Job Boards are not dying at all. They do, however, need to change things to stay alive and grow their business. Recently I wrote a blog about the top 5 challenges Job Boards need to tackle. After Jobg8 published that blog I’ve been approached by and speaking with a lot of Job Boards in Europe about these challenges they all recognize and I’ve decided to write a follow-up which is a combination of what I think will and should happen.
In 2015:
1. Job Boards will deliver more than just applicants to high volume clients.
Based on the data they have, they can offer their high volume clients market intelligence, insights and advice. Customers don’t want Job Boards to just sell ads to them, they want more! If a Job Board can’t do that, that Job Board is in a tough spot because buying views, clicks and applicants is something you can do everywhere nowadays.
2. Job Boards will heavily rely on aggregators. Or even become one themselves!
For a lot of businesses it just doesn’t feel right anymore to place their content on other platforms whilst they have invested in their own. So they want click-outs from the platforms they give their budget too. If Job Boards can’t offer more than simple advertising solutions, it makes sense for them to become aggregators, but they have to be quick, because the same thing will happen in this field that happened in the Job Board space; soon we will have hundreds of aggregators. If a Job Board can offer more to their clients than simple advertising solutions they will have to find a way to work with the aggregators, which is going to be harder and harder as aggregators prefer to have content from the original source (employer website). I think having content from small businesses that don’t publish jobs on their own website can really help.
3. Job Boards will do more business with SMB (indirectly).
Online recruitment is now available to small and medium businesses as well. Just look at the growth of companies like SmartRecruiters, Workable, Qandidate, HR-Office etc. Apart from doing lead generation and telesales directly I would definitely invest in partnering with these companies to sell your product via their platforms.
4. Job Boards will come up with smart performance based pricing and/or subscription models.
Before we enter the discussion about which pricing model is best; I think we are entering a stage where we have a market with multiple offerings; targeted at different groups with different needs; some want cheap, transparent and complex, others want easy, focused on good output and are willing to pay a good price for that. One big change Job Boards will have to go through is getting rid of the idea that they can sell 2-3 year contracts to companies. Flexible is here. Now. They have to get used to that.
5. Job Boards will become experts in real-time, automated bidding.
Because (whatever pricing models they offer) the customer is focusing on output more and more. Every month Job Boards have to invest in being able to deliver on job level, which is something completely different than just building/buying traffic. For this they will need to work with aggregators and either have a great marketing team between them and their platform to monitor, update and optimize all their campaigns real-time or they can use smart technology that can automate that for them (hint;)).
6. Job Boards will go mobile.
This is purely a technical issue, not a discussion. If you don’t go mobile, you’re out.
If you’re attending The Job Board Summit 2014 – Europe in November 2014 in London too; see you there!
This blog was written by René Bolier who is a partner and responsible for sales and marketing at OnRecruit – PPC advertising on steroids for the recruitment industry.
Feel free to connect/get in touch directly with René: nl.linkedin.com/in/renebolier / twitter.com/renebolier / rene@onrecruit.nl / +31-611604603
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