As noted in previous posts, I’ve been thinking lately about what makes a job board good – or not. Below are a few questions to that effect – and yes, some employment sites have these features, but most do not. Maybe there absent features you’ve wondered about?

• Voice input for search: Hey, if you’re…

Continue

A few weeks back I posed the question“What is a job board?”. In the process of trying to answer that question, I mentioned LinkedIn as a prime example of something thatlooks like a job board, acts like a job board, butclaims not to be a job…

Continue

I recently had the privilege of hosting #HFChat – the HireFriday Tweet-fest organized by @HRMargo and @CyndyTrivella.  HireFriday is all about helping job seekers find work. Recruiters, HR professionals, and the occasional job board doctor pose and answer common questions about the job hunt. It’s a wonderful event for all involved.

My subject – surprisingly enough! – was “Making job boards work for you”. The conversation ranged from the basics (setting up job alerts, using job boards…

Continue

If you hire people, at some point you will have to hire for a position about which you know absolutely nothing.  Perhaps you’re hiring a chief technology officer, but your background is marketing and sales. Or you’re hiring a new accountant, and you only understand coding.

What do you do? Perhaps you turn to friends and colleagues who are more knowledgeable than you about a particular skill set. Or you figure out which certifications a ‘perfect’…

Continue

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 …

Continue

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…

Continue

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…

Continue

There is a lot of activity in the online recruiting industry now – more than I’ve seen in many years. Money is flowing in, startups are blossoming, and established players are branching out.

So why now? Part of it stems from the (slow) retreat of the recession – more people working means more interest in finding candidates. Part comes from the rise of social media and mobile, spurring innovation and new thinking about old recruiting…

Continue

In the beginning, there was the job board, and the candidates rejoiced. So many jobs! So many locations! So much easier than paper.

The employers liked it, too.

But after a while, candidates realized that general boards were, well….general. They discovered that many (er, most) jobs were inapplicable to their interests. So they asked the job boards to make things easier. “Help us find just the jobs we want!”

Job board operators responded in a variety of…

Continue

It’s been an interesting several months in the job site world. To wit:…

Continue

People get bored. This is the number one reason that anything ‘new and shiny’ captures our attention. We get frustrated that what we’re doing is, well, kind of repetitive and doesn’t work the way

we imagined it would. Then something new comes along

and we think: Maybe this time things will be different! Maybe

that software will really work. Maybe this really is the

magic bullet.

Or, maybe…

Continue

A few weeks back I asked you to help with a job board industry survey – and you did! You answered questions about the effect of the recession on your job sites, threats to your business – and your thoughts about the future of the industry. So first and foremost, thanks!



I received 94 completed responses – which gives me considerable confidence in the results. A wide range of job sites participated, ranging in revenues from less than $500,000 to more than $10 million. Each size… Continue

Doostang just announced that they’ve landed $1.25 million in new funding. That’s not a huge investment compared to the boom years, but it is a signal that our industry may have reached bottom and is beginning to rebound.



So you’ve survived the worst. Now what are you going to do?



Do you have a plan for growth? If not, now is a good time to start – because if you don’t, your competitors will. The job board industry is like any other; you can grow, or you can fade away.… Continue

It’s easy to do: you work and obsess over building the perfect job board, making certain that posting a resume is easier than sneezing – but then you forget about the world outside your site. Or you spend hours on backlinks, blog postings, and email campaigns, only to discover that your site just isn’t that easy to use.



Job boards have to function equally well both inside the site and outside the site. As a colleague once said, “You can build the best store in the world, but you’ll… Continue

I’ve built various items with wood for many years. Some resemble furniture, others…well, they were interesting to create. Yet, apart from the sheer fun of cutting, chopping, paring, and (occasionally) pounding wood, I’ve also managed to extract a few lessons that have crossed over to my life in job boards:



1. Never cut first, measure second. Translating to the job board world, that means you should take some time – a goodly amount of it – thinking about what your next big move… Continue