For those that missed it, in February, Facebook rolled out its first dedicated jobs platform (read more here). It now seems that all of the major tech players have an eye on the jobs market, with Google last week announcing its flagship Jobs product. You can read more about the launch of Google Jobs here.
As with all major rollouts, the US seems to be getting the first exposure to these products. Facebook Jobs is in Australia, but only a few company pages currently have it. This will probably quickly change over the coming weeks. Google Jobs is also starting in the US but the magic words “with more countries coming in the future” suggests it won’t be long until Australia and New Zealand see the Jobs product in our local markets.
The big questions are: what does this mean for both the existing job boards and job aggregators, such as Seek, Indeed, Adzuna etc., and what impact will this have on the recruitment industry itself?
One incredibly interesting perspective suggests Google Jobs could spell the end for Indeed. This is because Indeed currently gets a large proportion of all its traffic from Google search. The full article can be found here.
Obviously, the Job Board industry is going to experience a lot of change over the next few years. The impact that things such as Google Jobs and Facebook Jobs will have will largely depend on the resources the two companies are prepared to invest. There is no doubt that if they truly want to play in this space, they can do so, but it will require a concerted effort to oust the existing market leaders.
For recruiters, in the short term, this increased competition can only be a good thing with an increasing number of sources that can be utilised for candidate attraction. In the long-term, things are less clear. It may well be that job search is just dominated by different, bigger organisations. Our advice is to keep an eye on these changes and be prepared to try some of the newer tools as you just might strike candidate gold.
