Remem­ber depart­ment stores? I do. I remem­ber going to Hub­bards, our local Texas ver­sion – rid­ing up the esca­la­tor to the men’s depart­ment on the 2nd floor, and of course the reverse path to the toy depart­ment in the base­ment. You could get pret­ty much every­thing there. These depart­ment stores were like Wal-Mart with­out the annoy­ances.

That’s how job boards have func­tioned in online recruit­ing: a one-stop shop for recruit­ment mar­ket­ing. Want a job ad? Here you go. How about a resume search? No prob­lem. A place to pro­mote your busi­ness? Check out our com­pa­ny pro­files! And on. If you were an employ­er, job boards want­ed to make it sim­ple for you to get every­thing you need­ed. In one place.

But depart­ment stores began to suf­fer from the ‘spe­cial­ists’. Want stuff for your bath­room? There’s a super­store for that! Toys? Anoth­er store! Kitchen stuff? Yes, anoth­er store. Each set of goods in the depart­ment store got its own store. The depart­ment stores’ mar­ket atom­ized. (And yes, depart­ment stores are still around, but they’re suf­fer­ing).

Guess what? The same thing has hap­pened to the job board world. Want job alerts? ZipRecruiter would love to help you with that. How about a com­pa­ny pro­file? The­Muse and Glass­door want to own this space. Job post­ings? Umm….Indeed. And so on.

Each dis­crete func­tion of the job board has been bro­ken out and ‘pro­duc­tized‘. In some cas­es, new sites are reassem­bling the pieces into dif­fer­ent types of offer­ings (think Vet­tery).

Is this good or bad? Nei­ther – it just is. It’s the nature of suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es to can­ni­bal­ize them­selves over time. First, the pio­neers (i.e., Sears or Mon­ster). Then, the upstarts, break­ing out a piece of the pio­neer­s’s busi­ness mod­el (i.e., Vic­to­ri­a’s Secret or Dice). And final­ly, the young Turks, promis­ing some­thing new – that often looks like some­thing old (Ama­zon or Hire). It’s a cliche, but it’s true – busi­ness­es are like sharks. They move or die. Change is inevitable.

If you’ve been in the biz for a while, you already know this. But this is a reminder – look at what you do for your clients. Look at it through their eyes. Peel away the pack­ag­ing and iden­ti­fy the real val­ue. Then think about how you can make it bet­ter – and make it stand out in sharp relief to every­thing else out there. Pro­duc­tize it.

I think it’s bet­ter than being atom­ized.

Note: This post first came out in 2016 – and I still think it’s very rel­e­vant!

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