Are Job Boards up to the Challenges? Thoughts from the Jobg8 Summit

Last week I went along to the Jobg8 Job Board summit in London.  My plan had been to review the event.  However, when the excellent Mervyn Dinnen (Social Media, Recruitment and HR Blogger) I could hardly turn him down! Here are his thoughts and takeaways from  the event.

The day was well organised with a good mix of speakers covering the industry, their clients, suppliers and analysts/commentators.

Most speakers laid down challenges to the Job Board sector – and from what I heard it would appear that there may not be the appetite or vision to take these head on. Here are the 5 main ones:

1 – Data, Insights, Trends

Opening speaker was Isabelle Hung from Alexander Mann Solutions, a major client of job boards who talked of what a business like hers needed from them. It was insight, trends and analysis from all the data they have. Seeing job boards as huge data warehouses with access to so much information about job seekers, their habits and behaviours, likes and dislikes, skills and preferences, she needs the sector to partner with businesses such as hers to help them. Maybe to create a new collaborative way of working? ‘You give us lots of information but very little insight’ she said at one point. The view from the floor though was that most clients just want better candidates and that this was the challenge for the job board sector.

Could this be a missed opportunity? Here was a major client telling the sector what she wanted from them…but was she effectively being told she was wrong?

2 – Skill Set Talent Pools

Another thing that Isabelle told us was that AMS are building talent pools based on skills not functional experience, as their clients want transferable skills and behaviours. This didn’t get discussed that much but I see this as a huge challenge for job boards. If recruiters start to look for talent differently then the sector will need to be driving that with innovation, not responding with surgery to what they already have.

3 – Understanding Job Seeker Behaviour

During the day we heard results of extensive research from Jeff Dickey-Chasins (AKA The Job Board Doctor) which was ripe with facts that seemed to surprise many. From job seekers it was the popularity of print media, reliance on referrals and networking, and seeing the job board as research not an application mechanism that seemed unexpected. But when you consider that only 2 of the boards present actively conducted research to ascertain job seeker attitudes and behaviours maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that this was news to so many. Are the rest just making assumptions about their candidate base?

Two of the top words for describing Job Boards were ‘untargeted’ and ‘overwhelming’ though ‘valuable’ did also appear, and niche Boards were perceived as better.

4 – Vanilla or Marmite?

This was one of many challenges from Peter Gold – What do you want to be? How do you want to engage with your applicant and client base? If you survey recruiters and they say their problems are sourcing and employer branding, do you know what their REAL problems are?

He ended by asking the audience to imagine a future in which they don’t charge for jobs and was met with stunned silence! No questions at all. What else do they offer, what else do they have that they can offer?

5 – Too Simple Search Tools

Jacob Zavrel of Textkernel, one of the final speakers, was puzzled. “Why is the Job Board industry hooked on job aggregation and shying away from people aggregation” he asked. The challenges that he saw came from aggregators, niche sites, social networks and mobile and yet there was no feeling within the room that these were being taken on. “Payment up front has hindered the optimisation of the job application process” he said, whilst bemoaning the ‘too simple search tools’ that rely on keyword and location. There were shout-outs during the day for Monster’s semantic search technology and SeeMore solution.

All in all there were more questions than answers at the conference. We were told that 80% of job seekers want to apply on a mobile device but can’t due to poor responsiveness and mobile experience, yet when one job board was challenged over how having a mobile-responsive site was more important than a mobile app, the answer was that the app was more important to drive push notifications.

When the need for good content on the site was discussed, the answer was that the job ads were the most important content – yet mostly this is published without any editing or sense check. In fact, poorly worded and uninformative job ads were one of the job seekers’ greatest frustrations.

The lack of interest in applicant behaviour and client needs was possibly the biggest concern. With the job market improving, now is probably the time to talk of innovation and creating new alliances and partnerships – yet the summing up from one member of the morning panel was to “get ready to ride the gravy train and raise your rates now”.

I’m certain that reports of the pending demise of Job Boards are very premature and almost certainly incorrect…but they certainly won’t be helping themselves by burying their heads in the sand as the tide of change begins to sweep in.

Mervyn is a content creator, community builder and social engagement strategist for the HR, Recruitment and Social Business sectors, helping companies leverage social media for recruitment and employer branding.  If you start from http://mervyndinnen.wordpress.com/ you’ll be able to find out more about contact him.