Your other point – the one about aggregators – is easy to defend: where is the personal touch in that? Right now it’s all about building communities and developing services around these. Job board users want an experience now, not just a place to drop their CV/resume into another empty hole with no guarantee of response.

Re CV/resume searching being a dying revenue stream: People, by definition, are inherently lazy. Whilst LinkedIn et al provide excellent resources for those with inclination/know-how enough to ustilise the talent on show, most won’t want to or, indeed, know how to.

I think multi-sites like Monster/Totaljobs will struggle without evolving because these are the genric platforms to which your sweeping statement alludes.

http://twitter.com/simonlewisomj

Certainly some great points to consider pre-TRU London. Best get some research done in preparation for my track…

I wrote a two paragraph comment, which was deleted during the Captcha process. bummer.

You and Dave Martin are pushing the pre-debate for TruLondon. Excellent comments from Gareth and Steve.

Push to Zero based pricing. For the Americans, this is new territory. UK job boards started with zero based pricing, otherwise known as Free Trials, to gain market share. Once they reached positions of market dominance, usually after the ownership changes, pricing started to move up, in some cases 2-3 times a year. Now we see other challenges to price models for the ‘traditional’ job boards.

A few ideas for the Track next week:
The aggegators can gain market share of jobs – how does the jobseeker define which place to go to? Can the aggregator survive without new pricing/revenue generating models?

Why wouldn’t the candidate join a club, a paid for site where content (jobs) matches what the candidate really wants – and where the candidate is not just one of millions?

Does the candidate really want employers surfing his personal and business profile 24×7 for job purposes? How can the candidate control that access?

Do always on information feeds from Twitter and other media soon lose their shine and get relegated to the waste basket without being read?

Note that these are not necessarily by beliefs, but are points to generate some debate in the Job Boards 2020 debate. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Cheers
Al

I think most definitely the job boards will have to change, but engaging and doing all the stuff like forums, newsletters (Which few read proportionately these days) is all fine, but at the end of the day it matters not if the job board in question does not deliver – i.e. drive placements. When we measured our job boards it was clear they were not actually driving relevant candidates, let alone placements. Very few recruiters appear to be able to measure to this level so ‘applications’ remain the measure.

I think Steven is bang on though – its a race to zero revenues. As it is with recruitment consultancies in the longer term. Print publishers who have moved online are particularly vulnerable.

Also, given the issues with CV databases mentioned above, its only a matter of time before the CV largely disappears as a relevant medium. I have a LinkedIn profile – why do i need a CV? If you want to know everything about me look there, its got everything my CV has and more. And it never ages, assuming im keeping it up to date, which i am.

Results. That’s what matters. All the community and social stuff is great, but if, as a job board, you cant deliver me relevant candidates that i place, its largely a waste of time. At the moment, even the market leading niche job boards struggle are struggling to deliver that.

Although those boards don’t want to admit it even to themselves, posting prices are in a race to zero. As more aggregators like Indeed, SimplyHired, and LinkUp enter the space and scrape more postings from corporate web sites, there’s just not as much of a reason for those employers to pay to post their openings on job boards or anywhere else.

As for resume searching, there are significant problems from the candidate’s side. First, a number of boards have been hacked and resumes used for identity theft reasons. For how long will candidates remain ignorant of this? And when they wake up to the threat, will they continue to post resumes? Second, a number of legitimate organizations have purchased resume searching access but use it to sell their products and services to the candidates rather than present them with job opportunities. If you receive such a call from a penny stock dealer and figure out that they got your name from XYZ Job Board, wouldn’t you complain about that to the thousands of your closest friends through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites? Think of the damage to the brand of the job board. There’s just no good defense against either of these threats. If Google can be hacked by the Chinese, how hard would it be for a job board to be hacked? And what defense is there against a legitimate organization buying access to peddle their wares to your users? Perhaps a legal agreement can be put into place but wouldn’t the damage already be done by the time that agreement comes into play?