What’s the best before date for the job board industry?

by John McInerney

Pun­dits will tell you job boards are going to fall off a cliff any day now. They’ll be eaten by social media or some­thing else, what­ever that may be.

In truth, many will just change and adapt. Dice Hold­ings, a large job board com­pany, released its earn­ings last week. They did $48.5m in Q2 up 8% year on year. Not bad con­sid­er­ing the over­all per­for­mance of West­ern economies.

LinkedIn, which makes over 50% of its rev­enues from recruit­ment solu­tions (soft­ware for recruiters and job ads) increased its rev­enues by 89% in the same period. So the pub­lic com­pa­nies show us there’s life in the beast.

What’s per­haps more inter­est­ing is the growth in early stage com­pa­nies. The recruit­ment sec­tor is going through a period of intense change. The global short­age of skilled pro­fes­sion­als is only going to get worse. Large cor­po­rates are mov­ing more recruit­ment inhouse. Social media is impact­ing on employee refer­rals — the sin­gle biggest source of all new hires.

Where does this leave the oft dis­re­garded job board. It’s worth look­ing at one of the most inno­v­a­tive and fastest grow­ing com­pa­nies in the sec­tor. One exam­ple is adzuna, a free clas­si­fied ad site. It’s only a year old and already has some 2 mil­lion UK ads listed, many of them jobs.

What we like about adzuna: it’s UK spe­cific, the search is excel­lent and its easy to use. It also car­ries jobs from Zartis.com so obvi­ously that’s a big plus. A really nice fea­ture is the “value add” info pro­vided around searches show­ing infor­ma­tion on the aver­age salary at a par­tic­u­lar com­pany or the aver­age salary for a par­tic­u­lar role. They’ve also added a neat fea­ture to show job seek­ers their LinkedIn and Face­book con­nec­tions at any of the com­pa­nies listed.

We’re going to be mon­i­tor­ing the traf­fic com­ing from them and report­ing back on it soon. Early indi­ca­tions are very positive.