Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces

Today's guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Sunkanmi Ola, co-founder and CEO of Propel, which is building the largest ecosystem of tech talent communities across the world - over 200 specialized communities, with 800,000+ members spread across 22 countries and three continents.

Together with cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, we learn about a very different way of identifying, reaching, and engaging candidates than that used by most job boards and recruitment marketplaces. If Reddit ran job postings and otherwise enabled employers to engage with its users, you'd have a platform somewhat like Propel.

Some communities on Propel are for Java developers in a particular metro and were created by Propel. Others existed in real life before Propel even existed and have now migrated partially or even fully to the Propel platform.

Our regular cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, are working their way through the 2025 Appcast Recruitment Benchmark Report. 

As usual, the report is full of great information. Rather than making you wait for our analysis, we thought it would be fun to use Google's new NotebookLM product to create a quick podcast episode. Listen in as the guest AI cohosts discuss the findings in the report and let us know in the comments what you think about them.

The report highlights a labor market that has reached a near-perfect balance, shifting away from the Great Resignation to a period of stability. Employees are staying put, reducing churn and hiring activity. Despite expectations, CPCs rose over 27% in 2024, likely due to harder-to-fill roles and job board pricing. Apply rates surged 35% to 6.1%, keeping CPA relatively stable with only a 4.8% increase.

White-collar jobs saw higher application rates due to increased competition, while healthcare, education, and construction struggled to attract applicants. Mobile applications dominated "standing-up jobs," while "sitting-down jobs" saw more desktop applications. Geographic differences impacted hiring costs, but every state experienced lower CPAs in 2024.

A balanced recruitment strategy should incorporate search, display, and social media. Search and display ads target active candidates, while social media helps build employer brands and engage passive talent. Employers must track internal recruitment data, optimize for mobile users, and diversify sourcing strategies to maximize hiring success. The key to effective recruitment in 2025 lies in refining data-driven strategies tailored to specific job markets and hiring needs.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Terry Baker, the CEO of Daxtra Technologies.

Daxtra is a world-leading specialist in high-accuracy, multilingual job and resume parsing, semantic search, matching, and recruitment automation. Employers use Daxtra to manage all of their candidate interactions instead of having to log in and do so through their ATS, various job boards they're working with, email, and more.

Our cohost, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group, was unavailable for today's episode. Our other cohost, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, met with Terry. Together, they talked about the impact of AI products on recruiters and talent acquisition departments and how that might change whether they continue to buy from job boards, what they buy, and how much they buy.

Spoiler alert: there will be some winners and some losers.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Brandon Mitchell, founder and CEO of WriteSea, which sells AI-driven career tools designed to enhance the job search experience, improve placement rates, and drive better outcomes for candidates.

Our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site, explore with Brandon why offering freemium services like those from WriteSea can both boost revenues for job boards / recruitment marketplaces while, at the same time, enhance the user experience.

Toward the end, we also dig into some exciting news for our friends at WriteSea. Spoiler alert: Meta is a big fan, as are a number of higher education institutions.

Our guest on today's episode of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Kaori Kido, the Global Business Development Manager of Kakaku.com's Kyujin Box Media Planning Dept., better known outside of Japan as Jobcube.

Kyujin Box is one of Japan's leading job boards / recruitment marketplaces. In Japan, its customers are mostly employers and staffing companies. A couple of years ago, it began to expand into other countries, including Singapore and the United States. In those markets, it operates under the Jobcube brand using an arbitrage, aggregator model by buying and selling candidate traffic with other job boards.

In today's episode, our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter explore why Kakaku.com decided to expand into other countries, why it chose Singapore and the United States, and how it is different operating in Japan versus those other countries. 

The end of any year tends to bring out the prognosticators and, with them, lists of predictions. Our cohosts, Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter, decided not to disappoint those who really, really want to learn what we're thinking about for 2025.

In today's episode, we each share our thoughts about how AI will be used by job boards / recruitment marketplaces, the economics impacting our businesses (spoiler alert...the word Trump may have come up), the Careerbuilder+Monster merger (Steven shares an underreported, positive aspect about them), Indeed becoming more restrictive about what postings it will accept (Jim Durbin gets a nice shout-out), and conferences such as TAtech, RecBuzz, Job Boards Connect, RecFest, Unleash, ERE, and others.

Bottom line: we foresee a lot of change. A lot. What did we miss?

The Internet brought with it countless changes to society. For example, employers no longer control their employer brand. If past, present, and future employees are largely in control of your employer brand, your job posting ads and other marketing materials be authentic.

But job ads from those looking to steal the data of those interested in working for you have also made authentication important. So, now, it isn't just important that you honestly communicate what it is like to work for you, but also important that candidates trust that the entity that posted the ad is actually the entity doing the hiring.

Today's guest, Sean Horton of JobsInLogistics.com, shares with cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site the impact on the family of niche job boards his company operates from the increased need to be authentic and authenticated.

What do you get when you combine the American Thanksgiving Day holiday and three podcasters? Some bad jokes about turkey...and a few great takeaways.

What you also get is a robust discussion with guest William Tincup of WRKdefined, a new network for work-related podcasts; Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group (Marketplaces / Classifieds); and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site.

In addition to some jokes about turkey, we discuss what works well for job boards and recruitment marketplaces that have podcasts targeting employers, candidates, or both. What content should they focus on? How many minutes long should they be? Should you also post excerpts to social platforms like TikTok?

The re-election 1.5 weeks ago of Donald Trump was a shock to some, a relief to others, and sure to bring changes to the U.S. and global economies, therefore hiring, and therefore our job board / recruitment marketplace industry.

In today's episode, guest Joseph Stubblebine of Lensa and cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter discuss what leaders in our industry should expect over the coming months and years. Some, they believe, will be negative, some positive, and a lot uncertain.

The election was consequential and today's episode will help our listeners better understand its ramifications for our industry.

JobGet today acquired SnagAJob, its 3rd acquisition in 18 months. 

JobGet is an app-first platform for quickly hiring hourly workers. In that niche, speed is key.

SnagAJob was founded 25 years ago and was the largest hourly worker site in the U.S. with 100 million profiles of hourly workers. In our interview with JobGet's CEO, Tony Liu, he acknowledged some overlap between users but indicated that much of the data that Snagajob had on those users was not also possessed by JobGet and that roughly half of the users in Snagajob's database do not appear to be duplicative. So, although the deal seems on the surface to be designed to eliminate a direct competitor, there are great opportunities to create a one plus one equals three.

Cohosts Peter Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter are grateful to Tony for making time for the interview on what surely was a busy and momentous day for JobGet.