No, you did!
Let’s review how we got here and where we might be going. To quote the Buggles, “Video killed the Radio Star” - well, not really - injured, but not dead! Way back, during the primitive times, before the web, jobs could be found on quaint “dial up” bulletin boards by
those who had a computer, a modem, and a phone line – but getting online was not easy for most people. Enter the Internet. Connectivity blossomed but usage didn’t really take off until the web browser was created, making the Internet much easier for the average person to navigate; just point and click. The Online Career Center, America Online, Monster and millions of websites commercialized what was historically a network for government and higher ed. Finding a job was one of the top uses of the Internet and continues to be so today!
Today Facebook and the Internet are ubiquitous - 100’s of millions of people connect daily to discuss their current career or next move. So where are the job boards? Thousands of employers will continue to use them until they realize the world has moved on without them… so like the radio, they are “not dead yet,” just significantly less popular.
So, what is causing the demise of the job board? To some, it appears LinkedIn is crushing job boards faster than job boards crushed the newspapers - why is that? I believe the speed of adoption of new solutions, like social media recruiting, is directly proportional to the ease of use, speed and effectiveness. In the ’90s, people realized it was much more efficient to post a job online and scan through emails that arrived within a day than wait for an ad to run on Sunday and watch the mailbox and fax machine for responses that could take additional days, if not weeks. Easy, fast and effective. In the past 12 months alone the Facebook and LinkedIn user bases have grown more than the total audience of job boards combined from the past 10 years!
So where is all of this going? It depends on what’s going to make Internet recruiting fast, easy and effective for all parties involved. Agency recruiters were the first to adopt online recruiting and made a fortune in the 1990s and now they are doing it again with social media! How? They’re using various online networks (e.g. LinkedIn) to drive the expansion of their personal connections to reach the candidates their clients want to see. Their “little black book” is not so little anymore! They need to deliver top talent - fast! But they are not getting handsome fees for just throwing bodies at the clients; it’s all about quality, and that’s not easy… or is it?
