Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces

Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Saïd Eastman, a 20-year industry veteran and former executive at Monster and CareerBuilder. Cohost Peter M. Zollman of the AIM Group is in Budapest, Hungary for its annual RecBuzz conference, so our other cohost, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, talks with Saïd about how the stealth start-up that he is leading is aiming to bring much needed improvement to the industry by providing the tools and incentives so that candidates become active participants instead of products. Saïd and Steven discuss how there's no simple solution. Some of what is required is a change to how we think about the process, and some requires some technology such as blockchain to validate credentials and engagement.

Lee Cage Jr. is today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. He is the Director for Enterprise Transformation, Strategy, and Technology for BDO USA; a human resources management NCO for the U.S. Army National Guard; and the host of the "15 Minutes With" podcast, hosted by WRKdefined. Oh, and he's also a musician. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Lee how choosing to not take action is a choice and that we should embrace the idea of taking baby steps when we're faced with large projects or challenges. He also has some very wise closing advice about how our industry uses technology.

It's been a lean year for just about every job board in just about every country and niche. Customers aren't buying as many postings or resume/CV searching packages, and so revenues for many are flat or down. Are there other ways to both help and monetize the candidates who use our sites? Marc Belaiche, is the founder of Guhuza and TorontoJobs.ca. He joins cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site to discuss additional revenue opportunities. One is to add interview-on-demand tech that delivers to employers a short list of matching candidates and enables them to schedule interviews as soon as they and the employer are both available, which often is within minutes.

It never ceases to amaze us how different companies in our space build their businesses. Some focus narrowly and try to dominate a niche. Others diversify into related businesses like ATS, career fairs,and employer branding. Przemek Gacek is the CEO of Grupa Pracuj, the dominant job board in Poland with significant business in Ukraine and Germany. During the Great Recession of 2009-10, they began to diversify into related businesses, which made them a more strategic vendor for employers and better defend against competitors, including Indeed. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Przemek not just their past moves, but where they're heading, including acquisitions.

For the past 1.5 years, our founder, Steven Rothberg, has hosted a very collegial and collaborative online meeting of dozens of leaders of job boards and recruitment marketplaces. The Job Board Leaders’ Roundtable meetings are held at 11:00am U.S. Eastern on the second Thursday of each month. They’re all free to everyone involved. Send an email to Steven at [email protected] to be added to the invitation list for future events. Initially, the meetings had no real agenda but were just friendly places to share ideas. We quickly moved to a format where each meeting had a particular topic, and Steven moderated the discussion. Starting in January, the format has further evolved to feature a guest who Steven interviews for roughly the first half hour, and then we open up the conversation so that any attendee can ask questions, share ideas, etc. Today’s episode featured Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the AIM Group. Their business is focused primarily on classified advertising in verticals such as real estate, automobiles, and jobs. For jobs, they host the annual RecBuzz conference and also publish the Recruitment Intelligence Report. Steven and others from College Recruiter have attended (and loved) RecBuzz multiple times and have subscribed to the Report since its very first edition. Steven and Peter also cohost the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. Peter, Steven, and a number of today’s attendees discuss the dominance of LinkedIn and Indeed in our industry, how that wasn’t accidental but due to a lot of great decision making and execution by both, and how best the tens of thousands of other sites in our industry can not only survive but even thrive.

Remember the days when a family member helped you write your resume / CV, found jobs that were a good match, and even submitted applications for you? AI can now do all of that for you, but that's not to say that it does it well. Yes, employers have AI agents that search for and contact candidates. And, yes, candidates have AI agents that search for and apply to jobs. But those agents can't find or communicate with each other, or can they? Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Tom Chevalier, former product manager at Appcast, Inc and now the founder of start-up Tink AI, a meeting place of sorts for employer and candidate AI agents. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Tom whether AI agents spell doom for job boards. His direct and confident answer may surprise you.

On today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, we're joined by Kelly Gorfine of Horizon2Media, which 10 months ago acquired aggregator Zhejiang Jiuerjiu Chemicals Co.,LTD, and Christopher Campbell of Reticular Media. Together, they walk cohosts Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site and Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group through JuJu's history, its decline, Kelly's decision to acquire it, and how its business model will and will not change. Some of what won't changed might surprise you, and some of what will change will almost certainly surprise you.

