Who are your real competitors?

One of the things I do remember from a training course was about competitors in a sales environment; and not the obvious ones! Doing nothing is a competitor, the internal option is a competitor. OK, pretty obvious but ask a job board who their competitors are and they'll reel off the usual suspects. They need to look a little closer to home though as all of their customers are potential (if not actual) competitors be they recruitment agencies or employers. If the agency or employer has a decent employer brand, a career site supported by an e-recruitment system, help with SEO and SEM, then they are going after pretty much the same applicants as the job boards they may also be using.

And with free classifieds coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN, and vertical search from Jobster, Indeed and Simply Hired, it is getting easier by the day to miss out the job boards for FREE!! Maybe this primarily benefits the big brands, but it's the big brands that the job boards need so as to attract the job seekers in the first place. Think about it: 'We have jobs with M&S, Tesco, Superdrug, Mothercare etc" OR "We have jobs with Smiths Butchers, Best Meat Pies, Mollies Fruit Shop etc".

Maybe, just maybe, we will see job boards paying the employer to have them list their jobs on the job board! And media buying commissions are earned from the amount we earn for the employer rather than for the job board. A topsy turvey World as they say. Don't think I'd like to be a traditional job board these days.