The Job Board Bubble

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1. Richard MacManus
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 2:43 am

   Mike, I totally agree. We all have a lot to gain if the job boards band together, so that niche publishers can join mini-networks and users have more to choose from. So count me in, but I guess it’s up to the job boards to come to an agreement.

2. yongfook
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 3:26 am

   I’m going to start a job board for people looking for coders who can develop job boards. It’s going to be like this micro-niche site and I’ll charge a thousand bucks per posting. This idea will print money.

3. Rex Dixon
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 4:03 am

   Sounds good to me! Maybe using the whole social network technology, we should all create “job net”. Seriously.

   Rex

4. Brian
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 4:17 am

   I would agree that a centralized job board would make snese, but once that happens doesn’t the value of your targeted audience go down? Instead of visiting techcrunch to see what jobs are available, then to the next site, the user would just go to the one site and apply for jobs in bulk like they do on other sites. Once all of the jobs are aggregated together, what prevents the same situation as the regular job boards(monster, craigslist) of receiving a large number of unqualified resumes?

   Unless I am totally missing the concept.

5. robert
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 4:27 am

   Michael, I agreed with you way back then in August last year and I thought the other “dissenters” were crazy at the time.

   All this other opposers just elevate the problem that is currently present in the job market.

   In fact, b4 slashdot started their own job board, they asked their users what they would want to see in a job board.

   If we all don’t come together, recruiters and employers will continue to recieve resumes that are not qualified for their jobs.

   I even started my own job board @ hipfox.com, because there seems to be no solution to this particular problem.

   Hopefully we can all come together as bloggers and job board owners to create a unique solution…

   (BTW, Om ditched his own home grown job board???)

6. Paul
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 4:43 am

   I have to say, I don’t get it. A Job Board is a relatively simple application. Why would Om ditch his home grown one, for a service that takes 50%? He can have 100%…

   And Mike, $2k to develop a Job Board? Insanity.

7. Christopher Hogg
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 4:57 am

   I tend to agree with you Brian, as there is a lot of value in being a strong (niche) brand these days. A centralized board already exists in something like Monster or Craig list (albeit it’s not all tech). The only difference is that they don’t share revenues and it’s not a collaboration between many.

   But Michael, I think your proposed model could also prove to be tricky, because how do you decide how many blogs/websites are allowed to join as operators or partners, and who is in charge of that? If it’s open to anyone, you will get a lot of garbage, but if it’s cut-off to only include an oligopoly of 2.0 sites it becomes elitist (which all of these types of business partnerships are, I guess)

   I believe a more practical idea (which sort of exists right now) would be a centralized site in which people upload jobs, but individual publishers can carry the feed on their site. For every job your site sells, you get a cut. Sort of like millions of people uploading videos on YouTube and sites being able to carry the feeds.

   That way you directly profit from your brand power but you don’t have to rely on your own traffic to get listings – you would have thousands coming in at one place, but it’s a customized look on your site. I realize this is close to existing with the companies you listed above, but they too have become great in numbers.

   If Monster, et al decided to invest in feeds like this (or a start-up jumps on this idea) I think it could be very lucrative, and could take a lot of these other players out overnight. Just a thought?

8. Fashion Industry Ceo
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 5:04 am

   I think the aggregration tool can come in real handy!

9. Peter
   

   January 24th, 2007 at 5:12 am

   yay! i agree completely! i’ve always wanted to say that here at TC.

   i’ve been trying to convince the guys at Emurse ( http://www.emurse.com/ ) to go this way, since their slammin interface leads one to believe they’re storing our resume info in a structured way and could easily XML-ize it, do some web services, etc.

   i’ve also had an inkling/hope that google would become the repository for resume/job information of all kinds, and let mashup builders do what they will using the gdata api.

   going through the job hunt for the past three weeks - i’ve felt the horror of ‘data silos’. i’m not sure if it’s any worse than it’s been in the past, but it certainly doesn’t seem better, which is pretty ridiculous. i put a lot of blame on the HR departments of companies big and small - mostly big - for using services like Taleo to hide data away. i’ve spent a lot of time retyping my life history over the past three weeks, but I’ve also turned away from applying for lots of good job listings because the ‘burden of entry’ - say, ten minutes of my time - was just too high.

   a little bw, with some ranting, of course:
   http://shmooth.blogspot.com/20.....tjobs.html

   p.s. on a side note - having my info all over the internets leads me to believe that an avalanche of junk mail is generated for each person who starts their job search anew. i haven’t seen it, but i don’t use my exact address. a startup doing something fun in this area, though is greendimes ( http://www.greendimes.com/ ). i suspect/hope we’ll start seeing a lot more ‘green’ startups appear on TC in the very near future.

