The Elephant (or the Job Board) in the Room

I’ve been attending lots of conferences lately.  Some good, some okay and all focused on jobs and careers.  Yesterday I was at one and sat down in a session next to a fellow attendee who was busily checking out all the job board sponsors on Blackberry to see what kind of jobs they offered.  The comments I heard were “see, there’s no professional jobs on that one.”  “This one’s better but it could be bait and switch – I’m not sure what company this job is for.” “This one, too, no professional-levels there.”

As I have a some experience with the recruiting industry and I just can’t help myself, I weighed in.  I told this attendee that January was the worst month ever in the 10-year history of job boards and this month may be even worse.  That if Monster.com is struggling, what could be expected of smaller websites that also contain job boards.  I also thought a more frank discussion on why job boards are not the place to find jobs in this economy was in order.

If you listen to the recruiting community (and if you’re a job seeker, why aren’t you listening to them?) you still hear about how hard it is to find great talent, even in this downturn.  Recruiters want “A” talent…not B or C types.   Posting a job on a job board right now, will get an overwhelming amount of B & C resumes but no A resumes.  So companies who are hiring are turning to other practices rather than job board postings.  They are listening…on LinkedIn on Facebook and increasingly on Twitter.  That’s where they find, identify and hire A talent.

Case in point, a young guy I used to work with got laid off recently.  He happened to be the guy who twittered for his company and he also has his own twitter account.  He’s funny, he’s creative and he’s good at what he does.  That comes through loud and clear on Social Media networks.   So when he got laid off and talked about it – in a very subtle and smart way, he had 3 local companies vying for his services.  These companies weren’t looking to fill a job.  They were looking to hire talent that filled a need.

The company that landed him had posted their job and was interviewing candidates already.  But no one seemed to be the right mix of what they were looking for.  They found out my friend was unemployed…reached out to him via Twitter and Facebook and asked him to interview for the position.  Within a week, they hired the candidate they really wanted, and he got a job that he’s really excited about.

But people looking for jobs are still turning to job boards.  And I knew soon the person I was sitting next to and had just exchanged business cards with would get around to checking out my site and would comment on the job board there.

When I went live 3 months ago, I decided to republish Indeed.com’s job feed and to pare it down by key terms including flexible and college degree, and a few others.   Why?  Because I wanted my site to have a list of jobs on it, because I wanted those jobs to be from all over the country not just 1 geographic location, because it seemed to make sense to go to a job board aggregator to get that done, because Indeed.com looked to me to be the best one to republish from.   I think I’ve put job seekers in the best hands I could…but, please…don’t let job boards be your only strategy in trying to find a job.  If it is, I’m not sure any job board will be good enough.