Hey, it’s the end of the year (almost) and time to take a look at what happened in 2012. Did anything? Well, actually, yes – quite a bit. Apart from an election, a (slowly) recovering economy, and a snazzy James Bond film, it did seem like 2012 was a busy year for online recruiting. Here are my picks for the most notable:…

The folks at LinkedIn have been busy lately, rolling outnew features, connecting with their users at the LI conference, and busily expanding their empire in all directions. Some pundits are proclaiming that…

Being a full time consultant is wonderful – I have the opportunity to work with hundreds of interesting clients, tackle unusual and cutting edge projects, and yes, get paid for it. But there is a drawback – although I’m in contact with dozens of people every week via phone, email, Skype, and Twitter, I don’t actually see them. I’m here in Iowa, and they’re…well, all over the world.

Conferences are a great way to see your colleagues and…

Almost every week I see another blog post or story about a trend, product, or development that will doom job boards. Let’s be honest – writing about the death of any institution, especially one used by millions of people worldwide, is a great way to gather eyeballs and readers.

But as I was considering my latest snarky…

In a recent presentation with Dr. Charles Handler, I discovered that although both he and I focused on the ‘quality of candidates’ – as does anyone involved in recruiting – we weren’t able to find much data on exactly which recruiting techniques delivered the best quality candidates, according to HR and recruiting professionals. As I was preparing the annual Online Recruiting…

Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have been conducting the landmark CareerXRoads Source of Hire survey for over a decade. In my mind, that’s useful data. They’ve just come out with the 2012 edition, and it’s absolutely worth a look. The top four sources of hire include referrals (28%), job…

It’s that time of the month – time to glance back and see if anything really happened in the past 4 weeks. Surprisingly enough, it did. Here’s what I noticed:

• Monster partners with Ogden Newspapers: Monster adds to its bevy…

Another week, another ‘job boards are dying’ blog post. If I had a dollar for every post like this, I’d be a (moderately) rich man. Truly.

I try to avoid the ‘job boards are dying’ discussion because (a) it’s a flamer’s game (not unlike arguing with those who disbelieve climate change), and (b) those of us in the biz know it…

Per this week’s survey results from job boards, we’ve seen some changes over the past 12 months – not the least of which is increased optimism. Perhaps part of that is based on what HR and recruiting professionals are actually doing to find candidates. This installment of the …

I’ve worked with dozens of job boards over the years, and I often take a look at what the job seekers are saying to them. Since the onset of the recession (and honestly, before), it goes something like this:

“Why don’t you have any jobs in my area?”

“I’ve had my resume posted on your site for months and you haven’t called me.”

“I’ve been working in my field for twenty years but you don’t have a single job for me??”

There are lots…

It’s that time of the year – leaves are falling, frost is threatening our gardens….and I’m knocking on your door about the online recruiting survey. I'm trying to include everyone in the online recruiting industry: HR and recruiting pros, job…

One problem with the internet in general and social media in particular is that you have fewer reasons to leave the office. After all, if I’m swapping Tweets with @Animal or @HRMargo all day, do I really want to spend ‘real’ time with them?

Well, actually, yes. It’s fun to meet the living, breathing version of these virtual friends. And what’s even more fun is to learn new stuff and hear interesting news and gossip.

That’s where the …

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…

Any job board operator will tell you that one of the toughest things about keeping your site running well is ensuring that you have a steady flow of the right kind of candidates. What exactly is the ‘right kind of candidate’? Well, this would a candidate that is qualified for a particular job AND responds to that job. If you have enough of these candidates, your employers will be happy and they will pay to use your site.

Problem is, finding these candidates is easier…

I’m a great believer in stealing ideas. Think about it: are most successful businesses truly original? Not often – instead, they take an idea and perfect it, then execute skillfully. (This applies to art, music, and literature, too – if you listen carefully, you’ll hear Matthew Sweet stealing from The Beatles, who stole from Buddy Holly, who stole from Hank Williams, who stole from….).

Are there ideas out there that are worth stealing for your job board? You bet! And…

I'm conducting a survey on how recruiters (and job seekers) use online recruiting tools - and I would love it if you could help! It will take about 3-4 minutes of your time - and I will send you the results if you like.

So how about it? To participate, click here:  Online Recruiting Survey

Thanks,

Jeff Dickey-Chasins

Job Board Doctor

Imagine that you’re one of the thousands of job boards that provided Indeed with job postings from its inception. Imagine that in addition to providing those jobs (which turned Indeed into the most visited job site on the web), you also spent money promoting those same jobs – thus providing Indeed with a lucrative source of income. Imagine that, in return, Indeed provided your job board with a stream of inbound referrals (both organic and…

As recently as several years ago, it was considered standard operating procedure for job seekers to post their resumes on as many job boards as possible. Why?Visibility. Employers and recruiters used the job board resume databases to find possible hires, so it made sense to have your resume in as many places as possible. Job boards encouraged this behavior because it made the resume access features easier to sell to employers.

Enter LinkedIn. It was…

One of the first business lessons I learned many years ago was that it is often better to havemany smaller customers than fewer large ones. At the time, I was learning the ropes from a battle-hardened magazine publisher. He said (in reference to my naive comment that I would rather have Microsoft as an advertiser than a dozen smaller ones), “Where are you when your big customer decides to ‘shift focus’? Your loss will be 100% of income, rather than 15% or 20%. How long does…

Go to any animal shelter and you will usually see pets that simply got too big for their owners – hulking St. Bernards, twelve-foot pythons, walking catfish, and so on. It’s easy in hindsight to blame the owners. But the owners weren’t thinking about how big the animal would one day become; they were focused on how much they wanted it.

Since roughly 2005, job boards have lived with aggregators such as …