Online recruitment Blog - The future of Job Boards

By Matt Burney, Sales Director, Online recruitment magazine / Onrec.com

Now I have to admit I've blatantly nicked this video link (tinyurl.com/bk235p) from Jamie over at www.mylonglunch.com but it's actually pretty timely that I did. I have been chatting with a couple of people looking to launch a new job board, to be 100% honest I was trying to steer them a little bit away from doing it right now, both were looking to make something generalist with video CV and all the bells and whistles. Whoa, I hear you cry, stopping potential clients from starting a new cash cow? Madness! Well, no, I'm a great believer in actually helping people and not just taking their money and sniggering behind their back at the silly idea. That's the idiotís way of doing business.

Instead I wanted to have a good chat with them about their backgrounds and motivations as well as what really interested them, the upshot is that both worked in extremely niche industries that they are hugely passionate about but they have no recruitment background.. Simple solution, if there is an industry you love and you feel passionately about getting people to work in it then drop the generalist idea and go niche. One has taken the idea and run with it and the other... well, Iím not sure I'll hear from them again.

Where is all this going though and why the reputation management link? Well, I was thinking about what I would like in a job board and what features I'd love to include that really say something about a candidate not just from the POV of a lovely well polished CV but maybe more from an honest overview of who they are. All this led me to thinking about some of the shiny social media tools I use and how they could create something unique about one person. Netvibes is one such thing; it works pretty well and draws in all my options to create a single online utility, nice. Now what if we could do the same thing for candidates and make it visible to employers, some would argue Google is your friend in this respect but I think it is deeper than that simply because we may make candidates THINK about their reputation and what it REALLY means. All of us in recruitment land are well aware of what our online rep means and why it's important but once again, I'd suggest having a chat with people outside the industry (some of us must have friends who don't work in the industry surely!). People hear about online rep management, they hear the facebook leading to getting sacked stories yet still the only link you'll find for them is a series of embarrassing pictures from a rugby tour or something equally unappealing for a potential employer.

When the job market is shrinking and there is a need to be more competitive having a great rep and making that easily accessible is more important than ever.

So if anyone has a great bit of software that can host a CV, pull in social media, deliver a job feed, allow clients to view the network of potential candidates in a very elegant mapping tool, host employer branded social media and video and allow 3rd party comment in all areas whilst integrating with ATS and having a really slick set of skills tests and CV parsing tools available then really do give me a call.. I reckon it could work.