New sites in our industry often face a chicken-and-egg problem: do you need meaningful candidate engagement before you can get meaningful revenue from employers, or do you need meaningful employer engagement before you can get meaningful traffic? Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Timothy Makalinao of Bandana, a new job board based in Brooklyn, New York that cracked the secret to building massive organic traffic without first winning a massive employer engagement. How? By using LLMs and other tech to create a superior candidate experience and really, really understanding the nuances of its local markets. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Tim his family's immigrant success story, the origins of Bandana, and what's next in this inspiring story.

Today's Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is a little different than what we usually do. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss the content creators we follow to keep up with developments in our industry. In alphabetic order, they include Heather Bussing, Kate Bischoff, Joel Cheesman, Gerry Crispin, Jeff Dickey-Chasins, Adam Gordon, Chris Hoyt, Jon Hyman, Jeanette Leeds, Hung Lee, Chris Russell, Chad Sowash, Julie Sowash, John Sumser, and Kevin Wheeler. Oh, and each other. Some publish e-newsletters, others podcasts or webcasts. Some do more than one. Some are available for free. Others cost money, but are well worth it. Who did we miss?

On today's Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, we dive into an issue that impacts almost every site to some degree: fake jobs, candidate profiles, or both. Fraud prevention and scam investigation consultant JAY JONES is the owner of The Profiler Protection Service. And he's a man on a mission to protect all of us, including his job board and candidate clients, from fraud. For example, he helped Teal get 150 fake jobs removed from LinkedIn (see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonesdoyoucopy_theprofiler-activity-7407362764278632448-ftVr ). Together with cohosts Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site and Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds), we learn how to find the fraudulent content, the impact it can have if left unchecked, why our industry is vulnerable to it, and how to get it removed.

Matt Charney, principal analyst for industry and markets for Kyle & Co. and executive editor of Mediabistro, is our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. Cohosts Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site and Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) talk with Matt about the significant shift by the biggest sites in our industry to the use of AI to, hopefully, better match candidates with jobs, and the inability and fear of smaller players to even fight let alone win that battle. Matt believes the smaller players already and will increasing have advantages, and we discuss those. We also dive into the article he wrote months ago for the Transform Blog about the impact AI is having in the workplace and how none of the workers knew on which job board they applied through.

The need to collect and use disposition data has massively increased as recruitment advertising has moved from newspapers to traditional job boards to job boards which are largely performance-basis. But disposition data can mean differ things, and the ways of collecting and using it differ too. Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Jennifer Johansson, the founder and CEO of Placed. Since its founding in 2016, it's grown from being a UK-based app focused on frontline hiring to also helping employers with non-frontline roles and also in Germany and the United States. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Jennifer why Placed collects and uses data such as applications, interviews, offers, and even hires and where it can be a challenge to do so.

Our industry has existed for more than three decades, yet a still undervalued element of it is the data that almost any job board of any size possesses. And we're not talking about resumes / CVs. We're talking about the job postings. Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Patrick Martinchek of JobFront.io, which uses AI to scrape, enhance, distribute, and otherwise manage job data at scale. It's customers include job boards but, more interestingly, organizations who recognize that job data reflects problems and opportunities faced by the employers and might impact their financial prospects. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Patrick use cases for the data, some of which have become economically viable because of the plummeting cost of using OpenAI and its competitors.

There's been an widely held belief that users of ChatGPT and other LLMs are better informed and deliberative before clicking to visit a consumer site to buy a product or even apply to a job. That belief seems to be wrong. Today's guests on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast are Maximilian Kaiser of Grips Intelligence and Dr. Prof. Christian Schulze of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Together, they just published a paper at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5585812 , which shows that traffic from traditional sources such as job boards and Google convert at a much higher rate than traffic from LLMs, although the gap is narrowing. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site ask why traffic from traditional sites converts better, if the impact on career sites differs from shopping sites, and how long it will take for the gap to disappear.

Today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast features a discussion on data and connectivity, both in terms of how job boards have used those as well as how, in the age of AI, they can and should be. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site are joined by Pietro Manenti of HrFlow.ai, which is on a mission to make AI and data integration pipelines a commodity. If your use of data is largely about optimization, that's great, but this episode will help you see how much more you can do with the same data.

