costs are under the microscope.
The job board market in the US is more competitive than in SA, but both are faced with increased challenges as major changes in media and technology takes place
These changes are bringing about new options for employers to source candidates direct from market instead of using traditional methods, saving them massive amounts of costs and giving them control of their own processes.
Its those that evolve with, not against these changes that will prosper…the simple adapt or die principle
Question Matt:
Do you have any examples of people boards as noted in the article?
Appreciated
leon
Hi Leon,
I am unsure of any at this stage this have taken off, a couple in their infancy but I believe that professional social networks like Linkedin, Xing, Plaxo, Ryze, Netparty, Focus have filled the gap and grown so much over the past year that you are going to have to do something really special to boost traffic & attention to significant levels…