It’s the time of the year when every­one – even doc­tors – are mak­ing pre­dic­tions. I have done it in the past (last year turned out rea­son­ably accu­rate), but I do so with plen­ty of caveats (my favorite:  ‘No one cares’.). Yet – anoth­er year rolls around, and here I am. I think this is the def­i­n­i­tion of a com­pul­sion! So, in no par­tic­u­lar order, let me make some pre­dic­tions about the job board indus­try in 2023.

• Google does­n’t get any deep­er into recruit­ing: Google stuck their toe in the water a few years back with Hire – then yanked it out after what I sus­pect were legal con­cerns. Then they rolled out a job ad schema which not every­one uses (ahem- Indeed!). But any­thing fur­ther? I’m bet­ting no. Both pri­va­cy and anti-trust con­cerns have not fad­ed – and you can bet that if Google tries to mus­cle into the job ad busi­ness, that lit­tle com­plaint the Jobindex made a few months back will pale against the wave of out­rage from Indeed, Seek, etc.
• Meta, Google, Tik­Tok, and oth­er social behe­moths run afoul of pri­va­cy laws: I’m not sure you can call this a fore­cast, as these behe­moths seem to spawn pri­va­cy law­suits as quick­ly as they expose user data. But the U.S. seems to be push­ing for some kind of action on Tik­Tok, which will undoubt­ed­ly affect all of that ‘Tik­Tok resume’ buzz. Meta (is any­one on Face­book still?) wants to col­lect and spill data in the vir­tu­al world, in addi­tion to the real world. But you can be sure that any job board stak­ing every­thing on a sin­gle social media plat­form will live to rue the day!
• Con­fer­ences come back – sort of: There were in-per­son job board con­fer­ences last year – two, to be exact. And you can’t for­get the HR con­fer­ences! But it seems like­ly that in-per­son con­fer­ences will take some time before they real­ly ‘come back’ – if in fact they ever do. Once an event has been dis­placed for not one, but two years, I sus­pect that a per­cent­age of the for­mer atten­dees may decide that it’s no longer ‘required’ to show up – and thus atten­dance will resume, but at a low­er lev­el. Expert hint: don’t hold your next con­fer­ence in Chi­na – I hear they have a bit of a COVID prob­lem right now.
• Anoth­er job board com­pa­ny goes pub­lic: I am call­ing this a fore­cast because it might or might not hap­pen – even though the com­pa­ny involved has said it’s like­ly. Yes, folks: Step­stone will get its very own IPO this year, adding to the sur­pris­ing num­ber of pub­licly held job boards. Well, unless the mar­ket tanks – in which case it may not get an IPO. We shall see.
• Pod­casts reach their tip­ping point: It seems like 2022 was the year that every­one and their dog start­ed a pod­cast (yes, even ne’er do well job board doc­tors!). I pre­dict that even more folks will start pod­casts in 2023 – but giv­en the absolute and immutable nature of time, pod­cast lis­ten­ers will not lis­ten to all of these. And bit by bit, pod­casts will fall by the way­side. (In a relat­ed devel­op­ment, a job board doc­tor may be launch­ing a series of Tik­Toks fea­tur­ing var­i­ous job board lumi­nar­ies singing their favorite one-hit-won­ders. Or maybe not.)
• Tech tal­ent redis­trib­utes (cour­tesy of tech lay­offs by the big boys): Remem­ber how vora­cious­ly the big tech giants such as Ama­zon, Google, etc. gob­bled up tech folks in the pre­ced­ing two years, hir­ing them in gigan­tic clumps? Seems that now they are lay­ing off these folks in a sim­i­lar, over-the-top man­ner. How­ev­er – the major­i­ty of those folks are being absorbed by all of the com­pa­nies that don’t have a big name, but do real­ly inter­est­ing stuff. My pre­dic­tion? This redis­tri­b­u­tion of tech tal­ent will ben­e­fit: a) the tech folks; b) the rest of us; and c) all of those com­pa­nies who just upgrad­ed their tech depart­ments. Win win win!

See? I could do this for hours – and prob­a­bly be wrong for days! Instead, I think it would be wise to go back to job-board-doc­tor­ing. I hope you have a phe­nom­e­nal 2023!!

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