Our cohosts, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site and Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group get together for an episode with a few tricks and, hopefully, a lot of treats. They talk about what they learned on the fall conference circuit, and it was a lot. Peter discusses promising demos of new AI-powered hiring systems being rolled out by Indeed, LinkedIn, and other giants of our industry. Steven agrees with the promise of those outliers, but focuses more on what the small- and medium-sized players admit about their use of AI when off-the-record and how none of the systems works well unless both the employers and the candidates massively improve the data they're feeding into the systems in the way of job ads and resumes / CVs.

Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is John Marino, the cofounder and CEO of Mashalot AI, a very new entrant into our space with a very different business model. John's vision for the new venture was born out of the frustration that he and his 19-year-old son experienced when applying to jobs on some of the largest job boards. The idea was to use AI to automate the search and application process and, instead of charging employers to advertise their job openings, candidates would pay. As a result, the site targets candidates with more money than time. So far, postings come primarily from Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter. John tells cohosts Peter M. Zollman of the AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site that they're not scraping postings but, instead, using a third-party who has authorization from the job boards to feed their job postings to Mashalot AI. Who that third-party might be is unknown to your cohosts at this time, but let us know in the comments below if you have any guesses.

On today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, cohosts Peter M. Zollman of the AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site talk about how buyers and sellers of job boards and other businesses go to conferences not just to learn about mergers and acquisitions, but also create those opportunities. Peter talks about some of the great people that he just saw at HR Tech including George LaRocque, Sarah White, and Mark Feffer. Our cohosts also talk about some of their favorite conferences such as RecBuzz, Job Boards Connect, TAtech, RecFest USA, Unleash, SHRM National, SHRM Talent Management, ERE, LinkedIn, and Indeed. Agree? Disagree? Any we missed?

Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Bill Richards of WJR Advisory. Bill has worked for several, leading job boards including Indeed, eFinancialCareers, and Reed.co.uk and now advises others, including some new entrants into our space. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of the AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site talk with Bill about the impact that we're already seeing from the rapid adoption of AI but, more importantly, what we're likely to see and how we need to adapt. This is far from a Chicken Little conversation as no one talked about how AI is causing the sky to fall on our industry. Instead, the focus was on how best to adapt and prosper in this new environment.

On today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, Linsey Fagan, global strategist at Indeed, joins us to talk about its new research into tech hiring. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site talk with Linsey about the overall health of tech hiring (spoiler alert: it isn't great) but how that varies markedly when you look at different segments, such as entry-level versus experienced or even in different geographic areas. There are also some findings that may surprise you, including how many tech workers are happy in their jobs, how many are looking, and how aggressively they're looking. Peter then asks about the many changes at Indeed, both in terms of its leadership as well as its products, and Linsey responds directly to both.

Peter Hoogendijk, the head of product and operations for Aimwel, joins the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast to discuss new research by Aimwel into how Google's new, generative AI summaries above the traditional search results are killing traffic to job boards. Or is it? Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with their guest the struggles that many job boards are experiencing, particularly those that, for years, relied exclusively on free (organic) traffic from Google and are now finding that much and sometimes most of that has vanished. AIM Group is about to publish a more in-depth story in its Recruitment Intelligence Report and Marketplace Report, so be sure to read those for more insights.

On today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, we learn about mergers and acquisitions from Patrick De Wachter of Mediahuis nv. Mediahuis features 1.4 million newspapers and more than two million digital news consumers per day in Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Germany. It's 6,000 employees work daily for its newspaper titles, radio and television channels, and online platforms. Patrick focuses on evaluating potential acquisition targets and divestiture opportunities. That's interesting enough in normal times, but these aren't normal times as technology and business models are rapidly evolving. Some of how he's approaching these challenges may be different from what you might have thought, and certainly was different from what was thought by our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site.

On today's "breaking news" episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, we discuss yesterday's merger of recruitment automation platform Visage.Jobs with AI candidate sourcing tool Rolebot. Neither are job boards / recruitment marketplaces, but both are closely related. Our guest, Joss Leufrancois is the CEO of Visage. The newly combined company will operate under the Visage brand with Joss as the CEO. Our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, dig into the why's and how's of the acquisition, including how the conversations started; what attracted the organizations to each other; and was it a cash deal, stock swap, or something else? If you're looking to grow through acquisition, or exit, you'll appreciate a lot of what we learned from Joss.

