By Peter Weddle, CEO TAtech.org
The once and future job board – that’s the title of a featured panel at TAtech North America & the World Job Board Forum, coming up in Austin on May 22-24. (Join us!) We’ve asked an all-star panel to imagine what such a site will look like in 2025. Though that’s less than two years away, the acceleration of technology and the rapidly morphing expectations of employers and job seekers will almost certainly produce a big bang of breathtaking site and business model developments. In fact, I thought I’d get a head-start on the discussion and offer my view of what a job board business could look like in the very near future.
First, let’s identify the meteor-like changes that have already impacted employers and job seekers and therefore what they will need from an employment site.
• A talent desert: Given the talent shortages identified by recent surveys, employers can expect significant challenges in filling vacancies for at least another twenty years.
• A talent utopia: The desperation of employers will transform working men and women from job seekers to career activists who will work when, where and how they want to achieve their worklife goals.
Employers Recruiting in a Talent Desert
Job boards will continue to offer online recruitment advertising, but they will also expand the range of services they offer and thus move from a pure platform for job posting to a more comprehensive “employment site.” To effect that transition, they will begin to provide (among many other services):
• Position Promotions, using large language models to help employers compete more effectively in the talent market. Today’s job descriptions with employer vocabulary and content will disappear and these more targeted promotions will use the terminology of top workers and the content they value to attract prospective hires.
• Automated Search Agents, using rapidly trained algorithms to search the web for a slate of three-to-five exact-fit prospects for mission critical openings. These applications will do more than simply identify candidates, however; they will also scour public data to determine the exact value proposition of needs, values and goals that will “sell” each of them.
• Future Draft Picks, using smart bots to search competitor announcements, industry news, conference agendas and other data to identify “A” level performers in specific fields and industries who are not yet needed by an employer but could be at a future date. Instead of today’s talent pipelines, these draft target databases will become the venue for recruitment marketing.
Each month, TAtech convenes a RoundTable webcast with some of the smartest people in talent acquisition. The show is just 30-minutes long, but it tackles the issues and ideas that are shaping the world of work, the talent market and the role of recruiters. April’s TAtech RoundTable explored, “Are today’s job seekers really all that different from those in the past?” Watch the show here.
Career Activists Working in a Talent Utopia
As part of their transition to an employment site, job boards will also expand the services they offer workers by augmenting their transactional interactions with job seekers with long-term relationships among career activists. To effect that transition, they will begin to provide (among many other services):
• An Automated Career Agent, using AI enhanced, life-like robots to help working men and women address the challenges they face in effectively managing their career. They will advise them on such issues as when to make a job move, what skills to add to make them more marketable and who to connect with to advance their career.
• A Hyper-Accessible Wellbeing Counselor, using the same technology as that in the career agent to help workers deal with the stress and turmoil of a rapidly evolving workplace and world of work. These intelligent agents will scour the web to provide the most effective support for specific individual needs and be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• A Smart Talent Discovery App, using large language models to guide men and women at all stages in their careers on an individualized journey of self-discovery. This resource will fill the gap left by our conventional education system and help workers in all generations find their unique talent – the intersection of what they love to do and do best.
Some of the above may seem like pure fantasy, but so too did streaming services and the cloud less than five years ago. What’s different about today’s situation is the speed at which change will occur. The best job boards have always evolved, and by 2025, they will be very different and dramatically more effective resources for both employers and working men and women.
What could that mean? Attend TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum (Austin, May 22-24) and let’s find out together.
Peter
Peter Weddle is the author or editor of over two dozen books and a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He is also the founder and CEO of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. You can download his latest book – The Neonaissance – FOR FREE at OneStoryforAll.com. And, if you don't have time to read the entire book, just download a short excerpt of his inspirational message.