The more things change, the more they stay the same – except when they don’t. Now how’s that for equivocation?

The results are in for the 2011 Online Recruiting Survey, and they are intriguing. We had a record 323 completed responses (a 15% increase from Fall 2010!), from three categories: HR and recruitment professionals, job board operators and employees, and job seekers.  We used many of the same questions from the 2010 survey, so it was relatively easy to track changes over the past 9 months. Here’s a sampling of what we found:

• For employers with 250 or more employees, ATSs (85%) and social media (85%) were the top recruitment channels; for employers with less than 250 employees, social media and referrals led the list

• .jobs continued to draw meager interest from employers, with only 6% having purchased a domain

• Job boards saw the recession (40%), LinkedIn (40%), and price erosion (31%) as the top problems for their businesses; LinkedIn had risen in threat level since the 2010 survey

• Both the quality (72%)and quantity (46%) of candidates produced by job boards remained important to HR and recruiting professionals

• The top problem for HR and recruiters? Lack of qualified applicants

As one job board respondent said, “I think the only constant is change. New and existing job boards must adapt to changing technologies and customer behavior.”

Truer words were never written. Get the full survey results here (free registration required).

I’ve been cataloging job boards for the past two years (for obvious reasons), and frankly, I’ve been surprised at how many sites rely on candidates for their primary revenue stream. Making money, of course, is always a primary focus for job board operators; after all, job boards are businesses, and if businesses don’t turn a profit, they disappear.

So inevitably, anyone entering the industry will ask: “How can you make money with a job board?” The answer is, well, both simple and complicated. But the bottom line is to solve your customer’s problems – right?:

Simple: Job boards have two core audiences: employers and job seekers. So most job sites will focus on one of those two groups – and most will choose the employer. Why? The employer has the ability to pay and the need to fill. Yes, as noted above, some sites focus on job seekers – but for every 1 site that is a ‘candidate-pay’ site, there are 10 that are ‘employer-pay’.

Complicated: Ok, enough of the easy stuff. The devil is in the details! Let us chronicle the many ways that job boards charge employers and job seekers for their services.

Employers:

• Job postings: far and away the most common revenue source
• Resume access: the most typical ‘#2′, although the advent of LinkedIn and other social media have made this less popular
• Highlighted job listings: Enhanced with fonts, images, search results location, and so on
• Site advertising: Banners, buttons, tile ads, and everything in between – the traditional web-based visual ad
• Company profiles: Enhanced, with logos, video, you name it – a spotlight on the employer
• Targeted candidate emails: A custom email that is sent to a subsection of the registered job seeker lists
• Newsletter advertising: Text or image (if, of course, the job board has a newsletter!)
• Social media extensions: This can be as grand as the new Dice Talent Network or as simple as ‘Tweeting’ the employer’s jobs
• Cross posting: Often included in the base price, but sometimes an add-on; job board posts the employer’s jobs to additional locations
• Packages: Combining any of the above elements

Job seekers:

• Membership fee: some sort of monthly or annual fee to access job listings and (possibly) related services
• Visibility: promotes the job seeker’s resume in some way to increase the likelihood an employer will respond
• Reports, etc.: Usually e-books on job hunting, interviews, resumes, salary surveys, etc.
• 3rd party services: the classic example is the resume writing service; the job board will take a revenue split of what the 3rd party makes

Then there are what I would term as ‘miscellaneous’ revenue streams: AdSense, affiliates, and other types of revenue usually associated with how much activity the site generates.

What did I miss? What other ways are there to make money with your job board? Tell me!

A few weeks back I asked you to help with a job board industry survey – and you did! You answered questions about the effect of the recession on your job sites, threats to your business – and your thoughts about the future of the industry.  So first and foremost, thanks!

I received 94 completed responses – which gives me considerable confidence in the results.  A wide range of job sites participated, ranging in revenues from less than $500,000 to more than $10 million. Each size segment was well represented, so again, I think that speaks to the usefulness of this data. Thus, without further ado (and in no particular order), here are some key findings:

• The future looks bright: 80% of respondents said they were either somewhat or very optimistic about the opportunities in their particular niche of the job board industry. This held across all size categories, by the way.
• Threats are out there: Among larger boards, price erosion was a big concern; with mid-size and small boards, the ongoing effects of the recession loom large. Other threats included: growth of job aggregators; LinkedIn; and search engine intrusion into the jobs market.
• Technology rules: One finding that surprised me was the plans by all sites – regardless of size or revenue – to invest in technology. Perhaps, given the threats mentioned above, this finding isn’t that surprising after all.
• More marketing: As the recession fades, expect to see more marketing from the job boards. A majority of respondents are planning to increase their marketing spends in the coming year.
• Business is picking up: Most sites are seeing increases in job postings, resume access, and site advertising from a year ago. The larger boards are also seeing increases in other services such as targeted emails.
• Niche dominates: As per the job board industry at large, most respondents had sites that focused on industry, geographic, or professional niches. Only 19% of respondents were ‘general’ job boards.