Employers, staffing agencies, RPOs, and employment advertising agencies are increasingly asking and even demanding from their job board / recruitment marketplace vendors that the candidates delivered be of higher quality, even if there is lower quantity. But are these requests actually driving purchasing and renewal decisions, or is it just talk? On today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast, cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site talk about the quality versus quantity conundrum. Should our industry be accountable for quality? Is there any common, objective definition for what that means? Are employers ready, willing, and able to provide that data to us in a way that allows us take action on it?

Episodes of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast are typically 15-minutes. Long enough to get a good understanding of the topic, not long enough to bore the socks off of our audience. Cohosts Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site and Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) knew going into today's episode that the topic needed more time to do it justice, and so we are giving it that time. Our guest is Matteo Nicolo, director of international sales for CareerBuilder + Monster. Together, we talk a little about the history of Careerbuilder and Monster before they were combined by Randstad and Apollo Global Management, Inc., how they were operated after that combination, the impact of the recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and how terribly they're treating the couple of hundred European employees despite having far more financial resources than necessary in order to treat them humanely.

Opeyemi Awoyemi of Fast Forward Venture Studio is our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. Join our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, as we learn more about venture capital, including what VCs want to see when they're considering investing in a job board / recruitment marketplace. Opeyemi was the founder of Jobberman Ghana and Jobberman Nigeria, two of Africa's leading job boards, and now owned by Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM) and led by Hilda Kabushenga. After selling Jobberman, Opeyemi worked for Indeed and SimplyHired before starting Fast Forward.

Today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast features not just one, but two superb guests: Robert Newry, chief explorer at Arctic Shores, and Martyn Redstone, founder of Eunomia HR.  Our regular cohost, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group, was unavailable but will be back with us in two weeks. Our other cohost, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, discussed with Robert and Martyn how the use of some kinds of artificial intelligence (AI) in the hiring process is a good thing, but that the use of large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, Grok, and others pose great dangers for employers.  Why? First, even if there weren't legal issues, they don't work well. They're good tools, but not well suited to that task. Second, despite what some of the TA tech vendors would like us all to believe, there are massive legal issues. Robert's "got to stop" post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-newry-2349596_ai-recruitment-arcticshores-activity-7339275826749734913-zg0u/ Martyn's LLM reality check document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XQvKDAOYtkCFBjPlDA2ipFmI6LzQRgHm/view

Are you thinking of raising investment money or perhaps even selling your job board / recruitment marketplace? Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast lives and breathes that. Georgios Markakis the managing partner of Venero Capital Advisors, which does more investment and M&A deals in the HR tech space than any other firm.  Our cohost, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group, was unavailable for today's recording, but will be back with us a couple of episodes from now.  Our cohost, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, talks with Georgios about the factors that go into the decision-making process for whether and when to raise investment money or even sell your business, including how to determine when the time is right and how to value your business.

Jim Durbin of Respondable Recruitment Media a/k/a The Indeed Whisperer is back with some more fantastic insight into changes announced by the world's largest job board, Indeed. Jim posted to LinkedIn earlier today that, effective immediately, Indeed will not accept any new, single-sourced feeds for integrated ATS partners in the U.S. So, what does that mean? As Jim wrote, "It means third-party agencies who have been doing the hard work of cleaning up your job postings are not going to be able to feed those jobs to Indeed anymore by XML. Instead, that information has to come from your ATS. "Let's say that you're a Fortune 1,000 company, government agency, or other employer hiring at scale. There's an excellent chance that you have an ATS, an ad agency, and a programmatic job ad distributor. Sometimes, your agency is also your programmatic vendor, such as Appcast, Radancy, and Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Until now, they may have scraped jobs from your ATS; cleaned up a LOT of the data; determined which jobs need traffic from Indeed, LinkedIn, Talent.com, College Recruiter, and other job boards; and sent them your CPCs or CPAs. Now, it seems you'll need to send the jobs directly to Indeed from your ATS. Is this a good change? In some ways, absolutely. But, even in those ways, it could be massively disruptive and painful for a lot of employers.

Professionals who are new to an industry or just about any kind of startup face the same struggle: how to build their brand so that potential customers can find them when trying to determine if they can trust them enough to do business with them. Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Jason Barnard of Kalicube, which helps individuals build their personal brands online so that potential customers who are researching you get the information they need to feel comfortable enough to give you a chance. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site learn about how building your brand is linked to the importance of niching down by understanding the profile of your ideal customer.

