After a decade-long warm-up ‑final­ly –AI is affect­ing job boards. As I’ve writ­ten ear­li­er this year, gen­er­a­tive AI has some obvi­ous use-cas­es for job boards and ATSs. In fact, if you take a dark­er view, gen­er­a­tive AI may do away with job boards entire­ly! Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it.

But…AI is affect­ing job boards in ways both large and small. For exam­ple:

• If you slap ‘AI’ on your com­pa­ny or offer­ing, VCs will give you mon­ey! See here, here, and here. Stick­ing ‘AI’ in your name or offer­ing isn’t a guar­an­teed mon­ey-mak­er – but it does­n’t hurt.
• AI may solve the prob­lem of crap­py job ads – and even if it does­n’t, since LinkedIn is using it, you will be also – very soon.
• AI will improve the hir­ing suc­cess of your employ­ers – if they fol­low its prompt­ing! You know what that means – the more hires from your appli­ca­tions, the more they like your job board, right?
• AI will make your pro­gram­mat­ic spend even more effec­tive – at least that’s what they claim. Even if it isn’t, it will be amus­ing to see one set of algo­rithms going head to head with anoth­er set of algo­rithms!
• AI is reshap­ing some job boards so much that they’re actu­al­ly becom­ing AI com­pa­nies! Of course, job boards have always adapt­ed to new tech­nol­o­gy, usu­al­ly by swal­low­ing it.
• Final­ly – and most impor­tant­ly – AI is what will keep job boards up at night! After all, we’ve weath­ered a reces­sion or three, COVID, the rise of remote work, pro­gram­mat­ic, CPA, social media, and a few oth­er things dur­ing the past decade. So now we have a new ten­sion-cre­ator!

Is AI going to actu­al­ly be the slay­er of job boards? The chant of ‘job boards are dead’ has been echo­ing in the halls of recruit­ment for almost two decades now – will AI actu­al­ly make it come true? Will AI sin­gle-hand­ed­ly get rid of this mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try? Or will AI become inte­grat­ed in every nook and cran­ny of the can­di­date acqui­si­tion process – from ini­tial attrac­tion to final hire?

By now, you prob­a­bly know my answer: AI is affect­ing job boards, and job boards will swal­low AI whole. They will drop it into their can­di­date engage­ment process­es. They will fold it into the job search process. They will use it to sup­ple­ment their employ­er sales efforts. Some of these efforts will work won­der­ful­ly. Some will fiz­zle. And three or five or ten years down the road, we will won­der how we ever got along with­out our AI-engorged job boards.

What do you think?

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