It used to be so easy to be a corporate recruiter.  Pre-Internet sourcing avenues included newspaper ads, referrals, nepotism (and  the "closely related" good ol' person network) and the organization's own job postings. Then, thanks to the investment of a few hundred million dollars of venture capital, Monster.com, HotJobs and a few less successful, but noble job boards, who sacrificed their hard earned Angel money for the cause, created a paradigm shift to the Internet.

It started with the well defined and easy to find computer user groups:  geeks and code monkeys, the Christopher Columbi of the Internet... The bean-counters followed as they were the only other corporate executives with access to computers.  

Within just a few years, tens of millions of JOB hungry Candidates (give or take a dozen) surfed the net for their next career opportunity... Newspapers lost 70% of their ad revenue. So, in revenge, they bought CareerBuilder and then paid a fortune for Headhunter, a top brand name that they immediately terminated. 

The evolution has continued...

Unfortunately, along with great growth, came a curse.

All ten million JOB seekers applied for every job, regardless of job description, location or minimum qualifications. This naturally caused a concern for the conscientious recruiters, who felt the need to answer every individual candidate personally.  Their techno-driven mission was never to create greater resume traffic -- Rather, better resume traffic.  Limited by the 2000 year old paradigm of keyword matching, the recruiters of the world nearly had a fit... and it wasn't the sort of FIT that the job seekers were after.

Finally, tech support introduced recruiters to auto responders and then to the deadly DELETE key.

Then along came the niche boards. Their simple remedy was to target a specific profession, industry or region. By advertising only to seekers who were qualified for the target segment of jobs, they were able to attract the leading talent and avoid the unqualified masses. In particular, these boards attracted many of the most talented candidates who had become frustrated with trying to plough through the half million or so, badly categorized job listings on the 3 major boards.

In short, the original niche boards resolved some of the problems. Unfortunately, inexpensive-to-develop niche job banks ran the course of the dot-com bust, failing to attract appropriate audiences and users.  Actual functionality and ROI ran in parallel... and poorly!

But the secret is out...

TIME has facilitated survival among the FIT-crowd.  Niche boards, today, are more efficient at attracting qualified candidates. In fact Reuters said it best with their statement, "Niche boards are more efficient at attracting qualified candidates." The trick is to find the right niche boards in the haystack!

Bob created his online presence, www.careerpilot.com, in 1994.  He has over twenty years of successful experience in Corporate Recruitment, performance management and Career Management Services.  He is an entrepreneur and innovator in the use of information technology in the recruitment and employment process.  On the Founder's Council of the Association of Career Professionals - International and quite active in their Professional Development, Technology and Chapter Growth initiatives--a frequent speaker at industry conferences and seminars.