One Job Board Owner’s Outlook for 2011

There’s no doubt that 2009 and 2010 were pretty difficult years for CollegeRecruiter.com along with virtually every other job board. Most estimates are that our industry lost 60 to 70 percent of its revenue yet we also doubled our market share so as the economy continues to (slowly) recover, job boards will end up being stronger than they were prior to the economic and employment market meltdown.

We’re seeing significantly more interest and significantly larger proposals now than we saw at this time in 2009 and late 2009 was significantly better than late 2008. So we’re somewhat optimistic. I think that the phrase “cautiously optimistic” best describes our attitude toward recruitment advertising in general and the portion of that business that we capture.

One of the reasons that our industry has doubled its market share is that many of the sites have done a really, really good job of using these couple of years of downtime to greatly improve their offerings. That hasn’t been the case with some industries. So the value that we deliver to our employer clients has increased significantly and many of them see that. We will need to continue to battle against the “job boards are dead mythology,” but I’m not terribly concerned about that as employers with larger or more difficult hiring needs will soon discover that social media and other alternatives to job boards are valuable but no more the silver bullet solution than job boards were when we essentially came into existence in the mid-1990’s.