10. Peter
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 5:14 am

    yay! i agree completely! i’ve always wanted to say that here at TC.

    i’ve been trying to convince the guys at Emurse ( http://www.emurse.com/ ) to go this way, since their slammin interface leads one to believe they’re storing our resume info in a structured way and could easily XML-ize it, do some web services, etc.

    i’ve also had an inkling/hope that google would become the repository for resume/job information of all kinds, and let mashup builders do what they will using the gdata api.

    going through the job hunt for the past three weeks - i’ve felt the horror of ‘data silos’. i’m not sure if it’s any worse than it’s been in the past, but it certainly doesn’t seem better, which is pretty ridiculous. i put a lot of blame on the HR departments of companies big and small - mostly big - for using services like Taleo to hide data away. i’ve spent a lot of time retyping my life history over the past three weeks, but I’ve also turned away from applying for lots of good job listings because the ‘burden of entry’ - say, ten minutes of my time - was just too high.

    p.s. on a side note - having my info all over the internets leads me to believe that an avalanche of junk mail is generated for each person who starts their job search anew. i haven’t seen it, but i don’t use my exact address. a startup doing something fun in this area, though is greendimes.com. i suspect/hope we’ll start seeing a lot more ‘green’ startups appear on TC in the very near future.

    …repost without the links

11. Adrian Keys
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 5:29 am

    I do think there are arguments on both sides. I have heard countless people complain that the big job boards are simply data collection points…hardly anyone ever gets a job.

    On the other hand I think a smaller board can do much to change the growing negative perception.

12. Christopher Hogg
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 5:32 am

    That was the point I was trying to make too Adrian, but I think there could be a balance of both worlds with a big place that aggregates its feeds to smaller sites. It would be an incredible income generator for niche sites that actually have a decent following and another way for the big boys to spread.

    I think the aggregated feed is the only reason YouTube is what it is today. Job boards could learn a lot from that.

13. McDaniel
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 5:51 am

    “There’s no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos”

    If your resume gets deleted on one board it will still be in another?

14. Mr. Drano
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:08 am

    I’m with the fellow who gasped at the $2k for a job board. A couple lines of SQL and you’re done.

    As for a centralized job board, you’re encroaching on Dice territory. Not a bad thing as long as you know who you’re competition is.

    Finally, don’t forget about places like LinkedIn. Ever since that service popped up and people started leaving my company, I get recruiting calls about three times a week.

    So, yeah, go ahead, somebody, and start one. But I sure ain’t gonna.

15. Scott
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:18 am

    you would abandon your $100,000 a month job board?

16. css menus
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:22 am

    nice post. I am getting tired of seeing the numerous job boards spring up. It is like the css gallery symptom (I am trashing myself with this since I own http://www.csselite.com and was about to launch a job board).

17. Paul Forster
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:26 am

    Something like Christopher Hogg’s idea does already exist - it is Indeed’s Jobroll:
    https://ads.indeed.com/jobroll/

    Any publisher can put a feed of jobs on their site/blog and get paid each time a user clicks on one of the job links. The feed is customizable so jobs are only displayed that match the job search query that the publisher chooses.

    So, publishers putting a Jobroll on their sites automatically get a critical mass of listing content suitable for their audiences and start earning money immediately. They have no need to worry about whether or not they will actually sell postings - money is generated from clicks on jobs in the Jobroll.

18. CzarWeb
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    @ Mr. Draino and Paul -

    $2k for a job board is a good price if you want it done right, and it sure as hell takes a lot more consideration than “a couple lines of SQL”. True web development is a process that considers accessibility, usability, testing, planning, coding, and communicating with the client. It’s not a “tell me what you want done and I’ll spend the night coding and have it done tomorrow - that’ll be $300″ job. This sort of job would especially raise the price because it involves communicating with a payment gateway and sending data over a secure connection. $2k is a realistic bid for the total amount of time that should go into a project like this.

19. Ronald Lewis
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:43 am

    Cha-ching! The best supplement (or replacement) for AdSense I’ve seen yet! People will be more inclined to click on jobs of interest than the average Google ad.

20. Eric C.
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:47 am

    Doesn’t aggregating the job board to these job search engines kill one of the large selling points of not being flooded with random resumes?

