Unless you’ve been under a rock or too depressed over Britney’s “comeback,” you know the economy is having some challenges. And in the employment space, bad economy equals bad news for most.

Although no one’s calling this 2001 all over again, I thought it would be interesting to get a take from some industry heads who survived the last downturn.

1. Steven Rothberg, College Recruiter

… the economy today is far stronger for virtually all than it was during the 2001-2004 recession. Unemployment rates are near historical lows, employment rates are near historical highs, and the opportunities for gainful self-employment are unparalleled. Today, few employers would consider the war when deciding whether to hire people and that will only improve as we begin the process of withdrawing our troops [likely 2008]. The slight cooling off in the market is probably a good thing for the job board business. Although some employers are laying off and others aren’t hiring as any people so some short-term sales are being lost or delayed, the reality is that we don’t want to go back to the red hot labor market of 1999 … more of [employers’] money is likely to come [job sites’] way rather than to executive recruiters or other more expensive methods which aren’t warranted when less expensive alternatives like job boards are likely to work at least as well.

2. Doug Geinzer, Recruiting Nevada

… mass layoffs will put tremendous stress on job board owners as the market quickly shifts from a jobseeker market to an employer market and the employers are no longer motivated to advertise as much as they once did. A significant slow down will allow the strong to get stronger. Quality job boards will leverage themselves and take more of a market share from newspaper, while inexperienced job boards will either go out of business or will be acquired by others.

3. Joe Stubblebine, JobCircle

I’m concerned with the US economy … employment seems generally stagnant recently. Certain skilled areas like mid-level technology and healthcare are generally recession-proof, but the impact on the overall employment numbers in the next 2-3 years will be interesting to watch. The job boards that simply hide behind their web site but don’t embrace the human element of the transaction will suffer. I don’t foresee a huge fundamental shift to the traditional post/resume job board search model in the next 5 years, but obviously web 2.0 ideas like blogs, discussions groups, tagging, video, filtering, voice, mobile phone, and other cool bells and whistles will help enhance connectivity and efficiency of job boards.

4. Aaron Matos, Jobing

… the economy is in a bit of flux. With the challenges in the debt markets and real estate, we’re beginning to see the trickle down
effects in other parts of the economy. Eventually, we’ll enter a full blown ‘real’ recession - it’s just a matter of when that happens. If the economy slips, it’s both good and bad news for job boards. First, it’s good because there are still over $4 billion in newspaper classifieds that will feel much more pressure in a poor economy (1/2 of recruitment advertising). Newspapers have been going down in what has been a good economy, the next recession will see an accelerated decline in print and transition to online services. A challenging economy will also put pressure on job boards, especially sites that may not be delivering quality candidates. If the economy slips, quality return on investment will become key as employers cut back to one or two primary recruitment advertising sources.

5. Eric Shannon, LatPro

I think the underlying trends from newspaper to online and towards diversity hiring will insulate us somewhat from the business cycle. Many job boards, and the best ones, will experience some protection if the economy slows down.

6. Bill Warren, JobCentral

Our economy continues to sputter. The market is impacted by problems in the mortgage industry, a nationwide housing slump, rising oil prices and continued fears of national, and even global, inflation. I believe this will result in significant corporate belt-tightening in the coming months. In spite of our economic woes, we are experiencing a strong labor market with the unemployment rate remaining around the 4.6% level. The outlook for job boards? As recruiters evaluate their programs in light of shrinking budgets, I believe the short-term winners will be national sites like Careerbuilder and DICE both of which have shown significant growth over the last year. In the long term, I believe the economic conditions will result in a shift to more measured-results types of job boards, or aggregators, like Indeed and SimplyHired.

Should be interesting.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 2:08 pm and is filed under big picture, job boards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.