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Here are my Top 5 pre-
dictions for 2006, in no particular order:
1. It’s litigation, baby! - Like parents shut-
ting down a good party, expect the lawyers to come out in full force in 2006. Between privacy concerns, content rights, technology ownership and everything in between, lawyers will be busy throwing around the wet blankets.
2. Acquisition – At least one of the vertical job search sites will be slurped up next year, most likely by a second-tier search engine like AskJeeves or Amazon’s A9.
3. Someone wake up Trumpasauras – Like a wounded animal, Monster will introduce a free posting option of some sort to fend off Google and Friends.
4. Recruiting.com vs. Electronic Recruiting Exchange – Blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, online education, desktop applications, MySpace meets LinkedIn, etc. hold a major opportunity for someone to create an online recruitment community the likes we’ve not really seen before and bring all these pieces closer together – and the dollars to follow. These two front-runners will be fun to watch in ‘06.
5. The ol’ switcheroo - A major, nationally-known employer will be paid a very large sum of money by a job site to have exclusive rights over at least a portion of their job content. (Any recruiting managers looking to see their stock rise with upper management might want to highlight this point. Forget about saving money, bring in money.)
The Year’s Perfect Storm
Free, free, free - Craigslist was doing a pretty good job of
driving the cost of job postings down to zero and disrupting the whole machine without much help. Now
along comes the vertical job search engines, Google (and MSN on the horizon) to
solidify and speed up the process.
Job boards of all shapes and sizes
are going to have to come to terms with the commodotization of job
postings in a big way next year. Comfort zones, sacred cows and business-as-usual will continue to take a beating in ‘06, but should land some nice counter punches before all’s said and done. I just love a good fight.
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December 30th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
Hey Joel,
I promise, I will not let any moment be a dull moment this year.
Jason
December 30th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
Joel,
Why doesn’t someone start a wiki-recruiting blog? It would be the perfect blend of recruiting.com and erexchange.
A friend of mine started a law wiki that absolutely blew up, http://wiki-law.org/mwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page.
I think it’s a great way to take these recruiting sites to the next, web 2.0 level
December 30th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
I meant just recruiting wiki, not a wiki-blog. Having a blog about wiki’ing wouldn’t be very useful to most of us.
January 5th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Hmmm – as much as I like to poke fun at their columnists, I don’t see ERexchange and Recruiting.com as competitors.
Most of their business is focused on driving people to their Expos – Recruiting.com is focused solely on building a community and seeing what happens.
ERExchange growing would be a good thing for us – because a bigger Recruiting Blogosphere would give all of us more online influence.
Recruiting.com growing is a good thing for ERExchange, because we push them to do a better job servicing their community of primarily corporate recruiters.
January 6th, 2006 at 12:19 am
Hey Joel. Here is an interesting post relating to your number 2 & 3 predictions of acquisition and waking up the Trumpasaurus.
Apparently, there is some talk out there that Google or Yahoo! may be looking at a buy out of Monster. You can read my post about it here:
http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/01/06/a-google-buy-out-of-monster/
Starting to feel like 1999 all over again :-)