We’ve moving into summer but the pace of activity doesn’t seem to be slowing for the online recruiting and job board world. I hope to see some of you at this week’s JobG8 Job Board Summit in Chicago – but in the meantime, here’s all the news that’s worth reading:

• LinkedIn beats revenue numbers – but stock still falls: Although LinkedIn managed to beat revenue and profit estimates for Q1 2013, Wall Street didn’t like the guidance for Q2. Well, we know that the stock market is a fickle lover.
• Niche job boards tops for effectiveness: A U.K. survey by jobs.ac.uk indicates that 71% of respondents prefer specialist job boards to generalist job boards. Not surprisingly, lack of skilled candidates continues to be the biggest challenge for employers.
• Twitter cards for social recruitment: Work4 has integrated Twitter Cards into its social recruiting platform.Twitter Cards, which are offered only to Twitter-approved developers, are small attachments that are added to the bottom of a tweet. When a user clicks on the card, it expands and shows additional rich media, such as summary text, photo, or video. The Tweets just keep getting longer.
• Is CareerBuilder too valuable?: While the parties involved aren’t commenting, Crain’s Chicago Business and The Wall Street Journal are both hearing from sources that sale of Tribune Company is hitting a snag because of Tribune’s part ownership of and Classified Ventures. While The Wall Street Journal suggested that Tribune group as an entire package could bring a price of up to $1 billion, it also priced CB and CV together at $700 million.
• eQuest gets some big numbers: eQuest that its collection of job board and social media candidate performance statistics has reached 1.25 billion.  eQuest collects and stores these statistics as part of its Big Data Recruitment Suite. I guess this is the ‘big’ in Big Data.
• Smart move: Treehouse has launched a job board that aims to bring new opportunities and income to its student body of 35,000 coders of all kinds. The jobs come from companies around the globe and include development and design positions, including mobile developers and junior-level developer. Teach ‘em and hire ‘em.
• eHarmony moving into the job board and/or matching world: The pioneering online dating site eHarmony has announced plans to launch a job site in 2014 that focuses on the ‘fit’ between companies and candidates, based on detailed information about both. This assumes, of course, that people are as honest about work as they are about dating.

That’s it for now. More news next month!

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I recently wrote a post for HR Examiner that looked at the profusion of choice for recruiters these days – how they are presented with lots of tools to do their jobs. It got me thinking about how things are similar for job boards. Never before has the industry been presented with so many options for improving and expanding their services. Whether it’s resume parsing, contextual  search, ‘talent communities’, social recruiting, video interviewing and resumes, or AdWord optimization, job boards have access to lots of technology and approaches that promise to improve their ROI for employers.

Which brings me to this: in the quest for the next ‘new’ thing, I think that we sometimes forget to focus on what works.

An example: one of the earliest job board innovations was the lowly job alert . It was a masterpiece of simplicity: the job seeker entered his/her job search criteria, including job title, location, industry, etc., and once a day/week/whatever, the job board ran the search against its job database, then emailed the matching positions to the job seeker. Easy, simple – and effective. In fact, apart from actually searching for jobs on the site, job alerts remain the most popular feature of a job board, according to this year’s survey of job seekers. Yes, it’s simple – even kind of boring. But like a good pair of shoes that actually fit and cushion your feet (as opposed to something with narrow toes and high heels), a job alert brings jobs to the candidate in an easily usable and consumable way.

So what’s wrong with that?

Nothing. Sometimes old (and simple) technology trumps new (and complicated) technology.

Now don’t get me wrong – I am first in line to push job boards to invest in technology. Too many sites have lame search engines, poor posting structure that makes finding the right job too hard, and less-than-friendly tools (not to mention a lack of a mobile interface!). But always, the goal when investing in technology is to focus on what works…and to make everything work better, for both candidates and employers.

So…what works on your site? And (ahem) what doesn’t?

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I’ve been consulting in the job board industry since 2009 and active with job boards for much longer. In all that time, a particular type of article / blog post / etc. has persisted and even occasionally thrived: the ‘job boards are dead‘ article. In fact, these have been so persistent and resilient (much like ‘Paul is dead‘ or ‘poinsettas are poisonous‘) that I thought it was time to catalog them. After all, perhaps you will someday be writing your own (erroneous) ‘job boards are dead’ post!

