AI is affecting job boards: is this good or bad?

After a decade-long warm-up -finally –AI is affecting job boards. As I’ve written earlier this year, generative AI has some obvious use-cases for job boards and ATSs. In fact, if you take a darker view, generative AI may do away with job boards entirely! Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it.

But…AI is affecting job boards in ways both large and small. For example:

• If you slap ‘AI’ on your company or offering, VCs will give you money! See here, here, and here. Sticking ‘AI’ in your name or offering isn’t a guaranteed money-maker – but it doesn’t hurt.
• AI may solve the problem of crappy job ads – and even if it doesn’t, since LinkedIn is using it, you will be also – very soon.
• AI will improve the hiring success of your employers – if they follow its prompting! You know what that means – the more hires from your applications, the more they like your job board, right?
• AI will make your programmatic spend even more effective – at least that’s what they claim. Even if it isn’t, it will be amusing to see one set of algorithms going head to head with another set of algorithms!
• AI is reshaping some job boards so much that they’re actually becoming AI companies! Of course, job boards have always adapted to new technology, usually by swallowing it.
• Finally – and most importantly – AI is what will keep job boards up at night! After all, we’ve weathered a recession or three, COVID, the rise of remote work, programmatic, CPA, social media, and a few other things during the past decade. So now we have a new tension-creator!

Is AI going to actually be the slayer of job boards? The chant of ‘job boards are dead’ has been echoing in the halls of recruitment for almost two decades now – will AI actually make it come true? Will AI single-handedly get rid of this multi-billion-dollar industry? Or will AI become integrated in every nook and cranny of the candidate acquisition process – from initial attraction to final hire?

By now, you probably know my answer: AI is affecting job boards, and job boards will swallow AI whole. They will drop it into their candidate engagement processes. They will fold it into the job search process. They will use it to supplement their employer sales efforts. Some of these efforts will work wonderfully. Some will fizzle. And three or five or ten years down the road, we will wonder how we ever got along without our AI-engorged job boards.

What do you think?

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