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.

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.

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

I spotted an article by Peter Weddle, CEO of Weddles.com where he uses the much touted Googlized/O’Reilly term of “Cloud Computing” and attempts to put a different spin on traditional recruitment. Unfortunately the vision he presents falls short of the mark in terms of a utopian recruitment cloud.

Let’s re-visit where “Cloud Computing” comes from.

Think of the heady days where the IBM mainframe was king and dumb terminals accessing locked down applications were all users could hope for. Sure enough, the rebellion against centralised control came with the personal computer. What goes around comes around and “Cloud Computing” now makes things surprisingly centralised again but this time it’s a lot more accessible and the choice of applications will be vast. Power to the user! Let’s take a look back at the recruitment industry.

What we have is 1001 generic job boards and 1001 specific job boards competing for the same thing - prospective candidates’ personal data. Job boards are building their own islands of data around which they put up their credit card barriers. They make their profit from recruiters wishing to advertise job vacancies on one hand and employers/agencies accessing their CV databases on the other as well as the usual plethora of site ads. What about the recruitment agencies? How do they fit into this picture? Well they don’t want to pay money to the Job Boards to get peoples’ data so they’re all building their own data islands too by essentially cold calling people and extracting information about other prospective candidates and storing this information for themselves. Hardly efficient, but when everyone wants a slice of the employer’s pie (fixed fee or percentage) then who can blame them? Let’s apply the vision of “Cloud Computing” back to the recruitment industry and define what “Cloud Recruiting” should be from an employer’s point of view.

• We want access to a vast pool of resources
• We want to find people quickly
• We want to know if they have the right skills
• We want to see when they’re available
• We want information about how good they are
• And MOST of all
• We want all of this to be FREE!

Curiously the same “wants” are identical for agencies but it’s not surprising as they are acting as a specialised, out-sourced HR department. For people seeking work (or wondering what opportunities are out there), there are a different set of values.

• We want to publicise ourselves
• We want to control the information people see
• We want to control how people interact with us
• We want to share our ideas with our peers
• We want all of this to be FREE!

We need to flip this whole thing on its head and give the power to the users…well they own the data!

Just as “Cloud Computing” is applications on tap, “Cloud Recruiting” should be a pipeline of people. The recruitment industry now needs to get its head up in the clouds rather than sticking it firmly in the sand.