•  Big job boards are dying: A current example of this type of article is here. These usually focus on a couple of points: a) there are too many applicants per job posting; b) the applicants aren’t qualified. A problem with this critique: how can a job board be ‘dying’ if it is producing boatloads of applicants for its employers? That is not to say, of course, that unqualified applicants isn’t a problem – it is. But it seems that the quality of candidates is the problem – rather than the fact that the job board is ‘dying’.
• Job boards are old technology: When job boards came on the scene, part of their appeal was that they represented ‘new’ technology – a way of improving the results of the traditional newspaper classifieds. So it is somewhat ironic that job boards are now being criticized as ‘old’ technology. As with the previous example, there is some truth to the critique: ‘traditional’ job boards look and function much as they did in the 1990s. But there has been substantial change, too. There are job boards that are really career hubs, matching sites, social search sites, and so on. Bottom line: old technology is often in the eye of the beholder – and many sites are embracing ‘new’ technology.
• Social recruiting will kill job boards: A very popular type of article – and surprisingly enough, it is often used by social recruiting vendors and evangelists. A key part of this argument is LinkedIn, as in ‘Look at how well LinkedIn is doing! How can job boards possibly compete?‘. Sure, LinkedIn is doing well. But one company does not make an industry-killing trend, I think. Many job boards are actually incorporating social recruiting products into their lineups. Some companies have had success with social recruiting; some have not. I suspect this type of article will continue for as long as it is effective as a sales tool for social recruiting companies – and no longer.
  
• Candidates hate job boards: These articles suggest that candidates hate job boards so much that they quit using them. Data indicates otherwise. The core candidate complaint, of course, is lack of response from employers – a problem that resides with the employer rather than the job board. This complaint also occurs in other hiring channels – even (!) on social recruiting sites.
• Job boards are too expensive: As in, job boards have priced themselves out of reach – or they just aren’t worth the money. Sometimes this complaint is actually being directed at the big general boards. Occasionally it is derived from specific data: the employer is tracking cost of hire, and a given job board doesn’t produce. But to say that because some job boards are not cost effective, all job boards will die, is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?

Of course, there are plenty of writers that are saying the exact opposite: job boards aren’t dying, they’re doing quite all right. See here, here, here, and here. But…if you’d like to put together your own ‘job boards are dead’ article, please use the above guide – and let me know when you get published. I’ll want to include you in my next guide!

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Hey folks – I will be presenting at the JobG8 Job Board Summit (June 20-21) in Chicago – but that’s not the only reason you should go! Seriously – they’ve pulled together what promises to be an interesting and informative agenda. Here is some of the stuff I’m looking forward to:

• A Q&A moderated by Steven Rothberg (CollegeRecruiter) covering the candidate experience and the future of work. As you know, I’m a big proponent of making job boards more friendly and effective for candidates – and I’m interested to hear what Gerry Crispin, Kevin Wheeler, and the audience has to say.
• Michael Marlatt (mRecruiting Camp) is talking about the new hyper-connected world. Think mobile, act mobile – it’s our future, methinks.
• How to dig into your existing prospect database and find the proverbial gold – from none other than David Donlan of Hubspot – one of my go-to resources for marketing automation.
• The fabled Joel Cheesman (whom I’ve never met, amazingly enough) is digging into the nuts and bolts of using social media for marketing. I’m betting he’ll say something interesting.
• Peter Zollman (AIM Group) will be moderating a Q&A following my talk about the 2013 Job Board Trends Survey. Guess I’ll actually have to read the damn thing…

There is more, of course – matching, real-time traffic bidding, and more. Not to mention a Thursday night cocktail party (yes, twist my arm, I’ll go!). I suspect this summit will be a good complement to the IAEWS conference (also in Chicago this October) – different perspectives, but the same goals: to make the industry better.

So if you want to learn and network, please consider coming to Chicago this June. And if you do, be sure to say hi!

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Last week Jakub Zavrel posted a fascinating piece on ERE.net asking the eternal question: Are Job Boards Still Relevant for the Future of Recruiting?  I strongly encourage you to read it (and definitely check out the comments – Steven Rothberg has some pertinent thoughts, too!).

In a nutshell, Zavrel discusses the role of search technology with regard to job boards’ longevity. Are two search boxes (one for title/skill, another for location) adequate? Is this the best that can be done? Or are there better alternatives? Not surprisingly, Zavrel – who runs a search technology company – believes that semantic search offers better results. He also believes that if job boards adopt this technology, they’ll be around for a while longer.

