About The Future of Recruitment…
We’re passionate about helping you get the most out of your day-to-day processes, so we created this little bit-sized mini-series to chase down some of the recruitment’s most prominent figures and get their opinions on highly valued topics throughout the industry.
So without further ado, we present to you John Salt, Managing Director of LogicMelon, ex-MD of CV-Library, and ex Sales & Marketing Director of TotalJobs. We closely follow his opinion on the evolution of ‘How Job Boards Will Evolve in 2022 & Beyond.’
A little bit about John…
John is a market tested strategy and operating executive with a successful track record of driving aggressive growth in digital businesses.
He’s an expert when it comes to internet marketplace, e-Commerce and SaaS businesses and has a background in data driven problem solving, working in top tier firms across multiple sales channels.
We asked John… “How do you see job boards evolving in 2022 and beyond?”
John’s answer was…
“To understand the possibilities, let’s take a brief look at the history.
Job boards as we know them began to scale in 1994 with the launch of Monster and
Careerbuilder in the US and Jobserve in the UK (and they invented ‘Jobs by Email’) evolving
from job listings posted on Usenet in 1990.
These online listings were a direct copy of how job ads appeared in the classified sections of magazines and newspapers, except they didn’t cost £70 per single column centimetre or £20,000 for an eighth of a page on the front of the Sunday Times Jobs Section.
Oh, and you could post them live immediately, without having to produce an ad, get it in the correct format to the publisher 2 days before printing, and wait to see it the
day after it was printed – a minimum time of at least a week.”
“Then came ad tracking. The ability to see if it has been ‘seen’, ‘opened’, ‘applied to’, ‘application
completed’ and where the applicant came from.
Tie that up to job boards and career pages integrating (some really well done, others, well, really
badly done) with a client’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and the rise of the free
‘Aggregators’ who were there to ‘partner with job boards to deliver traffic and applications at the
best value’ then the move from ‘Pay to Post’ to ‘Pay for Performance’ (cost per click moving to
cost per application) and here we are in 2022 if you forget about LinkedIn, who launched 20
years ago and are NOT a job board.
No, they will not have that, no way.
“LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and
mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional
networking and career development, and allows job seekers to post their CVs and employers to
post jobs”
– not a job board, ok?
Well, over the past 30 years…
Which is more or less now a complete working generation or two, it has meant they have not had to wait for printed pages, listing thousands of job ads under vague ‘classifications’ and then scan them manually, circle promising looking ones with a pen apply with a cover letter and CV in the post, to a company you were mostly unsure of what they did, who they were etc and then hearing nothing back for weeks, if ever at all…
mobile with stored details and a CV.
Then mostly hear nothing, but they can do it immediately, quickly, easily, one-clickly, easy-apply-ly, with Facebook, with Google, with LinkedIn* (*not a job board) and register to have similar jobs sent directly to them, often with loads of other irrelevant jobs too.”
So, where do job boards go from here?
For the job seeker, and you really should always put them first, job boards need to rise up to meet their expectations.
These expectations are driven by their online experience in buying music, food, travel, entertainment and communication.
Compare today’s reality of the experience with buying any of the above to applying for a job.
Please log-in, search, find, apply, be redirected, re-apply, damn, not working on mobile, CV wont format/attach, had to start again.
No wonder less than 5% of people who start a job application on a mobile complete it.
Yes, 95% of people who started to apply drop out. I do not think that would be acceptable at Deliveroo, Spotify, Booking.com or Zoom?