(Sep 24, 2008) When I talk to my kids about finding a job, I tell them to avoid using job boards. While job boards can be helpful in a job hunt, it’s easy to fall prey to the belief that they are the only thing you need to do. Being busy doesn’t mean that you’re productive. Looking through job listings and sending resumes is not the same as finding a job.
Finding a really good job requires you to know what you want. That means doing some very hard work and self-assessment. Research into the market and research into yourself are the first steps in a really successful career.
Jobs are transitory steps in a larger context.
When the online job board industry was in its formative stages, the newspapers did a lot of studying. One of the interesting discoveries of that early work was that classified ads have different value to different constituents. HR Departments and Recruiters believed that a significant percentage of their jobs were filled from classified ads. Job hunters, on the other hand, had the opposite belief.
Both things are true. Classified ads (job boards) work for Recruiters. They don’t really work very well for job hunters. If they worked for candidates, we’d be buried in testimonials. Can you recall ever seeing a candidate testimonial?
As a result, money pours into the employer side while the candidate side remains weak.
Craigslist is an interesting case. Since Craigslist insists on direct communication (without resorting to a database or a filter) between buyer and seller, candidates do find work. The anecdotal information is that both sides of the transaction find similar value in the simple Craigslist approach.
Candidates are generally better understood as lifetime customers while employers are transactional. For professional niches, this means that more career information is a good thing. Professional associations are uniquely suited to deliver real value to both sides.
In the long haul, job boards are businesses, not philanthropies. There will always be a strong drift towards the cash (employers) even though the inventory (candidates) are the source of any real wealth.
One Comment
John, do you think we’ll ever reach a point where all or most skilled/knowledge workers have their profile (not resume on purpose) on-line? Would this change the landscape at all?
For example, I can go research and find out ANYTHING I want to know about a publicly traded company – who their executives are – industry news, competitive info, etc. and be incredibly prepared when I approach them, but this is so costly and time consuming that I still have to advertise and invest in demand generation to generate the volume of connections that truly fuel a business.
I think its analagous to recruiting.
In the near future having the candidates alone may not be the biggest value. I may have access to all the candidate info I need. Being able to produce the candidates in a quality way is where the value will be (and is today IMHO).
I wonder how far away we are from that shift? Or has it already started?