21. Josh
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:49 am

    I think the services who take 50% of the listing fee are soaking the blogs that employ the board. 50% is a lot! I am surprised so many are willing to use those services.

22. Alex Rudloff
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:49 am

    Regarding #9 — And we hear ya loud and clear my friend We’ll be doing some pretty cool things over the next couple of quarters.

    We met with the folks over at SimplyHired this past summer and their a solid group of guys (and gals). We wish them the absolute best of luck with this launch.

    Paul (#16) mentions his company’s jobroll offering — we use Indeed’s API over at Emurse.com and it’s been incredibly easy to work with. Highly recommended for anyone looking to implement something quickly.

    Mike, I think you’re right.. Separate silo’s suck.

23. Vanner
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:54 am

    EdgeIO might be able to do a better Craigslist (Metro scale job listings), but it’ll be tough competing directly because Craigslist is generally “good enough” for 95% of the work out there, and they have the mindshare and eyeballs now. For the other 5%, you’re looking at the professional headhunter space.

    You always need HR people to through resumes. A good recruiter can filter through a pile of a hundred resumes in a day. The trick is to get those thousand resumes.

    Getting one resume every two or three weeks isn’t helpful when you need to fill multiple positions.

    Of course, most people still get their jobs through friends and ex-co-workers. That’s never going to change. Blogs and social networks fit in here.

24. Wil Schroter
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:04 am

    We built a startup company job aggregation site on Go BIG last year. Mike was kind enough to syndicate his TC listings as soon as we launched.

    http://jobs.gobignetwork.com

    We still have a lot of work to do on the site but we could easily syndicate a customized feed of the aggregated job listings to other sites and blogs. We’re working on a similar syndication piece to syndicate all of our classifieds, including funding requests, projects, partners, etc. and allow participants to offer all of our paid products from Go BIG. Even a silo on Go BIG (which is inherently a classified marketplace for startups) is too narrow.

    We have over 40,000 startup companies on Go BIG so if we could expand the reach of the network that would certainly help. If anyone is interested in picking up our listings or adding their own listings just drop me a line.

    wschroter@goBIGnetwork.com

    Mike - couldn’t agree with you more on this post.

25. Eric Yoon
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:06 am

    hi Michael

    JobThread (http://www.JobThread.com) does offer the functionality to create niche networks of sites.

    This is what we’ve done with Slashdot (http://jobs.slashdot.org), Linux.com (http://jobs.linux.com), Freshmeat (http://jobs.freshmeat.net/), IT Manager’s Journal (http://jobs.itmanagersjournal.com/) and Newsforge (http://jobs.newsforge.com/). They all have their own job board and custom look-and-feel, but they are all linked, so that a company posting on one board automatically has their job posted on all of the others in that niche network.

    Certainly some of the publishers using JobThread (as Richard Macmanus of Read/WriteWeb indicated above) are interested in combining forces to create high value niche networks of sites.

    Please feel free to get in touch with me to discuss coordinating this at:
    eric@jobthread.com

    A couple quick notes:
    (1) as for distributing jobs out to search engines, JobThread does this automatically and job posters have the option to distribute their job to Indeed, Google/Google Base, SimplyHired, Oodle and several other aggregators/vertical search sites.

    (2) regarding the value proposition of diluting audience reach by putting several boards together on one site, I don’t think this happens as it is still a combined audience of niche sites… and not the general, very active job seeker audience that would be found on a Monster or CareerBuilder.

    very best,
    eric
    CEO, JobThread
    eric@jobthread.com

    http://www.JobThread.com

26. sam
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:16 am

    michael…

    i’m laughing at your assumption/assertion that the more skilled/better targeted people are on the tech blogs, and will therefore generate better resumes/fits for jobs.

    have you actually looked at the majority of the posts/replies to the techcrunch postings/forums???

    but to the point regarding job boards. job boards may have their place in the job placement/hiring process, but they’re woefully ineffecient and frankly don’t really work.

    there really needs to be a better system that ties placements, applicant tracking systems, distributed reach, open source functionality, testing, past projects/functions, resource rating/ranking, payment for access function, etc…

    for my $0.02 worth, this area can use a great deal or re-engineering, and thought in a new direction.

    -bruce

27. Jimmy
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:17 am

    It’s all about krop.com, baby.

    Really cool job board I found… they were advertising on I think k10k.

