This and that: random observations and rantings

September 1, 2015
JobBoardDoctor
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random observations

News wanders across my desk (well, my monitor) on occasion that doesn’t really fit into a standard ‘themed’ blog post – just random observations and things that may or may not have any impact on our industry. Still, I find them interesting – and you may, too. So without additional preamble, and in no particular order, here are some tidbits:

SimplyHired dumps job boards: Well, not exactly – just organic listings from job boards, starting this week (I think). Why? Well, Indeed did it, right? So it must be good. There are still plenty of aggregators out there that accept organic listings from job boards, of course. I’ll be curious to see if anyone else follows Indeed/SH’s lead.
LinkedIn keeps getting bigger: As in buying companies that ‘extend’ the LI ‘platform’. Last week it was FlipTop, a predictive analytics sales tool. Like its consumer cousin Facebook, LI wants you to ‘live’ in their environment. Spend your money there. Work there. Etc, etc. Another one of those ‘rule the world‘ plays, I guess. They’ve got boatloads of money and a big tech staff, so perhaps they’ll achieve their goal. I find, however, that I spend less time on LI these days, not more. Perhaps it’s just because I’m a contrarian.
Work for yourself: A new study says that 7.6 million will work in the ‘gig economy‘ in the US by 2020 – that’s 5 short years from now. To put that in perspective, the total US workforce is about 157M – so the contingent workers would make up about 5% of the total. Good or bad? Good if more people are doing what they want and making a decent living; bad if those people are ‘in the hole’ because they provide their own health insurance, etc. You have to ask yourself: do you want everything to become ‘Uberized‘? Oops, spoke too soon!
536 jobseekers = 1 hire: Yep, you read that right. Jobvite has parsed its data on 10 million job applications, and says that – on average – you need 59 applications to make one hire – and to get those 59 applications, you’ll need to get the eyeballs of 536 job seekers. No wonder job seekers AND employers get frustrated! Job boards and career sites produced 77% of the applicants for jobs. Sounds to me like several problems hiding in these numbers. First, of course, is the abysmal quality of most job ads. If you have a poorly written job ad, you will attract fewer candidates, and fewer quality candidates. Second is the somewhat haphazard way many employers manage their hiring process, from where they post jobs to the way their career site works. Third would be of course the way employers implement their ATSs. And fourth would be job boards dropping the ball by failing to deliver targeted candidates. Plenty of blame to go around – but of course, plenty of room to improve.