Job Boards Revamped: Niche is the New Paradigm Shift

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Early Years: The Big Job Boards

For many years, huge corporate job boards dominated the online job search landscape, capturing the eyes of job seekers and the dollars of hiring managers and recruiters in abundance. But a few years ago, some savvy recruiters - as well as job seekers - started to notice that the mass appeal of these job search resources was leading to a cluttered, untargeted environment in which legitimate, appealing job opportunities and candidates were difficult to easily discern from their less appealing counterparts. Ironically, the success of the big job boards is the very thing that has led to their continuing downfall.

Enter the "Vertical" Job Board

The point at which the majority of online job seekers became aware of Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder is also the exact moment that early adopters on both the job search and recruiting sides began to look for better, less mainstream resources. Not surprisingly, those operating in the job board "space" found a way to meet the needs of these early contrarians, and produced job boards in volume to target various niche employment markets. Some job boards focused on a particular geographic market at the state or city level, while others focused on a particular industry or job title. Some combined these approaches, and went "super-niche" by focusing on both an industry and a geographic region.

While a number of the "new" job boards didn't offer very much, still others found that their niche was a popular one for both job seekers and hiring professionals, and the job boards took off. The early adopters who most readily sought alternatives to the job boards where the "masses" hung out wouldn't accept just any job board, of course, so these niche boards often offered something that the big boards didn't, in addition to the tight focus on a particular industry or area of the country. Some offered very inexpensive job posting, while others added "social" elements to their job boards, readily tapping into the mania for all things "Web 2.0."

Niche Becomes the Norm

As with all paradigm shifts, a snowball effect developed. Slowly, but with increasing momentum, the highly-targeted job boards that didn't appear at all likely to supplant the "Big 3" began to actually chip away at the market share of those corporate behemoths. Niche boards, which started as the stomping grounds of the savvy few, increasingly were visited even by relative newcomers to the online job search game. Recruiters and hiring managers looking for less expensive and generally more cost-effective options found that they could recruit just as many quality candidates by using a small, targeted job board, even though they weren't typically receiving as many applications for posted jobs. Job seekers found that they stood out more, the result of not being herded together with the masses as they were with bigger job boards and the industry-specific nature of their skill sets.

What Comes Next is Hard to Predict

It would take a great deal of prescience to accurately predict what developments the industry will witness next. Already, many "job boarders" are combining elements of social media and social bookmarking applications with their job boards, making them not only places to search for and post jobs, but also adding a networking element that naturally melds with what job seekers and recruiters are trying to achieve. A focus on greater direct contact is one development that is gaining traction, and something that anyone with a small, developing job board should take not of. In a general sense, owners of smaller boards are trying to offers candidates and recruiters everything that is missing from big job boards. Greater personalization, greater customer service, lower cost of recruiting candidates and more interaction are just a few such offerings. As small, niche job boards continue to evolve, whether the big boards will try to evolve as well remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that they will continue to lose market share, and job seekers and recruiters will continue to turn away from them as new, highly-targeted, smaller and better job search sites continue to develop.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Barbara Nishizaki is a writer who focuses on the online job search and employment space. She has over ten years of experience in the online recruiting and job search industries and writes regularly about her experiences. Ms. Nishizaki has been involved in a variety of job portals as a consultant and has helped to launch a wide variety of employment-related websites and services, from IT job boards to websites featuring Please Rate this Article

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