So I’m fresh back from TRULondon, an unconference put on by Bill Boorman and Geoff Webb. I could talk about all the incredible people that I met (and I will in another post, knock on wood) but for now I’d like to address some thoughts that occurred to me during one or two of the sessions.
I attended one session led by Keith Robinson, Felix Wetzel, Alan Whitford and Simon Lewis that was about Job Boards in 2020. There was a lot of intelligent conversation, but as usual my mind got hung up on one point thatJessica Miller Merrell made. In response to the success of one community/job board (Lewis’OnlyMarketingJobs.com) she pointed out that of course marketers were more apt to join a community, but how would a niche job board for say…data processors, go about getting their jobs to their candidates? It seems like a simple answer, right? Set it up so your jobs go out to facebook, twitter, typical board, etc. But her point seemed to get lost in the fray and I don’t want it to.
We have all this technology that makes setting up a simple job board a literal snap. You can set up several in a day. For a long time, whoever had the most jobs, got the most candidates and hence the most ads, leaving the board owners profitable enough to start the cycle all over again (there were references to Monster’s incredible call center, where thousands of job orders are processed for minimal fees.) We’ve got aggregators, semantic search, resume databases and more, all made easier by technology. You can set a job board up from your basement it seems. But with all this technology and simplicity, we’ve never once changed the distribution pattern of job orders to suit the nature (additional point here: we use personality type to do interviewing, performance reviews and training but not job search) of the niche. (This may not have been Merrell’s point but it is mine.)
I tried to explain that and was met with countless examples of how well yes we have. We’ve come out with multiple industry formats to suit the different verticals (true, but the delivery system remains the same). The job boards and publications have used publishing patterns (e.g. certain jobs expected at certain times and dates) to affect and control job seeker behavior. We’ve created multiple formats for every imaginable job posting out… But where are the niche boards that take advantage of delivery systems based on how certain personality types (based on their chosen occupation and how they function therein) prefer to get information? I don’t see them. Probably I don’t see them because the idea of customizing delivery based on a small cluster of preferences isn’t tremendously profitable. Better to throw all the spaghetti at the wall and make sure some sticks.
BUT, this is where recruiters can add some serious value and instead of butting head with job boards and endlessly lamenting how they don’t work. YOU know how your industry players want their information delivered. YOU know how you can make an offer appealing to a salesperson vs. a programmer. And what’s more, now you have the technology to do it, easily and quickly and for far less than a long distance call used to cost. This doesn’t mean creating community after community, or mass emailing job postings, or endlessly tweeting about open positions but a true strategic look about what delivery mechanisms work the best based on candidate history, industry knowledge (theirs not yours) and established and emerging job patterns.
Some people who are doing this:
Marie Journey (used simple video for name generation in a highly specific search)
Peggy McKee (uses video to deliver hard hitting job search advice as a way of building a medical sales talent pool)
Simon Lewis (created a community for ONLY marketing jobs, creating a space where marketers will communicate–what they do best– and congregate)
Craig Fisher (creates multiple facebook and linkedin groups for common IT positions, where he entertains and sources simultaneously)
Some other stuff I want to talk about: mobile job search and candidate attraction, global employer branding (is there such a thing, can there be?), RecruitingBlogs meetups with some of the best bloggers in the UK an…
