Everyone remembers what happened when the internet job boards disrupted classified print job ads. It got cheaper and easier to advertise.
And do you remember what else happened? A trickle of job applicants that used to come in by post turned into an online flood.
Many employers are still trying to keep their heads above water.
But now the Job Aggregators are disrupting the Job Boards. In case you’re not up-to-speed with that story, you can look here … the executive summary is that Job Aggregators are like Google for jobs…. they’re job search engines that trawl the internet locating jobs and making them searchable.
But there’s a twist!
The job aggregators want to make one-click applications easy. They say it’s because more than 60% of applicants are now on mobile devices, and that’s growing fast. And attaching resumes isn’t easy on the most popular devices (think iPhone, iPad).
But there’s more to it. By encouraging one-click applications using web-stored profiles and resumes, the job aggregators get to collect people into their database.
Why? Because once they have them, they can start to use “big data” to search their database and sell you applicants they believe address your needs. Neat idea, hey?
Incidentally, I believe this idea is fatally flawed. Research shows that 78% of resumes are misleading, 53% contain falsifications and that 40% of all job applicants lie on their resume [1]. So having a computer search and parse a resume or online profile is inevitably caught in the “garbage-in, garbage-out” trap. But that’s another story [here, here, and here].
What makes the Aggregators aggravating is that their one-click applications have multiplied the flood of applicants into a tsunami. Employers are again expected to do all the heavy lifting of sifting, sorting and evaluating applicants, whilst applicants furiously one-click away on the bus on the way home.
In the print era, one applicant would typically apply for a handful of jobs. In the Job Board era that rose to more than thirty. And in the Aggregator age, that’s already topping a hundred.
It’s becoming like Tinder for jobs out there! And applicants are beginning to expect getting a job to be as easy as the next date. Employers naturally want more than a casual “swipe right”.
Of course Expr3ss! is the solution for this. Taking hundreds of applications, many of them frivolous or spurious and in a flash identifying the “can do”, “will do” and “fit to” people to suit your needs is a breeze.
Thanks for dropping by…
[1] http://www.gradschoolhub.com/resume/