I’ll be completely upfront – I agree with him. Sure, the current paradigm works, more or less, for certain groups of people – those who have been trained (even at some basic level) to know how to search. But did you notice all those qualifiers I threw in there? More or less, certain groups, etc.? Many times I’ve sat in a room with job search ‘newbies’ and watched them struggle with the current search model. How much information do they put in the skills box? How do they know which skills to put in? What does the location box mean – where they are now? Where they want to be? And what if the results aren’t what they wanted - then what do they do?

In the old days, people were actually taught how to search. I believe the discipline was called ‘information science’. The courses were typically aimed at those who would become the high priests of information – librarians, programmers, and researchers.

Guess what? It was that very formal discipline that led to the creation of our current search model. Yes, it can work. No, it isn’t always obvious or pretty. And yes, a lot of people out there get left in the dust.

So what?

Well, for job boards to maintain and expand their current position as a key method for employers and candidates to find each other, they need to innovate. That could mean integrating semantic search into their systems. That could mean aggregation of job content across multiple sources. That could mean peer review or crowdsourcing of candidates to provide more sophisticated profiles.

What’s the alternative? Well, job boards could just sit on their hands and hope things get better – magically.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s gonna work.

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One of my goals at Job Board Doctor is to provide resources for job boards. My first attempt was the listing of job board software (which has been updated many times!). I also hope that my blog posts serve this function – at least some of the time.

But I’ve also know that there are many other types of services out there for job boards that don’t fall under the guise of job board software – things like aggregation, site optimization, affiliates, and so on. So I’ve now embarked on a new resource page: Suppliers. I’ve started the list – but I know it will grow (and I hope you help me with your suggestions). The descriptions are free of fluff (at least, as much as I can make them) – they are just there to help you figure out the type of service offered. So far, we have a few general categories of services:

• job aggregation
• PPC advertising
• job posting/distribution
• outsourced sales/marketing
• job wrapping/spidering
• social media services
• ad campaign management
• resume parsing
• resume creation / modification services

But it’s early days yet. And I (as always) need your help to make this resource better. So contact me with your suggestions/changes/whatever. And – I hope you find this resource useful!

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I got caught up in surveys and what not (What? You haven’t seen the 2013 Job Board Trends survey?) and fell a bit behind on the news. So here is the latest and greatest in the far-flung world of online recruiting:

• LinkedIn acquires mobile news reader: LinkedIn continued its acquisition-oriented spring by purchasing Pulse, a mobile platform for viewing news items, for $90 million. Content appears to draw more users than Groups, it seems. In other news, it announced an update to its search function.
  
• eQuest and Work4 partner up: eQuest, a job posting distribution company, has partnered with Work4 to provide the latter’s Facebook job posting technology to all eQuest clients at no charge. The deal will help eQuest gather candidate data on Facebook users.
• Indeed tops sources of external hires: Big data, indeed: the latest iCIMS analysis of their internal data indicates that 27% of external hires came from Indeed. The results – derived from 1.5 million job postings – also showed that 22% originated from ‘traditional’ job boards.
• Evenbase makes more money: Digital recruitment group Evenbase Recruitment has seen a year-on-year rise in turnover by a fifth to £32.7m in the 12 months to 30 September 2012, while profit doubled. Profits of £5.41m were more than twice the 2011 total of £2.56m. Amazing what a rebrand can do!
• CareerXRoads releases its source of hire report: Referrals, career sites, and job boards once again led as the primary sources of hire for companies surveyed in the 2013 Sources of Hire Report. Social media? Not so much.
• CareerBuilder Acquires Oil and Gas Job Search: CareerBuilder purchased Oil and Gas Job Search, headquartered in Manchester, England, and the oil and gas industry’s leading online job site outside North America. In other words, CB is still going niche.
• Dice meets earning expectations: Dice reported that it earned 12 cents a share on $50.4 million of revenue, which put it mostly in line with what Wall Street was expecting and what the company predicted in January. It also projected Q2 earnings at $2M less than previous expectations. A slowdown? Dice also added Shravan Goli as President of Dice to guide Dice, ClearanceJobs and the Slashdot Media brands.

That’s it for now, folks!

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The results are in from the latest Job Board Trends and Online Recruiting surveys – and they’re interesting. This year 319 job boards, 79 HR and recruiting professionals, and 108 job seekers participated – that’s a lot of responses! It also took a while to gather up the data and put it into report form – but it is now available in the Research area of the Job Board Doctor website. I encourage you to take a look (free registration is required to download the reports).

