By Peter Weddle, Founder & CEO TAtech
Earlier this month, I began a series of retrospectives on the job board industry by looking at it through the lens of the very first edition of my Weddle’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet, which was published way back in 1999.
My first post looked at the pundit-defying longevity of job boards, many of which have been around for a quarter century or more. My second post parsed out the customer-centric attributes that generated that endurance. And this, my final post on the topic, will explore the industry-focused attribute that was the cornerstone of the sustained commercial success achieved by these sites.
The English poet John Donne famously penned the phrase, “No man is an island.” Bing opines that the axiom “emphasizes the interconnectedness of people and the importance of community.” We are, in fact, a species that thrives on supportive relationships.
From their earliest days, the most successful job boards have also understood that truism and practiced it, as well. They’ve thrived on partnerships and alliances, product integrations, marketing joint ventures and other forms of collaborative endeavors.
Those pioneering job boards prioritized building those relationships. Sure, they devoted time, energy, money and attention to sales. Customers pay the bills after all. But customers don’t provide everything a job board needs to achieve enduring success.
Where do they fall short?
Despite their obvious importance, customers cannot empower a job board with the information and contacts to do more – to enhance its product, to enter new markets or to expand its service offerings. Customers can help a site prosper; they can’t multiply its prosperity. They cannot take it to the next level.
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Creating Enduring Success for Job Boards
Here’s the immutable governor on job board growth: It’s impossible for any site to sustain the resources necessary to sell its way to success. In other words, job boards cannot endure if they don’t supplement their internal business development assets with those of other companies in the market.
Given the number of Directors, Managers and even Vice Presidents of Partnerships that now appear on job board staffs, it seems clear that this message has been received. But, here’s the rub. You can’t build fruitful partnerships with Zoom calls. It takes face-to-face interactions.
Whether it was an appreciation for that fact of business life or simply that they felt they were working together to launch a new industry, many of the early entrepreneurs in the job board industry invested the time and effort to meet with their peers in person. Interactions became business relationships and business relationships became friendships.
Those connections (together with sales, of course) gave many of them the strength to weather the dot.com debacle, the 2007 Great Recession and the Covid pandemic. Companies far larger and better financially endowed – from Xerox and Blackberry to Blockbuster and Toys R Us – didn’t make it through those crises, but many job boards did. And, they did so because they heeded John Dunne’s counsel.
Food for Thought,
Peter
Peter Weddle has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He is the founder and CEO of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions.