4 Trends Shaping the Job Board Industry Today: Insights from CEO and Founder Michael Woodroow
Aspen Tech Labs’ CEO and founder, Michael Woodrow, recently had the pleasure of speaking with the good folks from the Job Board Doctor podcast. In this episode, he highlights the various trends shaping the job board industry and explains how job board leaders can stand out by making data management a priority.
Here are those four job board trends and why working with a jobs data management partner can help your board ride the job trend waves – and avoid getting swallowed up.
1. Salary Transparency: The New Normal
Salary transparency: Workers want it, places like Colorado and New York City already mandate it, and including it in your listings promotes organizational equity and attracts job seekers’ attention.
But today, only 7.8 percent of job listings feature salary information. That’s not enough. And legislators agree. It’s why we can expect to see an influx of salary transparency legislation in the next few years.
Job board leaders can do two things that will both cater to job seeker preferences and make it easier for employers to comply with these mandates:
- Feature salary prominently on your job boards before it’s required. This will help listings with salary information stand out – as they should. Having difficulty finding the compensation in a client’s listing? See if a salary parser can help. They’re designed to comb through every snippet of code in a listing, extract the salary, and format it for your job board.
- Encourage employers to include it in their listings. Salary data incentivizes job seekers to apply for open positions. This helps shorten the hiring process and helps your clients fill vacancies with qualified candidates – quickly.
Even in an employer’s job market, filling job vacancies isn’t easy. Updating your job board to meet job seeker preferences and impending legislative changes will help your clients fill openings more quickly, establishing you as a go-to partner in the job board industry.
2. There’s Room for CPC Revenue Growth
In the U.S., there’s room for job boards to grow CPC revenue. Even as some firms are announcing layoffs, we’re in a situation where there’s about one worker for every two available jobs. For employers, visibility of listings is essential – and they’re willing to pay for it.
If you haven’t reviewed your sponsored listing options for a while, now’s a good time to do so – and it’s a normal part of adapting a website to changing conditions. Anyone who’s been using Google for any length of time will be familiar with the changing ways sponsored results have appeared on the search giant’s results pages over the years.
What might your updates look like? For one thing, you may want to make more real estate for sponsored listings. We’d be happy to throw around some other ideas as well. Our JobMount software team helps customize the look and feel of our clients’ job boards, including how they incorporate paid listings.
3. Hybrid Work Is a Fixture – Not a Fad
Tech giants, like Google and Apple, have needed to walk back their mandatory five-day-per-week return-to-office plans in the face of emerging COVID variants and employee resignations. Translation: flexible work has become an expectation.
Yet only 4.4 percent of job listings are currently marked as hybrid or remote. And when 64 percent of employees would take a permanent work-from-home situation over a $30,000 pay raise, including remote or hybrid tags in job listings represents a massive opportunity. In other words, make the demand for workplace flexibility work for you.
Make it possible for employers to highlight remote and hybrid work with appropriate job tags at the top of a listing. Consider also encouraging your clients to evaluate whether a job needs to be in person or if it can be remote – the latter could attract more traffic and expand the pool of qualified applicants.
4. War-Fueled Inflation Is Driving Turnover
Many of our team members were in Ukraine when news broke of Russia’s invasion, and we acted swiftly to relocate employees and their families as needed. Though our employees are now safe, the war has continued to impact the global economy, primarily by driving up inflation rates.
This high inflation has many employees evaluating whether they can earn more elsewhere. They’re not imagining a financial squeeze, either. According to the BLS, wages have increased by just 5.6 percent over the past year, while prices have increased by eight percent – nearly a 2.5 percentage point gap.
Yes, including salaries helps job seekers, but consider what other portions of a compensation package your job board can highlight with job tags. Sign-on bonuses, 401(k) contributions, and employer-subsidized insurance premiums are all crucial components of a benefits package. Highlighting them adds color to your customers’ listings, making them more attractive to applicants.
Jobs Data Management Is Your Invisible Backbone
These are just four trends facing job boards today. Clean, updated jobs data helps you prepare for whatever trends we may see in the future.
No, data management isn’t flashy. People won’t point at your job board and say “Look, that’s the JSON delivery format capability!”
But data guides every action you take. From web scraping and organic backfilling to jobs taxonomy and custom mapping, strong jobs data management ensures you can adapt to changing trends and preferences.
If you want to learn more about the value jobs data management can bring to your organization, reach out. We even offer free month-long trials.