Here are some highlights from the surveys:

• Lack of response from employers continues to be the top frustration of job seekers
• Most HR/recruiters are planning to increase spending on their company career site, mobile recruiting, and referral programs
• Quality of applicants, quantity of applicants, and price are the top 3 factors for client renewal for job boards around the globe
• Over 70% of job boards surveyed use aggregators in all regions
• Only half of the HR and recruiting professionals surveyed actually track the cost per application
• Higher percentages of UK and European job boards have mobile-friendly sites than do job boards in the rest of the globe
• Over 90% of HR and recruiting professionals surveyed that are currently using social media for recruitment are using LinkedIn

There is, of course, much more. I encourage you to download the surveys that are most relevant to you. You’ll find them in the Research area of the Job Board Doctor website. Thanks again to everyone who participated – I appreciate it!

(Note: I will be discussing the results of these surveys in more detail at the JobG8 Job Board Summit in June. Details are here.)

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I wanted to let you know about some exciting things happening here in Job Board Doctor World:

• Next week I will begin releasing the results of this year’s Job Board Industry Trends survey. There was great response – over 300 job board responses worldwide, plus response from HR professionals and job seekers. More similarities between boards around the globe than differences. I look forward to sharing this information with you.
• Also, on Tuesday, April 30th, I will be conducting a webinar (courtesy of RealMatch) on “Revitalize Your Job Board (And connect with HR Needs & Budgets”. I plan on covering how you can turn what HR needs into solutions that they will buy – and of course I will give you lots of practical advice on getting started. Click here to sign up.
• Finally, I will be presenting the results of the Job Board Trends Survey at JobG8′s Job Board Summit, June 20-21 in Chicago. They have a good roster of folks lined up, including Gerry Crispin, Kevin Wheeler, Joel Cheesman, and Michael Marlatt. It promises to be a great couple of days for learning, networking, and (perhaps?) partying. Click here to sign up.

Man, I’m getting tired just looking at that. I better grab another double Americano!

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It seems that Monster is continuing its long, slow fade as the ‘big dog’ in the job board world (funny how long-term lack of leadership can do that to you). But there are plenty of services vying for the leadership role: Indeed, CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn come most immediately to mind. Of these, the latter two have shown the most consistent efforts to offer new services. Since what happens at the top of the industry often filters down to the rest of us, let’s take a look at what these two job boards have introduced in 2012-13:

CareerBuilder

• Introduced a service that allows you to compare your ad’s results with other similar ads on CB – including qualifying demographic info about applicant pool. Nice use of the infamous ‘Big Data’.
• Integrated an OpinionLab tool that allows job seekers to provide feedback via mobile devices
• Created a Supply and Demand portal that allows employers to determine where certain types of candidates are – and are most plentiful. More ‘Big Data’.
• Provides advice to employers on finding skilled workers from closely-related occupations (via, yep, you guessed it – ‘Big Data’).

In a nutshell, CareerBuilder’s purchase of EMSI in 2012 has generated several new services – and I suspect they’re just getting started.

LinkedIn:

• Introduced a tool to measure brand awareness on LinkedIn of a given employer – and increase awareness.
• Updated its LinkedIn Recruiter service and added a talent-matching feature (a recommendation engine, actually).
• Added mobile-optimized ‘company pages’
• Bought mobile news reader Pulse and presentation tool SlideShare
• Added ‘endorsements’ for LinkedIn profiles

So what’s really going on with these two very large companies? Despite the general press buzz, we of course know that LinkedIn has been around for quite a while, and is thus a much more mature company than its PR (and stock price) might indicate. LinkedIn has been rolling out a steady stream of minor modifications to its site that make it more useful, both on the web and on mobile devices. It is also trying to make itself into the primary hub for everyone in corporate America (and beyond) – a Facebook for people that actually work. At the same time, it’s trying to add revenue-producing services to satisfy its stockholders – and the vast majority of those seem to revolve around recruiting and job search.

CareerBuilder of course is even older than LinkedIn(gasp!), but after many years in the #2 slot behind Monster, seems to be assuming a leadership role – particularly with the actual implementation of big data in recruiting. It almost seems from the outside like the addition of EMSI has reinvigorated the company – and of course it has certainly turned its focus to the development of how employers can use all that data that CareerBuilder captures. At the same time, CareerBuilder struggles with a legacy that it is just ‘another big job board’. It is a bright spot for its corporate owners – but financial pressures from above could stifle ongoing innovation.

So it’s not quite like Mothra versus Godzilla, but the battle between CareerBuilder and LinkedIn for the deep pockets of the world’s recruiters is quite interesting. Until the EMSI acquisition, I would have given the edge to LinkedIn – now I’m not so sure.

What do you think?

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