…Wear­ing a red cape and pointy horns, he appears as every­thing you’ve ever dreamed of, or so the say­ing goes. In the job board com­mu­ni­ty and the broad­er tal­ent acqui­si­tion world, this advice is worth heeding—not just for the sake of our teams and brands but for the entire com­mu­ni­ty.

Over the past five years, the world has expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tions impact­ing how we think and oper­ate, both pro­fes­sion­al­ly and per­son­al­ly.

Some­thing tru­ly unique dur­ing the pan­dem­ic was how we start­ed find­ing new ways to engage with each oth­er and meet peo­ple where they were.

We began to under­stand the pow­er of com­mu­ni­ty and engage­ment in unex­pect­ed ways. Com­pa­nies were also will­ing to spend their mon­ey dif­fer­ent­ly, invest­ing in new tech­nolo­gies, strate­gies and nich­es as a part of their brand­ing and recruit­ing efforts.

We also saw an unprece­dent­ed flow of cash from fed­er­al and cen­tral mon­e­tary sys­tems to sta­bi­lize glob­al economies. The free flow of cash then became an expec­ta­tion in the mar­ket.

As we enter a peri­od of reset­tling, mar­kets are sta­bi­liz­ing and cor­rect­ing as they always do and as we should always expect them to do.

So, back to the dev­il.

(Side note) One of my favorite movies is The Dev­il’s Advo­cate, star­ring Keanu Reeves as an ambi­tious young lawyer and the icon­ic Al Paci­no as the dev­il. If you haven’t watched it before or recent­ly, I high­ly rec­om­mend.

What dis­guis­es do these dev­ils wear to tempt busi­ness own­ers and TA lead­ers? They appeal to our van­i­ties, as any clever dev­il would, tar­get­ing our ambi­tion, our need for com­fort and love, and our desire for rev­enue.

To exploit our ambi­tion, they may offer exclu­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties in new or devel­op­ing mar­kets. To sat­is­fy our need for com­fort, they may promise friend­ship, imply­ing they won’t turn against us while doing just that to our com­peti­tors. To appeal to our desire for rev­enue growth, they might offer what seems like end­less cash flow, espe­cial­ly in times of plen­ty.

As you may have heard on The Chad and Cheese Pod­cast this week, one such dev­il is again show­ing how their attire changes over time.

As mar­kets tight­en, pos­si­bly due to the dev­ils them­selves, they are begin­ning to cut off the cash flow that many agen­cies and job boards have depend­ed on for the last decade—a decade dur­ing which they’ve been pay­ing to siphon off our most valu­able asset: our job seek­ers. They now charge for access to the same con­tent and dis­tri­b­u­tion sources that were once free or organ­ic. They build walls around the job seek­er data we pro­vid­ed them.

Now, the next step in the strate­gies and tac­tics are com­ing to light.  Strate­gies like mov­ing from pay­ing “part­ners” for adver­tis­ing to pro­mot­ing their “high-qual­i­ty” con­tent direct­ly to job seek­ers with­out com­pen­sa­tion. They’re also focus­ing on niche ver­ti­cals like health­care and finance, after years of pro­mot­ing big-box adver­tis­ing as the only effec­tive way for TA lead­ers to spend bud­gets. As TA tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies, we must rec­og­nize this as a direct threat to our exis­tence. As TA lead­ers, we must eval­u­ate whether what we are pay­ing for is worth what we are get­ting in return.

Don’t get me wrong, part­ner­ships are cru­cial for all of us, and I rec­om­mend being open to every con­ver­sa­tion. This is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for small­er orga­ni­za­tions with­out large tech depart­ments or devel­op­ment bud­gets. We need part­ner­ships that enhance user expe­ri­ences, cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties for job seek­ers, deliv­er bet­ter out­comes all while dri­ving rev­enue growth.

In order to beat the dev­ils, we must demon­strate to our buy­ers and lead­er­ship that we are will­ing to evolve and are worth invest­ing in—not just because we lead to great hires, but because they see a pos­i­tive impact on their brands by using orga­ni­za­tions that have trust with­in their com­mu­ni­ties and ver­ti­cals.

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