If you’re interested in seeing the full survey results, just fill out the Contact form and I’ll send you a copy.

The future is alluring – nothing bad has happened yet, you haven’t made any dumb mistakes yet, and anything could happen. In fact, the future is so interesting I will now write about it (with my job board industry goggles on).

So, let us finish the following phrase in as many interesting and contentious ways as we can, shall we?

The future of job boards is…

1. Dead. After all, hundreds of bloggers and commentators can’t be wrong can they? (Well, yes, actually, they can – see #2 & #8)
2. Rosy. A rebounding economy, the intrusion of the web into every nook and cranny of everyday life, and a desire to do better will drive growth across the job board industry.
3. Social. Job seekers AND employers want more social features on job boards – so expect to see them.
4. Regulated. Did you think the OFCCP reporting requirements were a pain? Get used to it. I predict more is coming.
5. More revenue. Expansion into career hubs, new social media services, and more niche sites mean more revenue for smart job board companies.
6. Lower margins. Commoditization of job postings, more niche sites, social media, and cheap, easily available job board software will drive overall profitability down.
7. LinkedIn / TheLadders / Craigslist / .jobs / etc…: You get the picture. There will always be competition, and there will always be those who predict that ‘something’ will kill job boards. Prove them wrong.
8. You. That’s right. You run them, so you get to write how this story will end.

What did I miss?

Folks, I need your help. We’re emerging from an extremely challenging recession – one that has affected the job board industry deeply. So I thought we might all benefit from some collegial insight. Thus, I’ve put together a short (12 question) survey that should help us better understand the state of the job board world.

Your responses are completely anonymous. No names named, no sites cited. I will publish the main findings in this blog, and if you’d like the complete data, just contact me and I’ll send them to you.

But…I need your participation. The more responses we have, the better the data. It’s that simple. So please, I’m begging you – take the survey! It will take 5 minutes of your time, and I think you’ll find the results very useful.

Thanks in advance!

Doostang just announced that they’ve landed $1.25 million in new funding. That’s not a huge investment compared to the boom years, but it is a signal that our industry may have reached bottom and is beginning to rebound.

So you’ve survived the worst. Now what are you going to do?

Do you have a plan for growth? If not, now is a good time to start – because if you don’t, your competitors will. The job board industry is like any other; you can grow, or you can fade away. There’s not an in-between.

See if you can answer the following questions (all of them, that is):

1. How are you using and/or integrating social media into your services?
2. What are your plans to move beyond job postings and resume access as your primary revenue sources?
3. Have you talked with your employers recently (and I mean most of them, not just a few)? What do they need that you can provide?
4. What is your plan for improving the quality of the candidates you provide to your employers?
5. How are you planning to improve the ability of employers to find the right candidates, and candidates to find the right job?
6. How do you plan to empower your candidates and provide them with a better job hunting experience?
7. Are you planning to grow by expansion into additional niches, acquisition, and/or creation of new services?
8. Do you know where your business should be in 12 months vis-a-vis revenues, services, and competitors?

What questions did I miss?

When was the last time you asked your job board customers what they want? Not just a one-off question to a few clients – but an systematic, organized survey of everyone who uses your site? Employers and job seekers?

A recurrent theme in the ‘job boards are dying’ blog posts that I see is a feeling by recruiters, employers, and job seekers that the ‘big boards’ are out of touch. In other words, they don’t know what their customers want. Now, I’m guessing that they would argue with this assumption. I have no doubt that they survey their customers regularly. But the second half of a survey is communicating back to your customers: “Here’s what you told us – and here’s what we’re going to do.” In other words, tell your customers that their opinions do, in fact, matter.

Asking your customers what they want is also a good counterbalance to complacency and ‘business as usual’. You may think you know your customers inside out (and perhaps you do!), but a good survey can sometimes reveal gaps between what you think and what really is. Personally, I like discovering those gaps – I see them as opportunities to improve the site and grow revenue.

