Little Job Boards

This year is probably going to be the year of Little Job Boards or at least the year that Little Job Boards start to sprout up on niche sites around the Web.

While it's true that there are a lot of job boards out there (anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 or more depending on where the numbers come from), the bulk of those have typically been a pure play job board (like Monster.com) or a section of an online newspaper site
 (like nytimes.com).

The new thing this year is that niche sites (whether a publisher, blog or organization) are beginning to realize that they have a highly valuable audience/community that visits their site everyday or a few times a week. And it is particularly these more focused, targetted, high quality people that companies and recruiters are trying to reach and hire.

One of the main reasons that niche sites have such a great opportunity is that (not to beat a dead horse but) while the big three job boards have 70% of the $2 billion online recruitment ad market, recruiters and companies have been fairly unhappy with their job posting experience. As a typical posting on a site like Monster can result in a large number of unqualified responses. Another point is that while jobseekers that visit major job boards are typically "active" seekers, the ones visiting an industry blog, niche site, etc are not really looking for a job -- and of course, tend to be exactly the type of person that companies are trying to reach.

Anyway, we're of course excited about this trend and will begin to point out or profile some of the interesting new boards that pop up (hopefully they will increasingly be ones powered by JobThread Groups -- which is our free, turnkey job board product).

A couple of the more successful boards that have launched recently in the tech, design area are: 37signals' Job Board and TechCrunch's CrunchBoard.

I remember when I was at HotJobs in 1999, we were already seeing the fear of print newspapers coming true: online job boards were eating their lunch. When wondering about who would eat the lunch of the big job boards the site I thought of as the most dangerous competitor was Craigslist because of its free model and geographically-focused design and word-of-mouth only marketing and niche sites like Dice.com. Of course, I still think that Craigslist will begin to suffer from the same problems that the bigger boards have in time.. but there's a good amount of time for them to worry about that.

Where I'm going is that it certainly seems that a looming threat for online job boards will be very niche content or community driven sites (such as niche publishers, blogs, organizations, professional groups, etc). I don't think that Monster et al will have to worry about losing their market to niche sites, but I can realistically see the 70% market share they have now going down fairly predictably over the next several years -- while at the same time, the total dollars going online will be steadily going up.

Hmm.. It's been a while since I've posted here, and I've said a few times that I'll try to keep things more regular... So, we'll just have to see. (Also, I don't think future posts will be this long or rambling:)