Marketing Dumb: Selling The Job Boards

The job board industry has matured and is dying. It seems only the HR profession doesn’t know it yet.

You’d have to be living divorced from humanity to claim job boards and automated recruiting systems are not the bane of job seekers—or that these databases and their algorithms are doing a good job at matching job seekers to jobs. After all, the biggest jobs story continues to be about “The Talent Shortage,” a.k.a. The Failure Of Recruiting Technology.

John Sumser, a longtime HR and career industry pundit, seems to have not only separated himself from job seekers, but to have married into an inbred family of HR technology hawkers that never ventures into the real world of talent out of work.

In HRExaminer’s “Monster Returns To Its Cave,” Sumser praises the acquisition of the once-top job board Monster by Dutch HR holding company Randstad. He says with an apparently straight face, “The pathetic sales price of $429 million is evidence of the Monster management team’s complete incompetence.”

The more parsimonious explanation is that Monster’s management dumped a dog that doesn’t hunt. Sumser’s spin is nothing but dumb.

Everyone Dumps Monster

In five years the company’s stock price has plummeted 70%. Marketwatch reports its revenue is down from $1 billion to $667 million. Pre-tax income: down 94%. According to job board industry watcher CareerXroads, over 59% of employers surveyed said they “don’t use” Monster—the highest rejection rate among the top players.

Virtually every job seeker I hear from admits they use job boards like Monster because they feel they have to—then shrieks about the futility of applying for jobs via these black holes that suck down keywords and don’t even say “No, thanks.” (See “Fired! Job Boards Get Their Walking Papers.”)

If your company has ever lost business to a competitor whose success hinged on effectively marketing a product that doesn’t work, you’ll cringe at the memory. Ahem. We all know that a successful marketing campaign doesn’t necessarily reflect product quality.

Sumser says: “There is an important quiet revolution happening in the recruiting world. The market-facing functions like job boards, employment branding, candidate acquisition, pipelining, CRM, drip marketing campaigns, and all the rest of the marketing influence are shaping the public conversation.”

Marketing A Failed Industry

Here’s the public conversation about the “market-facing functions” of HR technology in the service of hiring: “Employers have tried to get those systems to take over the entire hiring decision … The hope is that a long list of requirements, often generated by hiring managers with high expectations, will mean that the perfect candidate will come out the other side. What happens instead is often that no candidates get through the screening process,” Wharton labor expert Peter Cappelli said on PBS NewsHour.

Sumser, a consultant to the HR technology industry, doesn’t say a word in his love letter to Randstad about the experience of job seekers, but predicts that, “The internal processes [in HR technology], characterized by ATS workflows and team construction, are the next frontier.”

When’s the last time you put marketing lipstick on a pig of a product? (I hope never.)

While Sumser praises an industry that’s lost touch with reality, the Millennial media buries it. A few months ago, Kurt Wagner, writing in Recode, took down Monster’s nemesis LinkedIn—the new iconic job board. Wagner suggested that LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner started talks with Microsoft to sell the company “just after its troubled February report in which the company had lowered its forecasts.” Wagner pointed out that LinkedIn’s “ad business was slowing down … growth was a concern … [and the] stock was struggling.”

If the iconic LinkedIn got dumped, what can we say about a has-been like Monster?

The job board industry has matured and is dying. It seems only the HR profession doesn’t know it yet. The sell-off of job boards to conglomerates merely reveals what often happens with overhyped technologies that don’t mature to serve humanity. Job boards have outlived hopes that they would “transform the way people and jobs connect“ (from Randstad’s press release about buying Monster).

Dumb is scrambling to sell out to Dumber. And all the marketing in the world can’t change that.