Job matching is the AI of the job board world.

It’s like this: for decades AI has been held out to computer geeks and normal folks alike as something that was ‘just around the corner’. Even the definition of AI has changed – sure, Big Blue could beat a chess master but that wasn’t really intelligence, right? Since 1950, the Turing test has been the gold standard for AI – and no computer program has been able to pass it. (I will leave for now the various strengths and weaknesses of this test).

Job matching has held a similar spot in the job board industry. As far back as I can remember, there have been vendors promising solutions – but the solutions have always fallen short in one way or another.

The promise: A job seeker can fill out a form (often of significant length) that details skills, likes, dislikes, and job history. The job matching software will use this information to ‘match’ the job seeker to a ‘perfect’ (or pretty darned good) job. The job seeker is happy because he/she has found a great position, the employer is happy because they’ve found the perfect employee, and the job board is happy because a position has been filled.

The problem: People are impatient, even lazy. They don’t want to spend 10, 20, or even 30 minutes filling out forms for an uncertain return. On the other side, programmers and designers must decide which factors are most important in matching a job to a person. Those factors can be overwhelming – for example, is it enough to have a B.A.? Or is it better to have a B.A. from Amherst? Or is it better to have a B.A. in English from Amherst in the late 80s? With a 3.5 GPA or higher? And believe me, I’m simplifying the problem here. Think about cultural fit, hard and soft skills, personality traits, and much much more.

Who has tried it? Well, there’s Jobfox, RealMatch, and many others.  None dominates the job board industry, although each has made inroads. There are also stand-alone services such as ClearFit and QuietAgent that are unaffiliated with specific job boards. I suspect that all face the problems described above: job seeker resistance and the complexity of matching.

What’s next? Heck if I know. Certainly if a system could gather information from job seekers in a painless manner, and then use that information to match jobs to seekers, it would have a chance of succeeding.

One path forward could be the collection and collation of data left on various social media platforms (imagine analyzing ALL Facebook postings for everyone ages 18 to 26, for example), which could then be fashioned into candidate profiles. Talk about a challenging project! But it’s just data, after all (although there is a small issue of privacy there).

Or perhaps a perpetual resume site like LinkedIn could somehow extract enough information from its users’ profiles, comments, and actions to build candidate data that would be used in matching systems.

Sounds like a job for AI!

I’m hoping that you’ll help me out by taking a short survey on the future of the job board industry. It will take about 4 minutes of your time – and I’ll be happy to send you the complete results!

It’s divided into 3 tracks – one for job seekers, one for job boarders, and one for recruiters and HR professionals. Pick the one that best fits you. I’ll be cross-referencing the results to see how the different respondents’ perspectives line up. Are job seekers actually finding jobs via social media? Do job boards plan major changes in the coming year? Are companies planning to increase or decrease spending on job boards?

So go ahead - take the survey! And thank you.

I’m building a marimba.  I’ve been a musician for years (although not a marimba player) but have never – until now – built an instrument. Believe me, building is different from playing. It helps to be a musician if you are creating an instrument – but the mindset is quite different. You’re worried about the ‘how’ – i.e., how high does that key need to be above the resonator to amplify without altering the pitch. You’re focused on the end result – you want to build an instrument that serves the musician, not one that gets in their way.

Same thing with job boards. Almost everyone you know has used a job board at some point; some folks, like recruiters and HR pros, use them every day. But what happens when one of those users decides to build a job board?

I’ve worked with many clients in this situation – recruiters or HR folks who have seen an opportunity in the employment market and want to exploit it by creating a job site. No matter how familiar they are with job boards, there’s always a moment in our work where we talk about the complexity of building a good site – and how to hide that complexity from the users.

The details can overwhelm you. There are a million decisions (not unlike building a musical instrument), each has consequences, and your experiences as a user will inevitably color your decisions. Hate long registration forms? Then yours will be short – until you discover that your employers really want more information about those job seekers.

You may discover that it’s often easier to have specialists working on your site – instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, as it were. Job board software vendors live and breathe job boards; they’ve had to face all of the easy and most of the hard problems.  So although you give up the complete free of the DIY approach – you also give up having to solve every single problem.

But at some point, you have to use your board - just like a job seeker or recruiter would. You can’t make excuses for its shortcomings or incomprehensibility. You simply take notes of everything that gets between your customers and their goals – and then you fix it.

It may surprise you that the Job Board Doctor is in fact NOT the only person writing about job boards. Really! In fact, there are some very articulate, smart folks out there covering developments in the job board world – and I thought it was time to point you in their direction. Each of these articles is worth your time – take a look:

• Matt Alder:  “The Job Cloud – Why Twitter is the future of Job Boards” – A look into how a ‘job cloud’ could disrupt the world of job boards.
• Don Ramer: “The Job Boards Are Dead…Long Live The Job Boards?” – Social networks are displacing the traditional job board model – but not the job boards.
• Peter Gold: “Why Job Boards Will Pay You” – Peter predicts that job boards will end up paying large companies to advertise on their sites.
• Steven Rothberg: “Are Job Boards Dead?” – Job boards aren’t dead, but those that stick to outdated financial models will soon perish.
• Eric Shannon: “Job Search 2010 – Looking 5 years into the future” – Consolidation at the top of the job board industry, but more small boards down below.
• Lou Adler: “Will Careersnotlateraltransfers.com Soon Replace All Job Boards?: Redesign the hiring process, dump job descriptions and resumes, and revamp job boards.
• Nick Corcodilos: “TheLadders: Job-board salary fraud?” – Nick has many concerns about TheLadders, and doesn’t hesitate to lay them out for you.
• Toby Dayton: “Great Insight on Job Boards from Google” – Toby uses Google to make a few points about candidate-pay job sites.
• Phillip Tusing: “Porter’s 5 Forces Model View of the Job Board Industry” – Using Michael Porter’s model to examine the Australian job board industry.

