Future Of Job Boards – Is It Social

Online community is a bit of a buzzword at the moment and I reckon it’s important we begin to define it in the context of recruitment. Why? Because recruitment is moving rapidly into an almost entirely online workspace. This being the case, whatever is a hot topic in the internet generally, becomes a hot topic for us. More importantly, though, we need to understand this concept in order to shape how we respond to it.

Here’s where I break it down for the readers: There are two main components to the notion of community. These are: a) common interest b) communication. So, a community is a place where people with a common interest meet to exchange knowledge, discuss ideas or get to know one another.

The demands of our lives are such that, with regard to communication, interactivity is vital. It allows us to achieve all three aspects of communication in one shot. In doing this, we can make informed decisions about WHOSE information we need access to and WHAT sorts of things we want to know. Interaction gives us this. It permits us access to a subtext in the discourse of a particular communication. It does this through commentary, but also through circulation on social networks.

Okay, so where does this leave job boards?

Over the short term, what this means is that job boards will attempt to integrate some form of interactivity into their sites. Sites such as TribeHQ have already begun to do this.

In the long term, however, job boards will not serve the functional requirements of our society. Lacking some of the basic elements of community, they will not be able to satisfy the need to streamline information resources, and they will not provide the social proof required to verify the validity of their advertisements. Seek already have difficulty with this and dedicate a large amount of resources to preventing (sometimes unsuccessfully) fake job ads.

‘Future of the traditional job board’ was discussed together with Thomas Shaw and Diane Lee at the ‘Recruitment Rumble’ recently. Listen to the recording here.