At some point back in the Fall I started to get really busy and I stopped writing as much as I had before. At least that is what I would like to think. Part of the reason why I stopped posting as much was due to the fact that I wasn’t using job boards any longer so my frustrations with them came to a hault. So did my inspired posts. And by inspired posts I mean that I was writing things that prompted a more well known recruiting industry blogger to pull me aside at a conference and ask me if I was on the payroll of some of the job boards that I had written about. Truth be told, I had been approached by some job boards, but I just didn’t feel like selling out. Instead I decided to become a consultant to hiring teams looking for help navigating the hiring waters without job boards. Seven months later I’m still in business and I have new frustrations, but none that have prompted me to write as much as I had about the job board industry. In fact, I started to think that my job board nightmare had left for good. Until today.
This morning my tiny staff had every intention of purchasing a job board account to help with the occasional random search that we do that isn’t in our immediate supply chain. There are just some things that require a rapid response or a broad search that Facebook doesn’t help with or Linkedin doesn’t speed along (waiting for anything - pages to load or responses on Linkedin is like watching paint dry). Before I knew what had happened, the nightmare was back.
And by nightmare, I mean…oh, please help me, please don’t make me have to talk to those people again, nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
If you have been following Jobmatchbox for very long you may recall that I’ve written about the little things that can make a big difference: how easy it would be for big traditional job boards to simply household their databse records so that there are not 10 different people with the same New Jersey Consulting Firm’s main line as their phone number, how nice it would be if I could flag spam on big traditional job boards like I can on Craigslist (Dice took my advice), and so on. I also talked about the bigger picture and how I can’t stand the fact that job boards play off of negative emotions to get people to impulsively change jobs - the I hate my boss ads come to mind. I also wrote about the things that job boards did that were shady, like selling accounts to anyone with a credit card number which could potentially facilitate identity theft.
I secretly contemplated what I would do differently if I were to ever launch my own job board. Lots of people contacted me for advice on their efforts to do the same. One of the major job boards tried to hire me.
So today I had to give up my job board fast for long enough to talk to the sales reps from several big traditional job boards. It was like nails on a chalk board. They talked really fast or they didn’t listen or both. At the end of the day I’m thinking that I will continue to be better off without a big traditional job board account.
