Life after Seek?

Well, not Seek particularly… I’m talking all the major job boards.  So that means CareerOne, myCareer too, the big specialists like Whirlpool as well as the international players.

Do you remember newspaper classified job ads?  Saturday mornings spent poring over the papers looking for job ads, circling the likely ones and sending your photocopied resume and cover letter off in the post?

You don’t?  Ok, ok … So I’m the one with the grey hair. Take it from me that’s the way it used to be.

Nowadays the jobs go directly to your applicants.  They set up their job board alerts and, presto!, there’s a list of suitable jobs in their inbox.  Magic!

They apply with a soft-copy e-resume, then they do it again, and again and again. Once upon a time, photocopying and postage costs limited the number of applications. Now it’s open season on job ads … applicants in their hundreds and thousands.

And that’s a good thing, say I.  Open the recruitment “funnel” wide to be sure you have tapped the jobseeker market thoroughly.  Lots of applicants means lots of choice and the knowledge that you have explored the available talent thoroughly.

But that’s a different story.  I’d better get back to the topic, Life after the Seeks, the CareerOnes and the myCareers are yesterday’s heroes.  I think they’re all a dying breed, especially the big ones.

You see, once upon a time we had town criers (and no, the gentleman at the back, I don’t remember those).  If you had news or wanted to advertise something, you paid the town crier and he went around the streets ringing his bell and shouting out your news or the ad copy.  No point in publishing it any other way until printing presses became cheaper and people learned to read, which of course eventually they did.

You don’t see too many job ads for town criers now.

Seek is the town crier of the moment.  And the printing presses?  They’re your company career pages delivered straight to your applicants via search engines, which are starting to index job ads.

Why pay a town crier when you can search the Internet directly with google, bing, yahoo or sfiz?  Ok… I made sfiz up.

Sure, when you search directly now you’ll find myriad paid job board jobs in your search results until you add -seek -careerone -mycareer  to your search terms.  Try it, it’s the wave of the future and the bell tolling the decline of online job boards.

When jobseekers learn to go direct to the web instead of the major job boards, paid job ads will die.  Why would businesses pay for something that they can get for free?

But everyone knows that social media’s going to be the big thing in job search, don’t they?  Well, I’m not everyone.  Watch this space.

Thanks for dropping by.