If all job board advertising was free....

....would job posting follow?

Most recruitment agencies and an ever growing number of employers are starting to have their jobs listed on their own career pages/job boards.  Now, the commercial job boards want these jobs in order to attract job seekers which they are generally better at doing than the employers/agencies.  But, when the career sites are more easily indexed and found in search engines this changes the game somewhat.  Furthermore, as Google et al start to really push search personalisation, employers adopt blogs, RSS feeds become ubiquitous, job widgets are everywhere and Google Base goes and gets the jobs, the job boards will have to follow.   

Now, why should the job boards go and get the jobs?  Well, it won't cost them anything whereas being added to a job poster does generally cost them (albeit not much).  Getting jobs by e-mail from customers in any old format costs them time to post them manually, reversing an RSS feed is free.  Chasing employers for their jobs takes time and therefore costs money.  But they need the jobs to make money.  Jobster are trying to make money by letting people advertise for free then pay for other services - could work?  Others will try many other methods to come up with new business models around free jobs; some will work, others not. 

But, this being the case the last thing the job board is going to do, is rely on Broadbean et al to provide them with jobs when they can go and get them direct from the source.  Unless of course they post for free and then find other ways of making their money - if they don't someone else will. 

Watch out Dan, someone's after your lunch........