Hubs: job boards with a little bit more
Note: The Doctor is recovering from jet lag, San Diego, and the IAEWS Spring Congress. This is a popular and still pertinent post from the past:
The ‘traditional’ job board is evolving – but as science tells us, every instance of evolution isn’t always ‘successful’. There are plenty of dead ends in nature – and business. Same in the job board world – often because the sites in question failed to adapt.
But which path will job boards follow to successfully evolve in the coming years? As is often the case in the industry, I think it is the resurrection and expansion of an idea that has been around for years – the career hub.
The career hub is designed to be a resource that candidates use – even when they aren’t looking for work. Why? Candidates that visit the site and use the resources day in and day out are easier to monetize (think advertising, for example) and easier to retain than candidates who visit a site every couple of years (when they’re looking). An added advantage: these candidates are viewed by employers as passive – and for many, a passive candidate is more valuable. (Honestly, I’m not sure I buy this – but I’m not a recruiter!).
Oh, and there’s one more (big) advantage: the site is not a job board. It’s a career hub!
What does a career hub (also often called employment portals) include?
- Job listings (of course!)
- Industry news
- Candidate Services (resumes, candidate profile pages, training, certifications, candidate marketing, etc.)
- Employer Services (job postings, profile/resume access, targeted emails, site ads, company profiles, sponsorships, etc.)
- Articles (industry-specific developments, professional development, how to, etc.)
- Opinion (blogs, etc. – which also let candidates comment and interact)
- Events (webinars, career fairs, offline events, etc.)
- Ability to interact with other candidates (forums, chat rooms, etc.)
This is hardly an exhaustive list of features, but it gives you an idea.
I said career hubs are not new – and I meant it. MediaBistro has been around for over a decade and is, I think, the prototype for a typical career hub. It has industry news, jobs, events, training, and blogs. There has been a new crop of career hubs sprouting up over the past few years, for the same reasons I mentioned earlier – a desire to keep candidates even when they aren’t looking for jobs, and new ways of generating revenue.These include:
- Safarious: for wilderness professionals
- Culintro: for restaurant professionals
- Aunt Minnie: for radiologists
There are many, many more. (Is LinkedIn a career hub? You bet!) The common linking threads are community, career, news, and interaction. Maybe career hubs really are what job boards become when they grow up.
I don’t think they’re a dead end!
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That’s again an interesting insight into, how jobboards are shaping and what is next expected from them. Career hub is definitely a good model to keep revenue pouring from different sources and addresses so many different needs. Media Bistro is a perfect example for benchmarking to reflect the same model for jobboards.
An interesting article, job boards do need to evolve beyond a simple transaction between active jobseeker and employer, towards being a resource to attract a pool of passive candidates, the kind of candidate who could be easily swayed by the right job offer. With the rise of the internal recruiter, the job boards have had to take on part of the role of the recruitment consultant in regard to building these candidate pools.
I believe that a job website has to be more than just a job listing board. As you have eloquently covered, the hubs are how job sites should be made.
Nice article, bookmarking it for future reference.
[…] The ‘traditional’ job board is evolving – but as science tells us, every instance of evolution isn’t always ‘successful’. There are plenty of dead ends in nature – and business. Same in the job board world – often because the sites in question failed to adapt. [read article] […]
[…] How jobs boards with more become hubs. […]
As a neophyte job board owner this is an interesting and insightful article. I unwittingly created this very scenario on my aviation industry site.