“These awards are significant for two reasons,” says WEDDLE’s editor and publisher, Peter Weddle. “First, there are over 40,000 employment-related sites on the Internet, so they can help others find some of the best sites online. Second, these awards are conferred by the toughest judges in the world—the job seekers and recruiters who use the sites—so selection is indeed an honor.”

Winners are determined through year-long balloting that is open to the public at WEDDLE’s Web-site (www.weddles.com). Voters select their favorite sites in two categories: general purpose sites that serve most professions and industries and specialty sites that focus on a specific career field, industry or geographic area. Over 8,000 people cast their votes to select the 2003 winners.

Recently, there’s been a spate of op-ed pieces forecasting the demise of job boards. These articles base their predictions on the growing use of self-operated recruitment sites by employers, the arrival of the employer-sponsored site, DirectEmployers.com, and the precarious position of the middleman in capitalist economies. While these are all important factors in the maturation of online recruiting, I think that Mark Twain’s oft-cited description of the premature announcement of his own death applies here, as well: reports of job boards’ passing are greatly exaggerated. In fact, the future of these retail recruitment sites—whether they’re managed by commercial companies, professional associations or trade organizations and other affinity groups—has never been brighter. In my last column, I listed five reasons why that is so. What follows are five more reasons to be optimistic about the future of job boards.

6. Historically, employers have never used a single method for recruitment. Instead, they tailored their approach to position levels, past difficulties encountered (or not) in filling various openings, the cost of certain methods and the impact of a position on the company’s performance. To put it another way, they typically used classified advertising or staffing firms to fill hourly jobs, display advertising in newspaper and select journals or staffing firms to fill low-to-mid range professional openings, and search firms to fill senior professional and managerial positions. Often, they also supplemented those tactics with networking and employee referral programs, job fairs and campus visits. In short, they employed a comprehensive, multi-faceted strategy that tailored methods to requirements. And that will not change with the advent of employer-operated recruitment sites. Recruiters will use whatever source they can find that will yield the highest caliber candidate at the lowest cost and in the shortest time. If that source happens to be a job board—and for many types of position openings that just may be the case—then recruiters will happily use it, even as they continue to rely on their own recruitment sites for other openings.

7. Job boards are getting better. While their core value proposition remains unchanged—they offer the job seeker and the employer a convenient, neutral meeting place—much of what surrounds that proposition has undergone a remarkable transformation. In fact, the irony is that many of the best job boards now resemble newspapers. Their employment sections are surrounded by content and activities that are designed to inform, entertain and even uplift those who use them. As a consequence, the experience of visiting a job board has been dramatically enhanced (at least at many of the better sites), and that change has lead to increased traffic to these destinations among all cohorts of the workforce. Now, some will say that this bump up in popularity is simply an artifact of the sputtering economy, and that’s undoubtedly true … in part. Some of it, however, is also due to what visitors find when they get there. At least, that’s what they told us in WEDDLE’s latest survey of job seekers. For the first time since we began conducting these polls in 1996, job seekers ranked commercial job boards ahead of employer sites in terms of their usefulness.

8. Brands count. Despite all of the dot.com hype about the power of technology, attracting visitors to a Web-site is essentially an exercise in traditional marketing. Success depends upon the visibility and perceived value of what an organization stands for. And that’s where all too many employer sites fall short. While there are undoubtedly exceptions, far too many companies are more than willing to invest millions of dollars in building the brand of their commercial products or services (including elaborate ads on their site’s Home Page), but will niggle over pennies when it comes to promoting their employment brand—their reputation as a place to work and grow. This kind of thinking is an artifact of the good, old labor surplus days circa 1952, yet it is still alive and well between the ears of many a corporate CFO and CEO. Meanwhile, the job boards, whose core service is the provision of employment services, are spending millions of dollars building their brands as places to advance one’s career. Indeed, according to one estimate in the late 1990’s, just three of these sites—Monster.com, HotJobs.com and HeadHunter.net—collectively spent over a half a billion dollars building their brands with Super Bowl ads, airport billboards, magazine inserts and blimps over sporting events. That’s real money in anyone’s book, and it is now paying dividends in the numbers of eyeballs that are attracted to those sites and other job boards.

9. Convenience matters, especially for today’s time challenged workers. Baby Boomers must deal with aging parents and teenagers. Gen Y parents are in the throes of raising young children. And for a growing segment of the workforce, the reality of dual working spouses means less time to stay on top of the job market and effectively manage one’s career. One solution to this situation that is fast gaining popularity is the job agent. This handy feature is now offered on about 40% of job boards and enables a person to turn their job search over to a computer. Basically, all one has to do is specify the kind of position they want or would like to consider; after that, they can return to dealing with work or family, and the job agent will search through all of the openings posted on the job board each day to find a match. When it does, it notifies them by e-mail. Even better, the message is confidential, so even if they’re employed, they can use a job agent to look for a better position. As a consequence, the job agent attracts a better cross section of the workforce to job boards (passive as well as active job seekers) and takes all of the hassle out of looking for a better opportunity. While some corporate recruitment sites have launched their own job agents in response, the only openings they check are those posted by that company. Job agents at job boards, on the other hand, search through the postings of numerous employers, thereby improving the likelihood of a match for the job seeker and, thus, their propensity to use them.

10. Many job boards are nimble, while most corporate recruitment sites are not. With the exception of the major commercial boards and those sites owned by publications or associations, job boards are typically run by small, entrepreneurial organizations. They can (and do) react quickly to shifts in the workforce, workplace and job market, enabling them to align their content and employment opportunities more closely to workers’ actual needs. Corporate recruitment sites, on the other hand, are normally controlled by the internal IT or Marketing Department and often cannot be changed without their approval and/or support. In other cases, changing the corporate site or any subsection of it (e.g., the recruitment area) requires the agreement of an oversight committee that meets irregularly and must consider a wide range of potential actions. As a result, the content at corporate sites is often static and does not reflect issues and concerns that are top-of-mind among workers. This inflexibility enables job boards to do a better job of serving their customers and ensures that they will remain popular among them.

As indicated by the five reasons above (and the five other reasons in my previous column), there is often a logical alternative to sure-fire prediction. As you may recall, for example, the early advocates of online recruiting forecast with absolute conviction that its capabilities were going to “disintermediate” recruiters, yet (happily) recruiters are still with us today and arguably more important than ever in winning the Talent Wars. The recent claims for corporate recruitment sites are, in my view, similarly hyperbolic and just as likely to be inaccurate. That’s not to say that corporate recruitment sites aren’t an important development; they are. In fact, they’re a core element of any comprehensive recruitment strategy. They will not, however, change life as we know it on planet Earth or even radically alter the way that successful recruiting is accomplished … despite the wishful thinking of their proponents.