28. pallet jack
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:21 am

    I think its really freaking easy - to do something, then make fun of anyone that does it after you. Its like people who think their idea got stolen even though it was simple; like no one else is this whole world could be thinking the same thing?

    - Mike a couple of points! , You started yours in the middle of the bubble, YOU WERENT EVEN NEAR THE FIRTS ONES!

    - You charge in exorbitant amount, but I guess that is a economics problem not with you.

    — Also any buisness model that takes 50% profit for work that is no longer on going; for 50% you better get like a call everyday from these people Its like when I sell you a pallet jack, do I charge you for the potential amount of money you might make with it? -

    - Mike what is your forum software charged you for every post? or made you give them 50% of your ad revenue? WHACK!

    - why?! becuase they quit working on that, code long ago, they sold it for a certain amount of money.

    - they are basically renting you the Job Board software; and also its even worse then rent, it adjusts with every single action. Its like the rent on my house adjusting depending on how long my car stayed in the drive way.

    -Makes absolutley no sense- RB

29. Shambhu
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:23 am

    Sam,

    The applicants may not be more qualified, but they ‘re probably a lot more motivated.

30. thomas marban
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:33 am

    anyone experiences with krop? i’ve seen a bunch of affiliates popping up in the creative scene.

31. BlogReader
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:50 am

    Mr. Drano I’m with the fellow who gasped at the $2k for a job board. A couple lines of SQL and you’re done.

    And the Mona Lisa was like, what, $10 in paint? Come on! Okay that works if you say it like the $3000 suit guy from Arrested Development.

    Mr Drano if you think it is that easy then why don’t you produce one for $100 as it is only a few lines of SQL. You’ll be rich instead of posting how easy something is on TechCrunch.

    Now back to the job board: dice would be okay if they didn’t have 10 contractors all posting the same job. I’m not sure there’s a way to protect against that on a job board, maybe if you ban contract firms.

32. Garth
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:53 am

    FM publishing charges about 50% I think, but if these job board companies are not doing the sales it looks a little high.

    If they are doing the sales, they are probably doing that function better and without the potential for conflicts than a blog authors.

    I still don’t get edgeio or any aggregated sales listings without fees. Fees cut down on spam and drive revenue and listing relevance, charging no fees drives spam, produces no revenue and reduces listing relevance.

33. Eric Yoon
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 8:26 am

    hi Michael

    Thanks for mentioning JobThread in this post.

    JobThread (http://www.JobThread.com) does offer the functionality to create niche networks of sites.

    This is what we’ve done with Slashdot, Linux.com, Freshmeat , IT Manager’s Journal and Newsforge. They all have their own job board and custom look-and-feel, but they are all linked, so that a company posting on one board automatically has their job posted on all of the others in that niche network.

    Certainly some of the publishers using JobThread (as Richard Macmanus of Read/WriteWeb indicated above) are interested in combining forces to create high value niche networks of sites.

    Please feel free to get in touch with me to discuss this at:
    eric@jobthread.com

    A couple quick notes relating to some comments above:
    (1) as for distributing jobs out to search engines, JobThread does this automatically and job posters have the option to distribute their job to Indeed, Google/Google Base, SimplyHired, Oodle and several other aggregators/vertical search sites.

    (2) regarding the value proposition of diluting audience reach by putting several boards together on one site, I don’t think this happens as it is still a combined audience of niche sites… and not the general, very active job seeker audience that would be found on a Monster or CareerBuilder.

34. Ethan
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 8:27 am

    JobTarget charges as little as 20% - but focus mostly on associations on .orgs.

35. jackie
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 8:32 am

    Micro-Job board RSS feeds.

    How hard is that?

36. sam
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 8:43 am

    ps….

    the fact that simplyhired is going implementing a ppc approach to job placements is interesting, and can be interpreted in a few ways depending on what side of the fence you’re on.

    personally, i can’t imagine that as a company with a position, that i’m going to want to pay a certain amount, every time the ad is clicked. i can imagine that simplyhired works out a relationship with the ‘affiliate’ sites where simplyhired pays a certain amount of the fee (from the client) to the affilitate site(s) on a ppc basis, while also running the ad/posting on the simplyhired site…

    the rationale for me stating this, is that for the most part, if you’re offering a paid/salary position, then you have no trouble getting plenty of resumes..

    -bruce

    1st, it could be that

37. Rich Miller
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 9:17 am

    There’s also JobCoin (http://www.jobcoin.com/) which is free to set up and takes a 30 percent cut of the listing fees, as opposed to 50 percent.

