By Peter Weddle, Founder & CEO TAtech
I took a trip down memory lane in my last post. My destination was the 1999 edition of Weddle’s Guide to Employment Web Sites on the Internet, a travel guide to what was then the frontier of the job board industry.
That early book – yes, it was actually published on paper – listed just 350 sites. Some were general in scope while others specialized in a niche, but all of them were experimenting with an array of features and functionality to determine which would best serve job seekers and employers.
They were certainly not as big nor as well-known as Indeed and LinkedIn are today, but they must have been doing something right. A significant percentage of them continue to operate today – twenty-five years after that first Guide was published!
So, contrary to what some pundits have thunderously opined, job boards are not only alive and well, but there are more than a few that have outlived such Wall Street darlings as Pets.com, Gawker, Alta Motors, Pebble and Solyndra. Of course, there’s no guarantee that will continue to be the case – job boards like every other kind of enterprise must evolve to meet shifting tastes and capabilities – but it can be helpful to know just what has made those early pioneers so resilient.
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The Attributes of Job Board Pioneers
While the advancing capabilities of technology obviously played a role, a key driver in the astonishingly fast growth of early job boards was a revolt by employers and job seekers. They were sick and tired of newspapers’ creaky employment platforms and lousy customer service.
Overpriced classified ads sold over the phone by jaded order takers and job search guidance that was as helpful as staring at a wall were something only an out-of-touch publisher could love. For everyone else – but especially for recruiters and job seekers – it was ritual torture in print.
Job boards gave them an alternative. They offered job seekers a wealth of information about job opportunities and employers a less expensive way to post their ads in front of a whole lot of eyeballs. It was, in effect, a triumph of responsive efficiency. In today’s vernacular, it met those two user groups where they were.
But, these early pioneers also did something else that was the antithesis of newspaper behavior. Instead of taking customers for granted, they built relationships with them. Instead of gouging them, they got to know them. Instead of subjecting them to a transaction, they treated them with courtesy and respect.
Relationship building is admittedly a two-way street, but someone has to take the lead, and many of those early job boards did just that. They worked on relationships directly – establishing that much discussed but often elusive sense of partnership with employers and their recruiting teams – and indirectly – creating a candidate experience that felt supportive whether or not a person was actively looking for a job.
Not every job board acted that way, of course, and even those that did weren’t always particularly good at it. And yet, enough of them did to set a standard that has served them well for over a quarter of a century. They understood something that newspapers never did: recruitment advertising is a human business.
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.