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.

Sometimes when “something” becomes popular and successful for a long time it becomes a defacto standard, something that is just accepted, no questions asked.  Over time, other people and organisations try to catch hold of the coat tails of this success by copying (sometimes with slight variations, often with none) the original idea.

Often, everyone is too busy admiring this “something” to notice that times have changed and the world has moved on.  Such is the case of the ubiquitous job board.

There have been many massive market shifts by inventors and free-thinking people in history.  Think of the first automatically sliced loaf, a buzzer when you leave your car lights on, Dyson and the vacuum cleaner industry.  All were big revelations…the kind that make you think….well that’s obvious!

Well, it’s the same in the recruitment industry.  The job board market is lazily jogging along (fat from its profits) unaware that its nemesis the “people board” is about to sprint past it and leave it for dead (quite literally).

You see, times have changed.  The Internet is now much more people focused.  People/users demand more from Internet services and they want these services to be free.  Any Internet service that is going to succeed in a massive way must focus on the benefits for its users.

Job boards simply do not focus on their users.  What they do is in fact the reverse.  Many job boards focus on two areas; job advertising and a CV (resume) database.

For job advertising, they charge a lot of money for employers (or agencies) that wish to advertise their job vacancies.  The other side of the job board website, the CV database, is a little odd.  Essentially users can send their CV (free of charge) to the job board.  At first this sounds like a reasonable deal until you realise that the CV database is locked down.  Only employers who register with the job board and pay (far too much money) will be able to search for your CV.

There are three fundamentally bad things here:

1. The job boards are selling YOUR data and you gave them it for free!
2. The job board has effectively restricted access to companies who can afford to pay for the service. 
3. Your data is only visible for those periods of time when companies pay for it and actively search for some skills.

 People boards are the reverse of this and bring benefits for those actively looking for work, those not actively looking for work, employers and even agencies.

So what is a people board?

Here’s my definition:

A people board:

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

We don’t need to overcomplicate the recruitment business.  There should only be two sides to it; employers seeking candiddates and candidates looking for roles in business. 

The objective of a people board is to make it much easier to put both sides of the recruitment equation in touch with each other, no matter what the business, no matter what skills the person has.

The people board is a simple concept, but then the best ideas usually are.

We’vee been working on various promotional videos for our site using Animoto.  This is our favourite at the moment:

Who do YOU think YOU are? on YouTube

We call it “Who Do YOU think YOU are?”.  We’re trying to get across the message that everyone should promote their skills and not rely on job boards or agencies……..

So how can we fix this?  How can we look at this beast of a recruitment industry and see beauty in it? Well first we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “Who is this business for? Who is it supposed to benefit?”

The answer to those questions obviously depends on what your role is - a recruiter, an agency or a candidate.

For recruiters (read the old-fashioned meaning of companies that actually employ people) it’s fairly simple - we want the best people for the lowest cost.

For agencies - we want anybody for maximum profit.

For candidates - we want an interesting job that pays a lot of money.

Well ok, I’ve over-simplified things and people aren’t that stereotypical in real life but it states the basic positions of the parties involved in this uncomfortable triangle.

The Bad and The Ugly

I don’t think I’m on my own here when I say that from a candidate’s view I don’t see what value an agency adds to the recruitment process.  They are simply an obstacle between the candidate and the recruiter, a third party that can shield the truth (both ways) between the other two parties.  This can’t be healthy and isn’t the best way to do business.

It used to be that an agency would send me a bottle of champagne and a box of Belgian chocolates at Christmas, but sadly those days are now gone……. I don’t even get a Christmas card any more!  So much for the brave new world where social networking is King!

The Good

I guess I shouldn’t gripe about the current system and its processes without having a better alternative up my sleeve.

Well I have got a better vision although to realize it will take time and you can bet there will be a lot of opposition from certain quarters……

Let’s all promote ourselves instead of using job boards. 

If all recruiters and agencies could find you for free and see when you’re available or looking for work then we can do away with all this cloak and dagger stuff.

Personal promotion online and networking - it’s the way forward.  Wave goodbye to job boards. 

My top 8 topics of interest for the recruitment industry in 2009 and beyond are:

1. Personal Promotion (for want of a better phrase!).  You own the data, you know what your skills are you know when you’re available.  Who else is in a better position to know all this?  Recruitment agencies - I think not!

2. Social Networking Sites - Can recruiters engage with candidates using social networking sites?

3. Video Branding - How can employers, agencies and individuals promote and develop their own brands?

4. Recruitment Blogs - How can recruiters utilise blogging within their career sites?

5. Personal Tagging - Forget scanning CVs or resumes, use data tags instead.

6. Aggregators - How aggregators are used in online recruiting (I have an instant aversion to aggregation - just smacks of poor quality output to me)!

7. Recruitment and Web 2.0 (+ Web 3.0)! - Nice words but is there any substance behind all this verbage?  Do we really need to engage with Generation Y using these techniques?

8. Cloud Recruiting - The recruitment industry’s spin on cloud computing

Following the not too painful birth of the knokknok business and website we take a long collective deep breath and wondered “What now?”.  We weren’t so naive as to expect thousands of people to flock to our new baby and knew we needed to promote and advertise our site.  

Without having a massive budget for TV advertising, or a wealth of creative talent we still believed that if we put certain “plans” in place we could generate more traffic.

So what should we try?

Here’s a short-list:

1. Write articles about the recruitment business and publish them on the web.  These needed to have a clear view point and if possible have some controversy to spark some debate.

2. You’re reading it…..yes a blogful of our thoughts on the recruitment industry, employers, agencies as well as our KK business and vaguely amusing things that happen to us on a day to day business.

3. Promotional videos which we could re-use, post on our website, post on YouTube …..

4. Anything else that doesn’t cost much but reaches lots of people.

All this in the vague hope of zooming up the search engine rankings……. more detail to follow.