38. dave
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 9:42 am

    hmm, perhaps those interested might simply browse sourceforge (or elsewhere) for “like craigslist” or “like monster/hotjobs” etc…there are some very interesting projects already out there for this kind of stuff..not sure why on earth somebody would bother trying to tackle craigslist unless it’s for a school or small community site with an interest in zero adult content…

    people go to the crowds, they are not looking for tons of jobs on sites like techcrunch, though i do believe that a few niche sites make sense for this particular need- like 37signals’ job board for ruby related work…

39. Allen Sligar
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    Cool stuff. I could see “Niche” sites like ours generating multiple income streams completely not related to job listing (although thats an option).

40. Rocky Agrawal
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    I’ve used several blogs (including TechCrunch) in recruiting and recently extended an offer to someone who came through a blog.

    As someone who used to work in the newspaper business, the thought of using classifieds never even occurred to me.

    I talked about using blogs in recruiting on my blog:
    http://redesign.wordpress.com/.....eb-talent/

41. Haris Khan
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:28 am

    Yes, indeed this is the next evolutionary step for all these job boards and there is one company which is already tackling the problem. Check out http://www.jobcoin.com which is already mentioned by Rich Miller. They have recently launched a network approach to job boards across multiple organizations. You can read about their latest venture in their news blog section on their main page.

    I also got the chance to talk with the founder of JobCoin and in my opinion he is already working on providing a solution to these scattered job boards and in my view has some very interesting perspective apart from just aggregating them all. So keep an eye for this one.

42. John Grishem
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:37 am

    Similarly, I agree that job boards are very hot right now. I agree with most of Paul’s sentiments here: http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/.....ards-boom/

    I was considering making a job board for the company I work at but as you said, at the time there was no service/software to use.

43. Brad Spirrison
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:43 am

    Our site midwestbusiness.com just started working with jobcoin, referenced above. It’s only been a few days, but we are pleasantly surprised by the reaction from our readers so far. It helps that jobcoin linked us into a chicago area network with the local IT association and some complementary blogs. IMHO, network approach is the way to go.

44. Julian Seery Gude
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:58 am

    I’m surprised by the 50/50 revenue share. That strikes me as *high* on the part of the job board platforms given how valuable a niche audience like yours is. You have the thing that’s hard to replicate, not the blog-board in a box and servers. Is it really that painful to mind your own garden or is this really just a statement that you see jobs as nothing more than a small, ancillary revenue steam at best?

45. Phil Carpenter
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:59 am

    When we first began thinking about the service that launched this morning as Job-a-matic, we did so with job seekers in mind. “How,” we asked ourselves, “could we bring jobs to them in their own backyards, those spots on the Web where they spend time each day?”

    We didn’t believe the industry needed yet another large job board, even one that was market-specific (Dice and others have already done this well in the tech sector). We still feel that way.

    Instead, we support the “let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” idea. Tech differs wildly from segment to segment (the mainframe software community is in a different universe from that of the Web 2.0 crowd, for example). Let a panoply of publishers run paid job listings on their own sites/blogs.

    We’ll aggregate those listings on Simply Hired, of course. And we’ll also distribute them via our network of partners, which includes sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, New York Post, and others (build your own job board and you won’t get syndication like that).

    We do think, however, that it makes a ton of sense to group similarly themed publishers together, and to let them share “like listings” among one another. Grouping publishers this way would also allow companies that want to post jobs to distribute those listings to multiple sites at once. Not only would that be efficient for these companies, it would bring help publishers to win more business.

46. Colin C.
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    Why not have all those job boards add xml feeds to Google Base? Google Base has over 29K jobs and counting right now from many different job sites.

    http://base.google.com/base/s2.....&gl=US

    Google base offers a great way to search and the job boards still get the traffic they are expecting. Win Win situation

47. Greg
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 11:14 am

    There is tons of action in this space. I have never needed to post a job but I have found these niche boards very helpful as a job seeker. 37 Signals has a nice one in their blog as well. Jobcoin.com has been getting a lot buzz and doing some good things.

    I would compare this to Adwords where you get to pick the sites within the Google network your ad runs on. As an advertiser I love zeroing in on my niches.

