The adaptive brilliance of job boards

Well, that’s a pushy way to start a post – claiming the adaptive brilliance of job boards! Apart from the assertion, it implies that job boards are still going strong – that they aren’t dying, fading, or otherwise disappearing (Indeed’s layoffs to the contrary). Hey, you know what? It’s true – job boards (no matter whether they call themselves hiring platforms, marketplaces, programmatic networks, or something else) seem to be thriving in a world where there are more jobs than people.

But…

Let’s get back to my original audacious assertion: the adaptive brilliance of job boards. What in the heck am I talking about?

To explain, let’s take a look at the latest ‘big news’ in the industry: ChatGPT. The AI tool has been seen in some quarters as revolutionary for recruiting. It’s true that employers are using it to create job ads, and that job seekers are leaning on AI to batch-apply to hundreds of jobs. It reminds me quite a bit of a previous ‘revolutionary’ wave in recruiting: the introduction of social media. Both were/are being oversold, and yet social media became part of the recruiter’s toolkit, as I suspect ChatGPT will.

But remember? Social media was pitched as something that would destroy job boards. Umm, no. Instead, job boards adapted their offerings to include social media. They used social media to capture candidate traffic, and they provided social media services to their employer clients.

And now? I am pretty sure that job boards will adapt their offerings to include ChatGPT and all of its conceptual competitors. Thus…the adaptive brilliance of job boards. They simply absorb competitive tools and technologies, and fold them into the basic model of concentrating candidates and exposing employers to those candidates.

What about those job boards that don’t adapt? As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, they will disappear.

Will job boards meet a technology or tactic that they cannot fold into their offering? Perhaps. But I’ve given up trying to predict what that might be. Instead, I focus on the ‘how’: how a new technology, tactic, or model can be utilized by a job board to do a better job of connecting candidates and employers. You should, too!

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