Well, that’s a pushy way to start a post – claim­ing the adap­tive bril­liance of job boards! Apart from the asser­tion, it implies that job boards are still going strong – that they aren’t dying, fad­ing, or oth­er­wise dis­ap­pear­ing (Indeed’s lay­offs to the con­trary). Hey, you know what? It’s true – job boards (no mat­ter whether they call them­selves hir­ing plat­forms, mar­ket­places, pro­gram­mat­ic net­works, or some­thing else) seem to be thriv­ing in a world where there are more jobs than peo­ple.

But…

Let’s get back to my orig­i­nal auda­cious asser­tion: the adap­tive bril­liance of job boards. What in the heck am I talk­ing about?

To explain, let’s take a look at the lat­est ‘big news’ in the indus­try: Chat­G­PT. The AI tool has been seen in some quar­ters as rev­o­lu­tion­ary for recruit­ing. It’s true that employ­ers are using it to cre­ate job ads, and that job seek­ers are lean­ing on AI to batch-apply to hun­dreds of jobs. It reminds me quite a bit of a pre­vi­ous ‘rev­o­lu­tion­ary’ wave in recruit­ing: the intro­duc­tion of social media. Both were/are being over­sold, and yet social media became part of the recruiter’s toolk­it, as I sus­pect Chat­G­PT will.

But remem­ber? Social media was pitched as some­thing that would destroy job boards. Umm, no. Instead, job boards adapt­ed their offer­ings to include social media. They used social media to cap­ture can­di­date traf­fic, and they pro­vid­ed social media ser­vices to their employ­er clients.

And now? I am pret­ty sure that job boards will adapt their offer­ings to include Chat­G­PT and all of its con­cep­tu­al com­peti­tors. Thus…the adap­tive bril­liance of job boards. They sim­ply absorb com­pet­i­tive tools and tech­nolo­gies, and fold them into the basic mod­el of con­cen­trat­ing can­di­dates and expos­ing employ­ers to those can­di­dates.

What about those job boards that don’t adapt? As I’ve men­tioned in pre­vi­ous posts, they will dis­ap­pear.

Will job boards meet a tech­nol­o­gy or tac­tic that they can­not fold into their offer­ing? Per­haps. But I’ve giv­en up try­ing to pre­dict what that might be. Instead, I focus on the ‘how’: how a new tech­nol­o­gy, tac­tic, or mod­el can be uti­lized by a job board to do a bet­ter job of con­nect­ing can­di­dates and employ­ers. You should, too!

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