Big news from the (by far) biggest job board / recruitment marketplace in the world. Indeed just announced that its Chief Executive Officer, Chris Hyams, is leaving effective immediately and being replaced by his predecessor, Hisayuki Idekoba, better known as Deko. No reason was given for Hyams' departure.  Deko will remain president and CEO of Indeed’s parent company, Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd. He won't be relocating to Indeed's headquarters in Austin, Texas, however, as he's lived there for years. As reported by the AIM Group, "Deko led the acquisition of Indeed by Recruit Holdings in 2012, and served as CEO and president from 2013 to 2019. Hyams followed Deko as Indeed CEO. He joined the company as VP of product when it had 130 employees. In his note to the Indeed team, Hyams said traffic to the company has increased 15x and revenue has grown 200x."  Our cohost, Peter Zollman of the AIM Group, speculated that Deko will only be CEO temporarily and be replaced by Christian Sutherland-Wong the CEO of Indeed's sister site, Glassdoor. Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter speculated that Deko will be replaced by Chris Forman, who was the CEO of Appcast until he stepped aside at the end of 2024 in favor of Matt Molinari.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Sandra Feldmann, founder of Itsatalent.business. It's A Talent helps talent acquisition leaders improve their hiring practices and TA vendors better reach their customers, whether those are candidates, employers, or other stakeholders. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter talk with Sandra about how job boards a/k/a recruitment marketplaces are an important part of the hiring process, but typically only a minor part when everything else is considered. And how important a part our sites are varies widely depending on such factors as the job's location, occupational field, number of hires, employer brand, and so much more.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Vir Kashyap, general partner of Zeetah Holdings and Everywhere Ventures In 2009, Vir cofounded Babajob.com, India's largest, lightly skilled jobs marketplace. In 2018, became director of global strategies and operations for Indeed. Today, he invests in early-stage companies that leverage India. In today's episode, our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site explore with Vir how entry-level and blue-collar marketplaces look in developing versus developed countries, the impact of AI, and more. Oh, and some nice shout-outs for Christian Forman, founder of Appcast, Inc; and Job&Talent.

Ethan Bloomfield, long-time industry veteran, one of the first employees at ZipRecruiter, and founder of consultancy firm, VitalFew, is our special guest for this special episode.  Yes, this is our 100th episode. Pardon our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, while they pat themselves on their backs. If there's one thing that has remained unchanged about our industry, it is that it continually changes. How we attract candidates to the jobs advertised on our sites is undergoing massive change. Instead of Google being the starting point for most job searches and many of those going to our sites, candidates are increasingly starting their searches on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Anthropic, and others.  If this only recently dawned on you, you're in good company. It was also new to the founder of Appcast, Chris Forman, until a couple of months ago. Search engine optimization consultants like Ken Shafer can help, but Ethan provides an excellent roadmap for our listeners too.

Tami Nutt, the vice president of research and insights for Aspect43 is our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. Aspect43 is an advisory firm whose clients are the HR solution providers, including job boards / recruitment marketplaces, and whose audience are the buyers of those products. Aspect43 was founded by Sarah White, who recently sold the advisory firm to Joey Price's JumpStart HR, a strategic partner in HR consultancy and technology analysis. Sarah is now Senior Vice President, Head of Innovation & Transformation at SAP SuccessFactors.  In Tami's conversation with cohosts Peter M. Zollman of the AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, she makes the case that HR budgets haven't changed much overall, but what has changed over the past couple of years is that the buyers are being much more careful about where they spend their money. What has also changed is that employers who placed great value on the volume of applications in 2021 and 2022 no longer do. Instead, they're far more focused on the quality of those applications.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Mark Emery, founder and CEO of Juvo Jobs a/k/a Juvo360. Juvo Jobs is a great example of a job board / recruitment marketplace that helps millions of candidates find jobs, does so in an innovative manner, yet isn't in the headlines nearly as much as the biggest players. In today's episode, our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site explore why hyper-local job listings benefit candidates and employers and how Mark's team successfully markets those listings through reseller arrangements with payroll, background check, and other such organizations.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Mark Chaffey, the cofounder and CEO of UK-based hackajob. Hackajob matches candidates with tech jobs in the UK, USA, and India. Candidates do not apply to jobs but, instead, the employer applies to the candidates. The employer describes the role, the AI lists matches, the employer requests interviews, and the candidates choose whether to accept them. When they do, the employer pays. In today's episode, our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site discuss with Mark why, as Cory Kapner of Recruitics says, some friction in the hiring process is a good thing and charging candidates a nominal fee to apply to a job, as Alexander Chukovski of crypto-careers.com suggested on LinkedIn, is a good idea but not without its own problems.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Shauna Cole, the president and founder of a leading, Canadian, diversity job board, hirediverse.ca. Before we even started to speak with Shauna, our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, mentioned that last week's guest was another founder, Jeff Taylor (founder of Monster); Steven will discuss USA diversity and other hiring issues on Hung Lee's Recruiting Brainfood on March 21st; and Peter will at RecBuzz in Vienna on April 8th and 9th. Diversity means very different things in different markets. In the U.S., it has been far more about legal compliance than in Canada and some other markets. Shauna talks about that, including providing insights into the make-up of her employer customers and how different customers evaluate her site differently.

