I recently had one of my articles published on Cheezhead about people boards as opposed to job boards.  Unsurprisingly, the article provoked a lot of reaction…..some negative (from seasoned job boarders I’m guessing) and a lot positive.

My simple and brief definition of a job board is as follows:

1. enables people to promote their skills
2. enables people to publish their availability and references
3. enables people to control how their data is presented and how they can be contacted
4. allows employers to search for people
5. 1-4 MUST be free of charge

Do you agree? Have I missed something from the list?  Let me know…I’ll behappy to debate it.

If you’ve been reading the press lately you’ll know that Monster have rebuilt their website.  I found a marketing brochure describing their great undertaking.  Here are a few quotes from the Monster literature:

When you invented the game, it’s okay to change the rules.

Today, we are reinventing the Monster Seeker and Employer experience, using patent-pending technologies to create new, never-before-seen products and services. In short, Monster is revolutionizing the way you recruit. Again.

That’s pretty big words from a pretty big company.  So the BIG question is “How much of this is hype, how much is bells and whistles and how much is blind panic by the Monster money making machine?”

I’ll do an in-depth review of the new features in a later post, but at first glance their site is still very busy to they eye.  There’s a lot of stuff that either has no relevance to me (the usual “career advice” and “how to write that perfect CV”) or, well just a lot of “job noise” that I’m never going to click on.

In their advance search, for example, they still stick to the rather dull splitting of industries into vertical segments and an old-fashioned list of click and select career checkboxes.  That’s not innovation surely?

At first glance, this isn’t anything like a full body makeover but more of a facelift.  Monster still looks ugly to me!

I thought that this was going to be a difficult post to write especially when the recruitment industry and hiring and firing in general is in turmoil right now, but when I got down to it my Top 10 predictions just fell out!

1. Recruiters stop using job boards to attract candidates and only use web apps in conjunction with revamping the job tab on their own website.  The real (if difficult) birth of cloud recruiting begins.

2. Recruitment agencies halve (or more) their percentage fee.  Tons of these guys will go out of business in 2009 (except for the ones that have a monopoly or add value).

3. Google comes up with an imaginitive way of finding and recruiting people.

4. Less and Less “career advice”, and more and more “how to keep a job advice” appears on those job boards that think we actually read that stuff!

5. The big job boards (Monster, Jobserve et al) begin to stagger around a little punch drunk.  They’re being hit from a lot of different directions these days (Facebook, LinkedIn et al) and no matter how much they try and change the colour of their spots they’re still the same old dinosaur and can’t adapt to the planet’s changing economic conditions.  They’re in the wrong game now and this year they may start to realise it!

6. Something really useful in the recruitment world will catch fire for mobiles that will change the whole game.

7. Buy-up of other job boards to reduce competition and try and keep revenue streams from drying up.

8. People/Job networking sites to rise and rise, although where there revenue streams will come from is anyones guess.

9. YouTube video shorts promoting companies, individual departments or individuals will put on a growth spurt but YouTube will need to add a smarter interface if it’s going to work.

10. The term “Personal branding” is dusted off, given some new spin to the point where it actually takes off.