Go to any animal shelter and you will usually see pets that simply got too big for their owners – hulking St. Bernards, twelve-foot pythons, walking catfish, and so on. It’s easy in hindsight to blame the owners. But the owners weren’t thinking about how big the animal would one day become; they were focused on how much they wanted it.
Since roughly 2005, job boards have lived with aggregators such as Indeed andSimplyHired. As discussed in a previous post, the coexistence has had its positives for job boards (lots of traffic) and negatives (competition for direct employers). But for most sites, the relationship has been positive – the aggregators have created more traffic and response than these sites could have obtained on their own. In fact, I’d argue that many boards became addicted to the aggregator traffic.
Over the past few months, however, Indeed has made a couple of moves that have folks in the industry talking:
What is a job boarder to think about the above? Well…
The real answer? Only Indeed (and its competitors) knows. They are a for-profit company, so they will do what they deem best to stay profitable and grow. The online recruitment industry is changing rapidly, and they are no doubt reacting to that change.
Lest we forget: it’s always prudent to know the difference between an elephant and a puppy.
Good one Jeff..
This is the case of "There is no Free Lunch".
When they are competing for Google search rankings and offer to fill your job board with backfill job listings, we know where its headed eventually. I would imagine most job boards that depend on indeed for traffic are newcomers in the job board business (don't have high google rankings).
The job board biz has gotten more interesting with the arrival of Linkedin and .jobs (recent fiasco). There may be room for everyone to succeed, but niche job board owners will have to fight it with strong brands of their own.
Great post. I've never liked the aggregators. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing. Now that they have started gathering candidate information they will eventually start allowing employers to post jobs directly to indeed and send out job alerts to the thousands of candidates that have submitted their information. It is only logical. This way they can now compete directly with monster and careerbuilder.
I've never liked the idea of sending my job postings to a site where they charge me to send traffic back to my site with my own content. If they want my job postings they can pay me for them.
Good post Jeff. The debate regarding the long-term viability of job boards continues to grow. Your article describes another example of the competitive forces that will continue to challenge all employment websites. It seems that the path of least resistance for job boards and job aggregators to grow and expand is to compete directly with, displace, and/or acquire their own kind. This is very short sighted.
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