The earliest job boards, including Online Career Center and TheMonsterBoard, grew out of the pre-web bulletin boards. Our guest today on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Jeff Taylor, founder of TheMonsterBoard, which re-branded as Monster and was instrumental in creating our industry. Our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds) and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, talk with Jeff about what caused him to found Monster, some of the early challenges, how our industry is still struggling with some of those challenges, and what is coming next. Jeff's new venture, BoomBand is set to launch this fall. It promises to push AI/machine learning to map the talent landscape and re-imagine the tools, user interface, and career flows to present candidates and employers with new ways to engage.

Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Sunkanmi Ola, co-founder and CEO of Propel, which is building the largest ecosystem of tech talent communities across the world - over 200 specialized communities, with 800,000+ members spread across 22 countries and three continents. Together with cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, we learn about a very different way of identifying, reaching, and engaging candidates than that used by most job boards and recruitment marketplaces. If Reddit ran job postings and otherwise enabled employers to engage with its users, you'd have a platform somewhat like Propel. Some communities on Propel are for Java developers in a particular metro and were created by Propel. Others existed in real life before Propel even existed and have now migrated partially or even fully to the Propel platform.

Our regular cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, are working their way through the 2025 Appcast Recruitment Benchmark Report.  As usual, the report is full of great information. Rather than making you wait for our analysis, we thought it would be fun to use Google's new NotebookLM product to create a quick podcast episode. Listen in as the guest AI cohosts discuss the findings in the report and let us know in the comments what you think about them. The report highlights a labor market that has reached a near-perfect balance, shifting away from the Great Resignation to a period of stability. Employees are staying put, reducing churn and hiring activity. Despite expectations, CPCs rose over 27% in 2024, likely due to harder-to-fill roles and job board pricing. Apply rates surged 35% to 6.1%, keeping CPA relatively stable with only a 4.8% increase. White-collar jobs saw higher application rates due to increased competition, while healthcare, education, and construction struggled to attract applicants. Mobile applications dominated "standing-up jobs," while "sitting-down jobs" saw more desktop applications. Geographic differences impacted hiring costs, but every state experienced lower CPAs in 2024. A balanced recruitment strategy should incorporate search, display, and social media. Search and display ads target active candidates, while social media helps build employer brands and engage passive talent. Employers must track internal recruitment data, optimize for mobile users, and diversify sourcing strategies to maximize hiring success. The key to effective recruitment in 2025 lies in refining data-driven strategies tailored to specific job markets and hiring needs.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Terry Baker, the CEO of Daxtra Technologies. Daxtra is a world-leading specialist in high-accuracy, multilingual job and resume parsing, semantic search, matching, and recruitment automation. Employers use Daxtra to manage all of their candidate interactions instead of having to log in and do so through their ATS, various job boards they're working with, email, and more. Our cohost, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group, was unavailable for today's episode. Our other cohost, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, met with Terry. Together, they talked about the impact of AI products on recruiters and talent acquisition departments and how that might change whether they continue to buy from job boards, what they buy, and how much they buy. Spoiler alert: there will be some winners and some losers.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Brandon Mitchell, founder and CEO of WriteSea, which sells AI-driven career tools designed to enhance the job search experience, improve placement rates, and drive better outcomes for candidates. Our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, explore with Brandon why offering freemium services like those from WriteSea can both boost revenues for job boards / recruitment marketplaces while, at the same time, enhance the user experience. Toward the end, we also dig into some exciting news for our friends at WriteSea. Spoiler alert: Meta is a big fan, as are a number of higher education institutions.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Kaori Kido, the Global Business Development Manager of Kakaku.com's Kyujin Box Media Planning Dept., better known outside of Japan as Jobcube. Kyujin Box is one of Japan's leading job boards / recruitment marketplaces. In Japan, its customers are mostly employers and staffing companies. A couple of years ago, it began to expand into other countries, including Singapore and the United States. In those markets, it operates under the Jobcube brand using an arbitrage, aggregator model by buying and selling candidate traffic with other job boards. In today's episode, our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter explore why Kakaku.com decided to expand into other countries, why it chose Singapore and the United States, and how it is different operating in Japan versus those other countries.