Who did I miss? Let me know!

When you’re in the midst of working, it’s hard to stop. The work can be both addictive and rote – a deadly combination if what you really need is an hour or two of quiet contemplation. Thus, the three words in the title above can often work at cross-purposes, even though each has its place.

Specifically: technology is not necessarily the same as innovation. Let’s say that your job board is popular and well liked by candidates and employers alike. Let’s also say that you discover fewer and fewer of your candidates find the site via search engines. Then you learn that your site has ‘aged’ with regard to SEO; in other words, your technology is old. It’s like when you have a 5-year-old computer, and you need some a bit more recent. So….you upgrade your technology and bring your site up to current SEO standards. Problem solved.

But innovation takes a different path. It might use technology to overturn some long held tenets of job board wisdom through the creation of a radically different user interface that candidates love. Or it might simply take an existing technique or tool and use it in a different manner. Innovation – unlike technology – is not something you necessarily put into a line item on your budget. It’s not an upgrade – it’s an overthrow.

And procrastination? Well, remember how hard you work? How little time you have? That can set the stage for procrastinating. You simply don’t want to think about technology or innovation because you’re up against the wall as it is. But I’ve also learned that occasionally procrastination is prompted by the feeling that something isn’t quite ready – an innovation that’s half-baked or a technology that’s kludgy -  and by refusing to act, you’re actually doing your job board a service.  Holding off can be good.

And what happens when you mix procrastination with technology? You might get an outdated site. How about innovation and procrastination? Maybe you talk a lot about what could be – but somehow never execute on it. It’s a balancing act. Things have to get done.

And if you don’t keep up with technology, forget to innovate, or simply fail to act? Well, you may find yourself alongside all those other companies that have faded over the decades, wondering when the world changed.

Thanks to the folks at Jobsite, I will be participating in #truManchester, another in Bill Boorman’s series of ‘unconferences’. Although an unconference sounds a bit chaotic (no Powerpoints, participants can move from track to track at will), past participants say that the meetings are fantastic for absorbing lots of industry information and getting one-on-one time with colleagues and experts.

I’ll be facilitating tracks on Job Boards (imagine that!) and Talent Attraction. I’m also looking forward to meeting with and learning from my British colleagues, including Felix Wetzel, James Mayes, Peter Gold, and Dave Martin.

Interested? Check out the track listings and consider attending. I’d welcome the chance to meet you face to face! In the meantime, I will be practicing my Iowa/Texas accent – something special to confuse my British friends!

A while back I wrote about some job sites that I thought were ‘cool’ – in other words, unusual (in a good way), well designed, and ‘of a piece’. I’m always prowling for new ideas and different ways to tackle our industry’s challenges – so when I find a site that’s different, I want to share. Thus, without further ado, here are the latest round of cool job sites:

Genotrope: Uses an ‘affinity’ engine to match candidates to companies based on skills and cultural fit. Very cool visual graph that shows a company’s connections to other companies. Matching tool + graphics + nice design = cool. (URL: http://www.genotrope.com/genotrope/)

Superscout: UK-based free site imbued with social networking hooks. Follow employers, engage and promote, just be a Web 2.0 kind of job seeker. Nice look + good social media implementation = cool. (URL: http://www.superscout.com/)

College Recruiter: A good example of an established site giving itself a very smart visual and functional overhaul. Good social media integration + solid design + logical organization of LOTS of content = cool. (URL: http://collegerecruiter.com/)

DoNanza: Another freelancer/work-at-home site – but with a twist. Any site owner can grab the DoNanza widget and display the site’s jobs on their own for a cut of the revenue (ala Jobamatic). Now why don’t more job sites try this? Good design + out-of-the-box marketing = cool site. (URL: http://www.donanza.com/)

Hey folks – it’s a new look for the Job Board Doctor! I’m now on the Thesis framework (thanks, Eric) and – although it’s not done – I’m inching toward a final revision.  Haven’t quite figured out how to integrate my logo – it may not be possible, given the design, but we shall see.

So…what do you think? Likes? Dislikes? Suggestions? Comments? Let me know!

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!

Sorry to tell you this – but job boards are businesses. They make money. They produce results.

Why are these statements such a shock to social media enthusiasts? Just like Apple and Google, job boards rely on customers who pay for results. Perhaps there’s the rub – most social media tools and sites are free (at the moment).  Since job boards aren’t free, they are by nature less lovable and effective than (insert the name of your favorite social media tool).

Well, guess what? Nothing lasts forever – and the days of ‘free’ social media will end. Twitter is inserting ad Tweets into the Twittersphere. Facebook has contemplated charging users. LinkedIn is always looking for new ways to extract money from users.

More than the expense, though, is the realization that results matter. Ask the well known recruiter Jerry Albright how many candidates he garnered from Twitter (hint: less than the fingers on one hand). Employers have been wowed with the whiz-bang of social media – but once a price tag is affixed, they will begin demanding results.

So if social media is about interaction and conversations, social media + a price tag will be about conversations and interactions that result in a specific outcome. In the case of recruiting, social media will need to show that it can produce better results – less expensively and as consistently – than a well-run job board. If it can, then that’s fantastic for the employer and tough for the job board.

But it just isn’t enough to be social. Going forward, social media must produce results - or it will end up as ephemeral as Handspring, est, and (insert a fad you remember!).