So if you’re not surveying your employers and job seekers regularly, start – you’ll uncover some great potential for improving customer retention and increasing sales. And if you are surveying, make sure you complete the important second step of telling your customers that you heard them – and what you’re going to do about it.

As I was sorting through the usual spate of ‘job boards are dead’ articles, I noticed other more interesting types of articles: pieces that point to job board postings as indicators of the state of the economy. (Monster has published their Employment Index since 2004.)

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If job boards are posting more jobs, then there must be more jobs available. Yet that’s where those doom-and-gloom job board articles clash – if job boards are no longer relevant and in fact are going down the tubes, then they can’t really be good indicators, eh? (Also, don’t forget that the increase in ‘free’ job post sites has driven up the volume of postings).

Well, as you probably know by now, I don’t subscribe to the ‘job boards are dead’ school. However, I do believe that job boards are evolving – in fact, they have no choice. The best are incorporating aspects of social media that make sense for their specific audiences. Some are attempting to become hubs for their audiences. Many allow their employers multiple ways to reach their job seekers – not just via job postings.

So getting back to the question at hand – yes, job boards can act as economic indicators, but simply using the number of job postings as that indicator is a bit simplistic. A better approach might be combining site traffic numbers, resume postings, job postings, and forum or network activity to produce an overall ‘economic health’ indicator.

Maybe your job board should take the lead – and get some free PR in the process!

Once upon a time, if you visited a job board, you knew what you would get: whatever jobs the board had on that day. These were jobs that the board’s sales force had convinced employers to post, on that job board. If you clicked on a job, you went straight to that job posting. And if you applied for it, you did so through that particular job board.

Well, those days are long gone. Since the advent of job board aggregators such as Indeed and Simply Hired, it’s become so easy for a job board to ‘backfill’ their listings that almost everyone does it.

Why?

• you immediately give the illusion of size and depth – just look at all of those postings!
• you hide any shortcomings in your existing sales efforts
• you keep job seekers happy (you hope!)
• the job board aggregators make it so darned easy – and you can pick up some spending money via click-thrus tied to your site

But things aren’t always as simple as they seem. These are a few of the dangers I’ve seen in backfilling:

• you create job seeker dissatisfaction – when jobseekers click on a job posting, they are suddenly transported to another job site (which may or may not have the job they’re looking for – it might just be another click on the way)
• you advertise your site’s shortcomings – job seekers (and employers) aren’t dumb; they realize that if they see ‘Jobs by…’ logo in your search results, your site just doesn’t have its own listings
• you give up traffic and job seekers – a certain percentage (often as high as 60-80%) of job seekers will leave your site and never come back. That can be a lot of traffic that you’ve fought hard to get – that you’ve just given away.

So what’s the answer? I don’t have one. Backfilling can make a lot of sense at a certain time – but it can also create problems.  Just like PPC and other temptations, use backfilling when you have to – and not a moment longer.

For the past 15 years, the job board industry has been dominated by the ‘pay per posting‘ revenue model: an employer purchases a job posting (and sometimes resume access or other add ons).

Yet there’s another model that has been around a while: ‘pay per response‘. In other words, you post your job, and when job seekers apply to your job, you pay for each application.

On the surface, it seems that pay per response would be more attractive to most employers – after all, if your ad tanks, then you’re not out any expense, right? But…what if you have a strong response? You could actually end up paying more than the cost of a traditional job posting. This concern, plus the dominance of the traditional pay per posting model and technical issues, has held back adoption of a pay per response option on most boards.

As a job board operator, you may want to consider pay per response as an alternative revenue model. Why?

• it has the potential to drive up your job postings, as more employer may be willing to put their positions on your site if the up-front cost is $0.
• it has the potential to generate higher revenue per posting if your site can deliver the seekers

However, you should be ready to handle an employer’s concerns over bogus or unqualified applications, and excessive numbers of application.  A possible solution: allow the employer to ‘cap’ the number of applications for each job (thus limiting their financial exposure), and including 1-3 screening questions for each job.

Employers that utilize ATS are probably poor prospects for pay per response, however – in my experience, they are ‘feeding’ their internal prospect system and thus want as many applicants as possible. So they will prefer a fixed cost per posting, rather than variable.

Your thoughts? If you’ve utilized a pay per response model, please share your experiences!