The end of any year tends to bring out the prognosticators and, with them, lists of predictions. Our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter, decided not to disappoint those who really, really want to learn what we're thinking about for 2025. In today's episode, we each share our thoughts about how AI will be used by job boards / recruitment marketplaces, the economics impacting our businesses (spoiler alert...the word Trump may have come up), the Careerbuilder+Monster merger (Steven shares an underreported, positive aspect about them), Indeed becoming more restrictive about what postings it will accept (Jim Durbin gets a nice shout-out), and conferences such as TAtech, RecBuzz, Job Boards Connect, RecFest, Unleash, ERE, and others. Bottom line: we foresee a lot of change. A lot. What did we miss?

The Internet brought with it countless changes to society. For example, employers no longer control their employer brand. If past, present, and future employees are largely in control of your employer brand, your job posting ads and other marketing materials be authentic. But job ads from those looking to steal the data of those interested in working for you have also made authentication important. So, now, it isn't just important that you honestly communicate what it is like to work for you, but also important that candidates trust that the entity that posted the ad is actually the entity doing the hiring. Today's guest, Sean Horton of JobsInLogistics.com, shares with cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site the impact on the family of niche job boards his company operates from the increased need to be authentic and authenticated.

What do you get when you combine the American Thanksgiving Day holiday and three podcasters? Some bad jokes about turkey...and a few great takeaways. What you also get is a robust discussion with guest William Tincup of WRKdefined, a new network for work-related podcasts; Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds); and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site. In addition to some jokes about turkey, we discuss what works well for job boards and recruitment marketplaces that have podcasts targeting employers, candidates, or both. What content should they focus on? How many minutes long should they be? Should you also post excerpts to social platforms like TikTok?

The re-election 1.5 weeks ago of Donald Trump was a shock to some, a relief to others, and sure to bring changes to the U.S. and global economies, therefore hiring, and therefore our job board / recruitment marketplace industry. In today's episode, guest Joseph Stubblebine of Lensa and cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter discuss what leaders in our industry should expect over the coming months and years. Some, they believe, will be negative, some positive, and a lot uncertain. The election was consequential and today's episode will help our listeners better understand its ramifications for our industry.

JobGet today acquired SnagAJob, its 3rd acquisition in 18 months.  JobGet is an app-first platform for quickly hiring hourly workers. In that niche, speed is key. SnagAJob was founded 25 years ago and was the largest hourly worker site in the U.S. with 100 million profiles of hourly workers. In our interview with JobGet's CEO, Tony Liu, he acknowledged some overlap between users but indicated that much of the data that Snagajob had on those users was not also possessed by JobGet and that roughly half of the users in Snagajob's database do not appear to be duplicative. So, although the deal seems on the surface to be designed to eliminate a direct competitor, there are great opportunities to create a one plus one equals three. Cohosts Peter Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter are grateful to Tony for making time for the interview on what surely was a busy and momentous day for JobGet.

Another week, another fine...and another lawsuit. Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter get together for a little one-on-one episode to talk about some newsworthy legal matters impacting the two biggest players in our industry. First, we talk a little about Indeed being sued for patent infringement. Whether the lawsuit has merits or not is unknown at this point, but neither Peter nor Steven seemed to feel that it worthy of getting worked up about. Pun intended. More interestingly, Ireland fined LinkedIn for ad-related privacy violations and it appears likely that Microsoft, the parent of LinkedIn, not only expected the fine but set aside more money to pay for it than needed and has already pledged to do what is needed in order to be compliant. With 190 privacy laws globally, it wasn't all that surprising to your cohorts that a global player like LinkedIn got its hand caught in the cookie jar.