thatedeguy waxes and wanes on the recent proliferation of job boards:

I just noticed that Om Malik’s new media giant GigaOM announced the release of GigaOM Jobs today. My Lord! How many job boards do we need? Frankly, I’d rather not have to check 30 boards in order to find a job. I certainly don’t want to check jobs.gigaom.com, crunchboard.com, jobs.problogger.net, and performancing.com/exchange just to find a job. Oh, that’s just the boards that have been announced in the last month or so. Several of them in the last week.

Amen, brother.

Here’s an area where mashups could be godsends. Sites like Simply Hired are trying. For our offline business I would first think of a local classifieds either via the paper or craigslist than using a job board. For online business we’ve hired within our sites and advertisers for every job we’ve had. As I mentioned in the comments area discussing the performancing votes function, I see number of votes, digg-style, for promoting job listings to the main site as not very useful to either employers or job seekers.

Since imitation is a form of flattery, I’m thinking Mike Arrington should be smiling. Though I might be wrong, I think Techcrunch was the first to kick off this latest round of we gotta have a job boardism. I can see how people want to branch from their brand but thatedeguy points out the problems for the job seekers. And how many job owners will go the old fashioned way and use the classifieds in their local area or online via craigslist instead? I’ve seen lots of advertisements for Monster and Dice but have never spent any significant time at their sites or placed an ad.

Will be interesting to see if any of these job boards make a splash. My guess is they will get about the same amount of bite as they are getting with advertisers. Is TechCrunch selling all its ad inventory? Is Om selling all of his? If they are and this expansion is enabling them an additional place to sell oversold ad inventory and for other onsite reasons it makes a lot more sense than just adding a job board because the competition is doing it.

From what I saw from the Problogger board where Darren is charging most the ads were for the parent blog network. I find it odd though that they’d use Darren’s blog to do it and not use B5 Media but Darren indicated he has been wanting to do a job board for awhile. Maybe they have a separate B5 Media job board?

Not accusing any of the sites above of this but doing something only or primarily because your compeition is doing it isn’t always a good business decision. I hope that’s not the primary motivating factor in any of these cases. If it is, then the web is going to see a lot of dead job boards in the coming months and years.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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