The 2010 Job Board Report is ready for download here. Here are four observations from the report:

The Competitive Landscape
The wrath of the downturn spared no one; industry revenue dipped by 21%.  However, the industry grew in numbers even in the midst of falling revenue. We recorded 270 jobs boards, an increase of 14% from last year, and many more are still in the woodwork (we counted around 50). Convinced that the print industry has no long-term future, job boards are buoyed by the fact that spending on print media still amounts to an estimated $400-600 million every year.

As competition remains fierce, the gap between a good and bad operator becomes more apparent. While household names rule the roost, new players with little hope of survival enter the market; many just unique domain names masquerading as job boards. However, new niches rich with potential continue to be discovered. Resume databases are looked at with new vigour, monetising job seekers’ experience is doing the rounds, and new business models are emerging.

A Year of Doubt, A Future of Hard work
Besides having to tackle the wrath of an economic downturn, job boards have been forced to address simmering doubts. Proven or otherwise, alternatives to job boards are suggested with aplomb. The social media brigade is the loudest. Already, 53% of recruiters and 23% of HR have dabbled with social networks. While social media offers compelling reasons for adoption, there is little evidence of mass migration from job boards. Still, past glory amounts to little, and like all players in the employment game the task to stay relevant will be all consuming for job board owners.

Endorsement Remain Strong (The triangular nexus)
As it stands, the fortune of the job board sector is influenced significantly by recruiters; in turn recruiters owe their existence to employers. There’s a place for job boards as long as recruiters can do a better job than employers in finding talent. Good job boards count as an essential tool in the toolbox of any competent sourcing operation. 96% of recruiters continue to use job boards; it’s in the interest of job boards that the recruitment industry thrives. For now this dynamic – a nexus between job boards, recruiters and employers – remains healthy. Also, it helps that job seekers – those who have the least to gain from job boards – are generally positive with their endorsement.

Clarity of Purpose
Thanks in part to the emergence of alternatives, more than ever, there is a clearer understanding of the problems job boards can solve. With almost all friction eliminated in posting job ads, using job boards is effortless and widespread. Over time, fuelled in part by marketing and the lack of real alternatives, job boards have been painted as the be-all for sourcing.  Job boards do a good task within the realms of what they can and are supposed to do.  Expecting more than they can deliver often results in blame falling in job boards’ courts. Sourcing is a complex operation; a universal solution rarely exists. Smart sourcing operations who understand the need to use different tools for different tasks will call upon job boards to perform what they are best at doing; nothing more nothing less.

Voices
This year, to decipher the road ahead, we enlisted the help of twenty contributors, many of them giants of our industry. A beneficiary of their wisdom and good grace, I remain eternally grateful to all contributors below:

• Brett Minchington (CEO, Employer Brand International) argues that promoting employer brand should be the bedrock for all recruitment advertising.
• Greg Savage (CEO, Aquent) thinks that technology by itself amounts to little, and that it is people, not job boards, who find people.
• Jeff Dickey-Chasins (Founder, Job Board Doctor) sheds lights on new global trends that will affect the industry.
• Carey Eaton (CIO, SEEK), provides pointers on why job boards matter and the potential of the industry to further grow.
• Paul Jury (Head of Executive Recruitment, Talent 2), offers an assessment of the job board sector from a recruiter’s perspective.
• Clifford Rosenberg (MD, LinkedIn), believes the time for social networks in recruitment has arrived.
• Lisa Watts (CEO, ArtsHub) contemplates a future where job seekers paying for content might not be a rarity.
• Peter Wilson (President, AHRI) believes that Association-run job boards have an important role to play. Lauren Jensen, Marketing Manager ITCRA, shares similar sentiments.
• Keith Muirhead (Head of Jobs, TradeMe) believes a job board’s growth lies in looking after the welfare of the audience – job seekers.
• Google and search engines matter in job searching and sourcing, argues Glenn Davies (Director, JXT Consulting)
• Phil Harpur (Senior Research Manager, Frost & Sullivan) reveals past, present and future numbers for the job board sector.
• John Kirkby (CEO, ExpatJobs) lays down ten points to illustrate that all job boards are not created equal.
• Kevin Lodge (CEO, EOC) illustrates the value of face-to-face interaction as an alternative method to source talent.
• Adam Shay (MD, The Face) thinks offering advice on job boards will feature in the evolving role of advertising agencies.
• Andrea Culligan (MD, Unimail) addresses the issues of using multiple channels in recruiting Gen-Y.
• Kelly Magowan (CEO, Sixfigures) lays down the case for niche sites.
• Riges Younan (Director, Peerlo) affirms the need to boldly experiment with many sourcing tools.
• Leah Gibbs (Founder, Lifestyle Careers) highlights the idea that many demographic niches remain largely untapped.
• Martin Warren (Principal Consultant, Insidejobs) dives into the role of sourcing in identifying passive candidates.
• James Green (Director, Check4jobs) thinks aggregator with new business models have fresh solutions to offer.

The Job Board Report is supported by the following organisations:

JXT Consulting (Premium Sponsor)

Frost & Sullivan released new data on the Australian Online Classifieds market.  I asked Phil Harpur, Senior Research Manager, five questions.