48. Aaron Sperling
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 11:23 am

    An alternative approach to simplify the posting of listings such as jobs is to have one place that allows the purchase of postings on an ala carte basis. A recruiter can create the posting and then check the sites that they want to be included on. One stop, one payment.

    vFlyer, the one-stop shop for creation and submission of classified ads, already does the submission of ads to horizontal marketplaces such as Google Base, Oodle, Edgeio, Vast, and vertical marketplaces such as SimplyHired and Jobalot. In an upcoming release, it will allow the ala carte purchase of exposure into premium marketplaces.

    Our efforts to create mini-networks or bundled offerings have been nearly impossible to create. Whereas, offering to resell listings at rack rates has been met with nearly universal acceptable.

49. matthew
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    blogger is down

50. Michael Fomkin
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 12:10 pm

    Here is the problem http://pragmaticstudio.jobcoin.com/ they have one job listed and they are in jobcoin press release for launch from back in October. This system needs sites with enough traffic to make it worth it to the employer.

51. Steve
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    So everyone wants to be the next Monster. Monster prints money. Sweet.

    Job postings are dead. If you were the first company to post jobs, you did well. Now Monster has a gazillion jobs, so you compete against a gazillion other jobs for good candidates. Good luck.

    The niche site solves this problem, but fails to address the real flaw with job posting business model:

    In good economies, people don’t look for jobs. They have them–they don’t look at job postings. (you say, “Yes they do!”- I say “Yeah, like one gazillionth of them.”)

    In bad economies, companies aren’t hiring. Even though they post jobs, you become one out of a gazillion resumes.

    The zeitgeist for hiring tech people (and almost anyone else) is that we’d rather waste a little money on something that doesn’t work, then pay to solve the real problem.

52. sam
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    steve.. #51…

    sorry.. but i’m about to rant.. are you out of your mind!

    job postings aren’t dead, the process of finding/hiring people, and feeling positions is still ongoing, and will continue. unfortunately, the overall process works rather poorly, and as i stated in a previous post, it can use some fresh insight.

    you have a myriad of companies in this space, ranging from Craigslist, Monster, to SimplyHired/Indeed, to Jobster, to Talio, to the 1000’s of smaller niche sites…

    the market’s not going anywhere, unfortunately, it’s also not really going to get any better. and part of this is due to the fact that a lot of people who are in the position to hire, don’t know a damn thing about really hiring good people who can fit with the position.

    peace…

53. Allen Arakaki
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    In response to “building your own”:

    If you can build a job board for 2K (or whatever your budget is), then by all means “go for it.” However, I contend that many IT people (much less non-technical folks) have a very fuzzy picture of the “total cost of ownership” - yea, yea, much over used stump line (by the Software as Services camp). You’ve probably heard it before, but it’s a point worth “beating a dead horse …”

    For many: more important than “hassle free software” is “worry free software” - are you really the expert at “job boards”, much less, building a customer (much less a hacker) resilient solution?

    The value/benefit of hassle/worry free is being more agile (to focus on what you do best).

    Think about “building your own”: find a “qualified candidate”; document the “requirements”; manage the project; QA; deploy; maintain; etc. WHY??? Because you don’t like the 50% revshare? If that’s your only objection, then call the sales people at SimplyHired (folks that built job-a-matic) and negotiate something else.

    ————————————————————–
    Why would gigaom give up their “home grown solution” for jobamatic?

    I can’t speak for gigaom, but my guess is that their “home grown solution” is/was a lot more hassle/worry than SIMPLY using a solution from a company that has devoted 10-20X the amount resources to building a “complete solution”; not just job boards, but search, resumes, networks (such as myspace, linkedin, etc.), etc. etc.

    ————————————————————–
    Lastly …

    From the business perspective: every moment you don’t have a job board on your site (assuming you have the right audience), is a lost revenue opportunity.

    For (big) sites making a lot of revenue already, it’s not as important to “hurry.” But if you’re a small site, then every revenue stream is an important one.

54. Patricia
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    Job boards in general have been awful. I have loved and had great results from Gigaom and tech crunch job boards - moreso than monster, etc., because you’re right - it’s a lot of junk to sift through, for employers and also for prospects.

    I think the idea of a consolidated job board that everybody shares revenue from isn’t a bad idea if it’s tightly moderated (as all of your job boards are now) and selective, so that it continues to maintain be efficient and effective for both job seekers and employers. What’s interesting is that this sort of “co-op” kind of mentality (for a lack of a better description) is something I know many have talked about with advertisers in my niche (shopping/fashion) as well as others, and a lot of companies on the marketing side are also talking about it on their end. I think right now with the combination of Adsense (because it’s hard to pull people off that and get them to advertise with you instead), the uncertainty of what works/what doesn’t online, plus all the high traffic but still very niche sites, it makes sense to do something consolidated like this.

