Are Job Boards Dead? A Look Into The Future of Recruitment Advertising

Last week marked the end of an era, as Monster and CareerBuilder announced they were entering a marriage of equals, more or less undermining most of their sales messaging over the last two decades of this once powerful duopoly. Not so very long ago, of course, such a move would have been unthinkable.

When I first started out in this industry, Monster was an S&P 500 index stock (NYSE: MWW) and CareerBuilder was the only thing keeping the ersatz Tribune Company  from imploding during those early days of digital transformation, as newspapers and traditional publishing were suddenly displaced by anything with a .com in its brand name.

This was so long ago, in fact, everyone was too busy undergoing digital transformation to talk about what’s essentially a theoretical construct as something worth paying billable hours for. No one needed a consultant to figure out how to use that AOL CD that plumped the profits of magazine publishers – which, in retrospect, was an act of self immolation.

There were no management recommendations or metrics involved in the sudden influx of advertisers wanting to pedal their wares online, but there sure were a ton of innovators willing to take their money, and annoy users with pop up and display ads (it was so much worse when Flash was still supported, for the record).

When Job Boards Ruled The World Wide Web 

It might seem weird today, given the decidedly unsexy and anachronistic connotations that most of us subconsciously associate with online job postings, or by glacial pace of progress with which the HR Tech industry has slogged along for decades now. The way candidates look for jobs online and the enterprise systems through which they must apply have not really changed, like, at all, since George W Bush took office. The first time.

One can only hope that history is as kind to job boards as it was to the second President Bush, who, history has proven, is a case study in the power of winning by comparison rather than by competency. Doesn’t look so bad now, does he? I’ll give you one guess who LinkedIn Talent Solutions is in this extended metaphor.

Given the future alternatives to traditional job boards (a definition that includes the likes of Indeed and LinkedIn, who have done a great job distancing themselves from a category in both which clearly belong), the plethora of shit results and a UI/UX that’s pretty much the professional equivalent of MySpace minus the midi might not look all that bad. In fact, sometime soon, we might more or less approach a time when candidate generated content was contained to cover letters with a faint hint of nostalgia.

Of course, this merger was somewhat sentimental to me, as someone who came up through this industry as part of the internal marketing and communications team at Monster.com – a job I interviewed for as a joke, since I was still a corporate recruiter at the time and even a decade plus ago, recruiters dismissed job boards as a punchline.

Of course I took it, because Recession. And it’s way easier to write about trends than actually hire talent. And I quickly learned who the real enemy truly was.

CareerBuilder was the Pepsi to Monster’s Coca Cola, the Ali to its Frazier, the Joan Collins to its Linda Evans, the Biggie to its Tupac, the Boston BTS Army squaring off against those Swifties from Chicago.

Not really sure about that last metaphor, by the way, but I was trying to include a reference each generation in the workforce would understand, but my pop culture knowledge pretty much ends so long ago I still blast Kanye and Kid Rock with zero shame. So, sorry Gen Z.

Well, I’m old enough to appreciate the fact that the rivalry between Monster and CareerBuilder was actually good for both companies (and the larger market), in a blatantly codependent kinda way. And that these two companies brought recruiting, for a fleeting moment, to the bleeding edge of tech.

For real.

In fact, back when the industry was more Wild West than Silicon Valley, CareerBuilder and Monster were becoming billion dollar businesses selling something that they literally invented – specifically, recruitment advertising.

When Recruitment Advertising Was Cutting Edge

Job boards may have few fans and more than enough bad will from the general public, but the fact that both of these companies are still around today, with only cosmetic changes to their core product roadmap and strategies to maximize shareholder value since they were both founded in 1994; by comparison, there were only 2300 registered websites in the entirety of the World Wide Web by the end of 1994; 23,500 sites had been registered by the end of 1995. For the entire internet. Globally.

Man, I wish I could go back to those days. I’d buy so many friggin’ domain names.

Yet, Monster was one of those core original sites; reportedly, it was the sixth URL ever registered, beaten only by the likes of CERN and Stanford. It was joined by CB in 1995, which means that by December of 1995, one out of every thousand registered domain names was a job board.

It’s always been an incredibly crowded category, and the fact that both Monster and CareerBuilder went on to become blue chip brands and among the oldest internet companies with a truly global user base proves that at one point, these properties were leading the enterprise tech adoption bell curve instead of perpetually lagging in the arms race for ad spend.

Not that it mattered. Job boards were right up there with AI in both adoption and spend; overnight, seemingly, the recruiting industry went digital, pushing away from the newspaper classifieds to which they’d long been consigned and instead became such a big business, the Department of Labor soon repurposed an entire regulatory authority whose entire scope was online job advertising and application.

