We had some fantastic names with us for this year’s Job Board Summit 2015 – Europe, one such being Keith Potts. Keith has been at the forefront of the job board industry since founding one of the earliest job boards in the UK, Jobsite, and subsequently built the highly successful group, Evenbase which included: Jobsites, Broadbean Technology and a number of niche job boards.
Today, Keith is building another successful business, Talenetics, and he is bringing the same passion, knowledge and values we’ve seen time and again to this business.
I was delighted to get a few moments with Keith to discuss his insights into these four big questions.
What are the main challenges you see for the traditional job board today?
Besides the usual challenge to remain effective in attracting quality traffic to the board, job board owners we speak to are mainly challenged by keeping their technology relevant and up to date whilst sticking to their IT budgets. There is so much new technology available to job boards now and new, more efficient development techniques and platforms so it is a constant game of keeping up for the job boards.
Sourcing v Posting – clients seem to be migrating towards sourcing (the lazy one’s love LinkedIn) what’s your take on this?
Sourcing has always been part of the recruitment mix and will always be key. With their strong CV databases, job boards are an important part of this mix and it’s vital they provide clients with powerful search capability in this regard.
Why are Job Boards, and similarly ATS’s getting such a bad rap? Is it a maturity issue or is there a deeper underlying issue?
I think we’ve been hearing the “job board is dead” story for a long time now. When Google emerged as a dominant search player, we heard it then and we still hear it now. Three years back it was all about social media knocking the boards for six but that didn’t really happen. I was fortunate enough to catch Dan Martin’s Broadbean speech at a conference this week and he was sharing some fascinating insights into how strong the job boards continue to be.
Why they are getting a bad rap is probably down to several factors, not least the fact that they are actually reasonably mature.
What 3 features will the job board of 2018 need to have?
Well, there seems to be a constant trend towards faceted search so I definitely think that trend will continue. Viewing a collection of job results via multiple filters is definitely getting the thumbs up from the jobseekers. I also like the way Indeed and job boards are working closely together via their publishing programme to create a vast network. I can see this trend continuing and job boards adopting this functionality. Finally, I’m liking the new open source CMS offerings which save the job boards so much time & money and give them ultimate editing flexibility. I’m sure these will play a major role in the job board of the future.
Gold Sponsors of The Job Board Summit 2015 – Europe.
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