    Very interesting.

55. Robert Dewey
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    How about letting the people define the job they want, and then the employers can do a simple search and pick off the people they see fit? It’s the same concept as posting a resume, and it allows for a pure performance play - the employer only pays when a potential candidate shows interest in their job position.

    Imagine, the largest bank of people seeking jobs and paying only when that candidate shares interest. It’s better than paying X amount in hopes that someone will see your job listing.

    I dunno… maybe people aren’t interested in that sort of thing.

56. rob
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:40 pm

    Steve (#51) is right. I have been in the job board/recruiting tech space for 12 years. Fundamental changes need to occur; and its not about “matching algorithms” its about making connections–like it always has been. $90 Billion will be spent by companies this year on “recruiting services”–but recruiting technology (ATS, job boards). only makes up less than 9% of that #. Recruiting is still largely a “manual process”

57. Drama 2.0
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    I’m disappointed Michael. You’re way smarter and more intelligent than Kevin Rose, but he built Digg on $2,000 and I’m pretty sure that CrunchBoard isn’t nearly as successful as Digg. You might actually have a profit (unlike Digg), but I haven’t seen you on the cover of BusinessWeek with the headline “This Former Attorney Made $180 Million in 16 Months.” What’s up?

58. Alex
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    @ 57 …

    What are you smoking?

59. Drama 2.0
    

    January 24th, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    The good sh*t.

    What type of sarcasm detector are you using? It’s apparently broken.

60. Alex
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 12:08 am

    You wasted 5 lines on lame sarcasm that wasn’t funny.

    It’s not broken, it’s just set on funny and couldn’t find anything.

61. John
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 5:07 am

    What I’m really surprised HASN”T happened is somebody trying to make both the job description and applicant (resumes) more personal and or more detailed. Although very cheesy and a bit creepy, the presidential candidates jumped on the YouTube wagon and released online videos that “personalized” themselves and their…um cough…sincerity and integrity. As an employer I would love to hear/see a two minute reason why I should hire this person or what their view on a particular facet of the business is. Yes, like YouTube it would mostly be crap, but it could save lots of money by minimizing the amount of interviews that you have to do. From the job hunter perspective it might serve to bring to life (or bury) a job that looks appealing (or crappy) on paper.

    John
    http://www.monomachines.com

62. Michael Fomkin
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 6:50 am

    Is anyone familiar with a job board that allows video resumes yet?

63. LB
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 7:19 am

    These job boards are very US centric. For example, if I want to find jobs from SimplyHired, I can do a nice search, but I can’t narrow the field with geographical filters. Sure the front page gives you a nice location box, but it does not work with larger geographical areas such as “Europe” (”We couldn’t find the location europe”!).

    More intelligence needed, folks!

64. Rob Steir
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 7:25 am

    Hi all, I’m a bit late in this discussion. Having created a job board for MBAs (www.mbaglobalnet.com) since 1998, I’ve been in the job board space (evolving my services over time) and seen a lot.

    FYI — I’ve come up with a totally different way to build a recruiting service centered on the URL I own: talentpools.com (just waiting for the right time and team) and invite any of the participants of these comments to contact me about it.

    It’s a very different “pull” concept, not a “push” concept like all the job aggregation sites that have been mentioned. It places the power of recruiting to the job seeker, in many ways.

    Rob

65. Fab
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 7:59 am

    JOHN - This french web site already proposes video resumes http://www.easy-cv.com/votre-c.....video.html

66. Allen Arakaki
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 9:24 am

    Rob (#56),

    I’m not clear about the point you’re trying to make.

    Sure, matching talent with jobs (or visa versa) has been a manual process. But technology, allows us to reduce or eliminate the need for “manual processes.”

    It boils down to this: talent/job search is about matching the right candidate with the right job - currently done with a “human algorithm” (intuition, etc.) but can be done more effectively/efficiently (with the aid of technology). How? I don’t know, I’m just a commenter. But someone, way smarter than me, will eventually figure it out. To think otherwise, is to keep your head in the sand; “one day”, you might be like that NYSE person (looking for a new job). BTW, kudos to the NYSE for FINALLY going electronic!

    ——————-
    Steve (#51),

    I don’t agree with your premise about good/bad economies.

