Last Saturday I attended my first recruiting “unconference” at the offices of Stack Overflow in lower Manhattan. An unconference is a one day event where the sessions consist of a track leader who introduces a topic to a group and then lets the group take the discussion to wherever they want. truNewYork was put on by @billboorman. It was a great event and Stack’s employees were awesome hosts.

I got a chance to chat with some of their sales reps and recruiters about their tech job board Careers 2.0. It has over 110,000 vetted technical resumes that they sell access to. It has job postings that sell for $350 each and they just launched a product called “Company Pages” which highlights their employer clients. To me this is what the next gen job board (or any company career site) should look like. It has pictures of the office. It has interesting, unique copy written by a human. And it tells you who you’ll be working with.

Stack Overflow started with a community of developers and they added the job board later on. Let that serve as a lesson to you would be job board operators. Having an existing community of like minded people will make it easier to add a job board later on since you will have a built in audience.

Whats also interesting is not just anyone can post their resume. You have to be invited. That way they can vet each person to make sure they are a quality candidate. If you study what Stack does you will learn a lot about how to run a job board, they do it very well.

So well in fact they are embarking on a big push to hire over 40 sales reps to help sell to employers. If you like sales and job boards, check ‘em out.

When I ran my local job boards I had NO sales team. Instead I relied on electronic ways to offset any lack of  manpower. If you dont have the time for sales yourself here’s how you can do it without one.

With the advent of sites like Linkedin, Github, Behance and others that contain publicly available profiles, job boards face a conundrum since they typically have private only resume search.

But they need to evolve with the times.

The trend now is making your job seeker “profiles” open to search engines so candidates can be found. I believe this is the future model job boards will need to follow. It provides more benefit to the candidate since it offers them more ways to be found.

But job boards will not be able to charge for resume access if this happens.

I never saw much value in charging for resume anyway so perhaps its better off to make your resumes/profiles open to Google’s crawler. Some job boards like Monster/Dice/CB can still charge because of the sheer amount of resumes in their database but any new job board will do better by making them public.

I read an article recently that predicts the civilian UAV industry is posed to explode in the next few years when the FAA opens up airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles, aka drones. So I see opportunity and just launched two job boards to take advantage of this trend.

UAVjobbank.com
JobsinDrones.com

Each is powered by Jobamatic. As you can probably tell I’m targeting two different keywords here. UAV and drone. I hope to get some search engine traffic within 6 months which shouldnt be too hard given the newness of the industry. There are no competitors.

So if you are looking to start a job board look at what NEW types of jobs that are being created and target that market. Bigdatajobs.com is a good example of that. “Data Scientists” didnt exist a few years ago now they are in high demand.

Think ahead. Think niche.

My friends at Headhunter Labs in NYC put together this handy map of the online recruiting industry. Download it here as pdf.

Talent Acquisition Technology Ecosystem (.pdf)

Use it as a handy guide to see who the players are in all phases of the hiring process from video interviewing to ATS to resume builders. Its free and shareable.

The CareerXroads sources of hire study is out and once again job boards place in the top 3 behind referrals and company career sites. Job board market-share dropped off a little as more and more tools come on the scene to find talent. I didnt see any major trends in the study so its pretty much status quo. Download the whole report right here, its an interesting read.

CareerXraods sources of hire stats

So what new job boards/technology are coming on to the recruiting landscape? Well here are some that caught my eye recently.

* Collegefeed.com is a social platform to help students follow employers. [story on techcrunch]

* Strangely named Gozaik will launch soon as some kind of online resume platform.

* Visual job ads? Pinthejob.com hopes so.

* This aint your fathers job fair. Check out the Uncubed job fair [story on Pandodaily]

NOTE: thinking of starting your own job board? Try and evolve that idea into something new like the businesses above. Like all online businesses, job boards must evolve or risk being minimized by employers.

I have been wondering lately if social share butons on job postings are worth it. So I went to arguably the webs most social savvy audience (Mashable) and took a look at their job board. I clicked through the top few pages of recent listings and most jobs had ZERO likes. A few had 1.

The reason I think is that job listings are inherently not a shareable piece of content. Job seekers are out for themselves and are unlikely to share a job with others.

So if you want to have social sharing buttons its better to have them on the home page and other parts of your site except the job description itself. I suppose it doesn’t hurt having them on descriptions but why look at a zero if you dont have to?

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I got a nice email from an NYU student about being an entreprenuer. I thought I would share since they were great questions.

Q. I’m toying with the idea of quitting grad-school and going full-time on my 4 month old startup..what is your philosophy on the value of education in school vs education via building a business?

A. Building a business is always a better learning experience than grad school in my opinion. I guess it depends on how much longer you have to attend. If you are close, might as well finish it. Looking back I am glad i went to grad school because it motivated me to start allcountyjobs. But if you still have a few years left it might not be worth it.

Q. Do you think it’s possible to build a meaningful business in this modern age of automation without hiring anyone?

A. Yes I do think its possible. Lean startups are awesome. If you are building a SAAS model you can certainly make a living off it. It will probably be just a lifestyle business in terms of sales. Employees can be a pain to manage but you can do a lot with just 2-3 people these days. Look what Instagram built with just 10 people!

Q. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done as an entrepreneur?

A. the hardest thing I had to do was probabaly building up my business again after the financial crisis of 2008. I lost half my revenue and it took almost 4 years to get it back to previous levels. But i did it and was able to sell for a good price.

Its time for another one of those posts. Yes every year you see it in the blogs and twittersphere saying that job boards are dead.

Phooey!

Job boards are alive and well, especially the niche ones. Just look at this recent source of hire study from ATS vendor SilkRoad. For external hires, job boards lead the pack.

The fact is if you have a niche audience you can monetize with a job board. Just look at two of the leading tech blogs…Techcrunch & Mashable. Both of them have job boards!

Craigslist is a job board and I dont hear anyone saying they are dying.

Dont believe all the hype you hear. Job boards aren’t going anywhere, but what is happening is that there are more tools than ever for recruiters to recruit with. In the beginning there was just newspapers, then we added job boards, then we added social media & referral programs and now sourcing from sites like Linkedin are all the rage. So your job board is just one of SEVERAL ways to get talent.

All this means is you need better marketing to reach potential employers. You need to rise above the noise of everything else.

Job seekers are trained to use job boards. Thats not changing anytime soon.