Q. Revenue in the Australian employment classifieds market dropped by 21% in 2009.  Why is the drop so drastic?
A maturing market strongly linked to macro-economic factors.  Of the major online classifieds segments, employment has proved most vulnerable to economic conditions, with the volume of adverts directly linked to employers’ willingness to hire staff. Employment was by far the worst hit segment by the GFC.

Q. What is your reading of the current employment classifieds market? What are the likely numbers for 2010?
A rebound in the market is predicted for 2010 as employment conditions continue to improve, however the market is not likely to fully recover from the impact of the economic downturn until 2011. Growth for calendar year 2010 for the total online classifieds employment market of around 7% is predicted by Frost & Sullivan.

Q. Online classifieds cannibalised the print market, do you think social media is doing the same to online classifieds? How serious is the threat from social media?
A very  interesting question. Organisations in Australia are now increasingly using social networking sites such as Linkedln, Twitter and Facebook to source staff. These social networking sites are providing employers with alternate avenues of sourcing candidates directly, thus bypassing the traditional online classifieds channel and creating a structural change in the online classifieds market.

So, there is no doubt that are strong parallels here with the migration from the print to online channels that has been occurring over the past decade in the online classifieds market. However I see social media as becoming more of a niche and complementary channel that will co-exist alongside the traditional online classifieds channel. There will be some cannibalisation, but nowhere near to the extent seen in the print classifieds market.

Q. You are predicting that by 2013 the employment classifieds market will reach $238 million, which is not a lot considering the market is currently worth $172 million, is the employment classifieds market maturing?
The employment sector is expected to reach only $238 million by 2013. CAGR for 2009 – 2013 is predicted by F&S to be only 8.5% for employment, a substantially lower rate than the previous 5 years, and indicative of a market that is now reasonably mature.

Q. What do you think job board operators need to do to stay competitive?
In 2010, with the state of economy improving but employers still cautious about recruitment, online recruitment sites will need to focus on the delivery of quality, rather than quantity of services, at a low cost per service and cost per placement. Recruitment websites that deliver quality candidates at a low cost will be able to retain the recruiters with smaller advertising budgets. Even more employers will use job boards directly rather than engaging recruiters as it becomes easier to source quality applicants directly. Websites that are highly visible, easy to use, and cost effective, will no doubt be the winners in this market.

Phil is a Senior Research Manager for Frost and Sullivan’s ICT Practice, where he covers the Digital Media sectors for the Australia and New Zealand market, including both the online advertising and e-commerce sectors. He has 15 years of ICT research experience as a market analyst. His most recent position was Senior Analyst at BuddeComm where he covered a wide range of areas in the telecoms sector for the ANZ markets. He has also held a number of ICT market analyst positions at Gartner/Dataquest over a six year period as well as co-founding an independent Research Consultancy in the ICT space.

The Australian Public Service Commission (APS) released stage one of a report which evaluated recruitment advertising activities across different agencies.

Some interesting results:

• Data collection – Of the 104 FMA agencies only 45 FMA agencies collected source-of-hire data (Only those who collected data were included in the evaluation). Not surprisingly data collection problems exist  – “Response to the evaluation survey suggests that those agencies that utilise an e-recruitment system were able to provide detailed survey responses more efficiently than those agencies that had to manually check through paper files. There was also anecdotal evidence that an e-recruitment system, however, does not ensure accuracy of applicant information. An agency advised that applicants appeared to be selecting the first item on a drop-down list of advertisement sources”
• Source of Hire: APSJobs (the online job board operated by APS) and the Internet delivered the most number of new applicants; but Print channels are not too far behind. The consensus is that online channels offered the most value for money.

• Quality of Hire: Interestingly, when it comes to quality of hire, all media channels performed equally well with 4.6% of job offers coming from APSjobs; 4.4% from internet advertising; and 4.5% from print advertising.

It is never going to be easy to monitor and collect accurate data for a large entity which employs 162,009 staff; besides, APS is going through a period of change. In fact, only 8% of the agencies under the APS have a formal talent management plan, while only 32% conducts workforce planning.

Yet, kudos to the APS for the deliberate effort to improve the monitoring and collection of recruitment data. In their own words  - “The Commission will also continue to assess ways of improving source-of-hire data collection”.

As I have been always arguing – you can’t improve what you don’t measure (or don’t know).

(PS: The APS made references to the work we did on the Source of Talent Report and the Job Board Report).

Part of the reason why the vast majority of recruitment advertising delivered low result is because the demographic data required to plan proper targeting strategies seldom exist. Say, if one doesn’t know the makeup or the supply and demand dynamics of the PHP community it will be difficult to plan and pull off a successful recruitment campaign. 

Instead, blame is often laid on the middleman (e.g. job boards, print etc) when essentially the problem is planning and targeting flaws as a result of poor availability of data. Any amount of advertising on job boards is not going to work if the demographic one targets do not frequent them. Paucity of data is the main culprit.  

Numbers do not explain everything but they allow us to form perspectives and can help in the shaping of effective targeting strategies. Any day, it’s better than guesswork.  

ACS is one of the leading professional associations regularly churning out good data on the IT industry.  If you are in the business of hiring IT professionals, at the very least peeking at their comprehensive compendium (pdf) will assist in forming clearer perspectives, which can be valuable in planning targeting strategies.