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.

Sage ol' Pilot's TIP:  If it hurts to do THAT... Don't do THAT!

Use your favored Job Banks' systems in reverse to discover the appropriate keywords for your resume.  Consider an Internet job lead as your START to networking into and around the opportunity, using proven target firm networking tactics.  Get out from in front of your monitor and on to the phone!

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. They had the right idea.

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!

TIME has facilitated survival among the FIT-crowd. 

Niche boards, today, are more efficient at attracting qualified candidates. In fact, often their FORUM's, Bulletin Boards, ListServes and other technology tools create appropriate gathering places for very tech-saavy job seekers. The trick is to find the right niche boards in the haystack!