I recently attended the Recruitment Innovation Summit in Toronto where CareerBuilder, Monster & Workopolis representatives sat on a panel to discuss the relevance of job boards in today’s ever changing social media driven field of employment branding and recruiting.
The job boards argued that they are evolving based on today’s job marketplace by expanding their talent service solutions to keep up with today’s job seekers and social media technologies. Workopolis argued that passive seekers are the candidates you want and they “use 1 job board while unemployed seekers likely use multiple sites & aggregators.” CareerBuilder said that they are offering new services (though never expanded on what these were!?) and ¼ of their revenue comes from behavioral data on their job applicants that they sell to companies. Monster spoke well in the panel but failed to sell me on their new features even though they have recently rebranded themselves as: the “New Monster: Aim Higher. Reach Farther. Dream Bigger.”
The purpose of the panel was to take questions from the audience on job boards’ relevance, ROI, targeted resume mining, and costs. My frustration with the panel was the job boards were so busy trying to sell their services and outdo each other that they weren’t listening to the audience and hearing our concerns. They missed their mark on enforcing their relevance as I left without understanding the features of their evolution. Personally, I see job boards useful for certain target markets; however, for sourcing millennials (born 1997-2001), I believe they are a thing of the past. Recruiting millennials in today’s social media driven world is revolutionary and if job boards are just evolutionary, they just aren’t going to cut it!
Great post on job boards and their place in the market. I agree with you that job boards are evolutionary when they need to be revolutionary. Calling themselves 'innovative' is only true if they are actually bringing new concepts and ideas to the marketplace. Sounds to me as though all the job boards are doing is a mediocre job of trying to keep up.
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing about this topic. Love your candor!
- Kendra
Even while falling behind in some very key areas I think that job boards will continue to be the go to resource for large companies. Although large corporations are embracing social media more and more for promotion and branding there is still a desire for a professional approach to hiring. LinkedIn offers a level of that professionalism and joins it with with the fantastic targeting of social media but does not reach the same size audience of job seeking individuals.
ReplyDeleteI agree that job boards need to embrace social media more completely or risk obsolescence but I see that transition happening faster than any particular social media site taking over. Then again Google didn't exist 12 years ago and facebook has been around less than seven so if there is lesson to be learned its that market dominance in web based services is never a simple matter.