The OFCCP was established after World War 2 but before federal Civil Rights protections to prevent discrimination among government contractors, a mandate that eventually extended to hiring policies and processes. One can safely assume the agency had no idea what it was in for when it agreed to take on job advertising in the early 2000s as part of its portfolio of enforcement responsibilities.

Now, it’s pretty much all they do, an existence that has given job boards a distinct advantage over other industries, although AI is certainly coming into their crosshairs. Thanks to their policies on the disposition and documentation of internet applicants, it’s pretty much illegal to fill a job without first advertising it, a loophole that was big enough to weather multiple recessions, a pandemic, and tens of thousands of emerging challengers, from HotJobs to BranchOut, from Beyond to the Muse and beyond.

It took until last week for the two OGs to join them, at least as standalone entities. In their announcement of the deal, both Monster and CareerBuilder (likely, through gritted teeth) said they were better together, and long term, that’s probably true. This assumes, of course, that either have a long term at all.

Then again, when the likes of LinkedIn and Indeed first appeared to challenge the traditional models upon which the incumbents were built, obituaries were already being written. Both companies, of course, succeeded in finally ending what had been a long entrenched job board duopoly, and are well ahead of the combined entity in terms of ARR, market share and MAUs. 

They are decidedly the next generation in the job ad revolution kicked off by their just merged predecessors, and still rake in billions of dollars a year selling perhaps the most simple and basic form of online advertising: job posts.

Neither is perceived as a job board, for whatever reason or at least seems to have the same sort of stigma attached to them, as either of their older rivals. They are largely seen as modern tech companies (lolz), whereas Monster and CareerBuilder are somewhere below the Dancing Hamsters or Vine in the pecking order of internet relevancy. The good news is, they’re still way ahead of Dice.

The bad news is, they were spun off in a joint venture between a Dutch staffing company whose services margins make job ads look like a fast food restaurant, and a white glove PE firm intent on unlocking value.

Marriages of convenience rarely last, and the announcement of this last stand likely still can’t turn back the inevitable unwinding of both of these companies, probably into an auction for their respective IPs and the rapid extraction of any proprietary data that can potentially (and legally) be resold. The announcement felt like an inevitability.

The truth is, both outlasted Indeed (acquired by the Yakuza, er, Recruit, in 2012) and LinkedIn, Redmond’s $26B red headed stepchild, which joined Clippy and Windows Vista in the Microsoft family of properties all the way back in 2016. Yes, Monster was acquired by Randstad, and CareerBuilder was swallowed up by the Apollo Group, a massive PE firm, but both continued to operate as independent entities – that is, until last week.

The meteor finally came for the dinosaurs, turns out.

Consolidation or Elimination: The Future of Recruitment Advertising

It will be interesting to see what happens to LinkedIn if Google decides to limit or completely decoup le from the entire Microsoft online ecosystem, a seemingly inevitable salvo in the ongoing AI arms race.

This would, of course, rob LinkedIn of its primary source of traffic and, unless Bing can finally become a thing (spoiler alert: it won’t), its ability to track, target and triangulate the PII of its purported 3 billion plus global users will be severely undercut, along with the value of its advertising solutions, which remain its primary source of revenue, by a significant margin.

Similarly, Indeed has lived its existence at the mercy of Google deprecating deduplicate content (or at one point, launching its own paid job ad product, which it turns out wasn’t as lucrative – or as simple – as simply continuing to collect the estimated $100M in annual ad spend generated for the search giant by Indeed, one of its largest advertisers.

That detente is now irrelevant, as Google plans to pretty much phase out cookies by the end of 2025, requiring companies to use their own data for online advertising instead of APIs and channel partners, meaning that the downstream revenue generated by aggregators like Indeed by hijacking job seeker traffic through a combination of SEO, paid media will likely end even before all those AI bets can pay off.

It also, ostensibly, means the death of “programmatic advertising,” at least in the recruitment advertising ecosystem; these platforms all rely heavily on the same sort of cross platform user data that Google is basically killing off; most of the “programmatic” vendors in recruitment advertising, after all, are impenetrable black boxes for any sort of data, from their algorithms to their attributable results. But most, if not all, leverage GDN – Google’s programmatic ad network – in some capacity.

Many “programmatic vendors” in the TA industry are also, in a dirty secret everyone but employers kind knows, effectively Google Ad shops making money off a lucrative and closed market that’s facing an imminent embargo by its sole trading partner outside of the cabal of “programmatic providers” living, quite literally, on the margins.

They’re still pretty good, after all; US employers spent over $60B on job ads last year alone, proving that there’s still a market for the most specious, transactional and, at this point, mandatory part of the hiring process. It’s just that the value chain is slowly, inevitably, shortening.

Which means the future of recruitment advertising, likely, looks a lot like consumer advertising does today. And that old cliche about how your candidates are your customers will finally stop being a nicety and start being a reality.

In the meantime, pour one out for Monster, CareerBuilder, and the end of an era in talent acquisition and recruitment.