    In a tight job market (bad economy), sure there are more candidates than jobs. So what. It doesn’t change the goal of the company which is to find the top talent. In a bad economy, companies don’t have to use as many channels to find qualified candidates, but why wouldn’t they continue to use the channels they had success with? So the goal of the “job resume funnel” (job board, etc.), should be to provide the best results.

    In a tight labor market (good economy), sure there are more jobs than candidates. So what. It doesn’t change the goal of the candidate which is to find the top company. In a good economy, candidates don’t have to use as many channels to find qualified companies, but why wouldn’t they continue to use the channels they had success with? So the goal of the “job search engine” should be to provide the best results.

    It doesn’t matter what the economy is (good or bad) because the “top talent” are always highly sought after (and very likely already employed) - hence the current need for head hunters to poach from other companies. In either economy, the “top talent” don’t have to “actively” look for a job.

    Although talent may not be actively looking, they are passively looking. It’s human behavior to upgrade … cars, houses, jobs, etc.

    It’s hubris for “recruiters” to think they are anything but a nuisance to a “passive” job seeker. Honestly, it’s as bad as a telemarketing call. So I’m betting there are other channels that are much more acceptable to “passive” job seekers. Will it be the “networked” job board? Only time will tell …

67. Jobmatchbox
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    I’m late on this discussion so I’ll make it short and sweet.

    Paul Forrester and Eric Yoon both have good ideas about the existing options that are there being sufficient. What is missing is a consensus on standards. The standards are being decided on by individuals and the other party no one is talking about: the people making our RSS feed readers and the people integrating our feeds into our web sites.

    People can subscribe to syndicated jobs and don’t need a hub to do that, all they need is a feed reader. There are more than enough middle layers already, we don’t need more of them. If someone wants 50%, 30% or 20%, 10%, etc. they need to consider the impact that this has on the end hiring team and their company overall.

    If there is going to be any long term benefit from these developments, they should be in flattening the process, not inflating it by thickening the middle layers. Sites that are capable of indexing the job feeds that people want are the key here. In other words, if someone wants to find a job working with Extreme Programming then they should be able to subscribe to the XP Jobs Feeds that are out there.

    If anyone is interested in pursing this discussion offline feel free to email me: email@jobmatchbox.com, or vist http://www.jobmatchbox.com .

68. Ambrose
    

    January 25th, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    Allen (#66):

    Great vsion–and what you described is already here. check out QuietAgent.com (www.quietagent.com)…Anonymous Candidate Sourcing for the already employed.

69. WorldIsFlat
    

    January 26th, 2007 at 1:22 am

    Re: LB (#63)

    Totally agree with you that most of these sites are US centric - when will they learn that the world is really FLAT and good talent can be sourced all over the world?

    One site I came accross http://www.iitjobs.com - let’s you search job postings all over the world / as well as it attracts world wide candidates .. I think this is the right direction to go!

70. Lordschaft
    

    January 26th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    RE: #61 John,
    I agree that the data used by both sides in recruitment needs to be more personal. Something like http://www.employmedirect.co.uk tackles the job search from this angle by not asking for CVs/Resumes but asking for job seekers to enter a personal statement.

71. BLAMMO
    

    January 27th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    Why would anybody in their right mind give up 50% of revenue for licensing basic technology? Ridiculous.

72. Robin
    

    January 28th, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    Michael,

    I think you’ve nailed it right on the head, “too many niche job boards” essentially silos of data.

    Moving forward, here’s the next question, what the best revenue model for a job board outside of earning for job postings, and Paid listings? I personally don’t think the developers of these widgets are focusing on how to help publishers grow their business. From this perspective, I think universal solutions will float to the top of everyone’s mind on how job boards software evolves.

    R

73. Ivan
    

    January 29th, 2007 at 11:20 pm

    Now is the bubble bigger, http://www.jobitems.com

74. Francis
    

    January 31st, 2007 at 10:01 am

    Does anyone actually have any numbers of the size of the online job market? How many jobs are posted and what’s the revenue out there? This tidbit of info seems to be missing from all these dicussions.

    Fran

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78. David Mackey
    

    February 17th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

    I like your idea, though the fact that the blog boards are searchable is a great step in and of itself.

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80. Steven
    

    March 7th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

    Why on earth would you pay someone 50% of your income instead of just purchasing a license like I did. What if you made $2000 bucks a month off of your site? You would end up paying $12,000 dollars for the use of a product you could easily purchase for much less. Not very good business sense.

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