Pod Insights The Chad & Cheese Podcast Are Job Boards Solving the Hiring Problem? About this episode Chad & Cheese are back to bite the hand that feeds the recruitment world. In this episode, the boys sit down with Lou Goodman, the industry vet behind the "Job Board Revolution?" report, and Martin Lenz, the tech mind leading Jobiqo, to dismantle the 30-year-old myths holding the hiring world hostage.
Between the typical banter and sharp European insights, the group explores why the current "pay-for-activity" model is fundamentally broken and whether the platforms we rely on are actually solving problems or just monetizing chaos.
The conversation takes a hard look at the shift from raw volume to meaningful curation, questioning if the "job board" as we know it is evolving into something unrecognizable—or simply becoming an invisible data pipe for AI agents.
From the death of the "click" to the rise of specialized niche players, this episode is a wake-up call for anyone betting on the status quo. If you're ready to stop selling the wrong product and start understanding where the talent marketplace is actually headed, grab Lou’s audio book and executive summary below.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
03:49 - The Research Behind Job Boards
11:03 - The Role of ATS in Recruitment
22:29 - Activity vs. Outcomes in Job Boards
26:08 - The Quiet Hiring Phenomenon
33:38 - Convincing Arguments for Job Boards' Relevance
Job Board Revolution Audio BookFull version (2:38h): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lvphp0qchdefwvjc4zfhd/ElevenLabs_Job_Board_Revolution_Full_report_v6_amends_highlighted_docx.mp3?rlkey=gz0bvrfe6ufjuy2xsn7o1jnhc&st=yl4fbfpo&dl=0
Blinkist style (9 min): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xe0ggzala2prtm7pmy50m/ElevenLabs_Blinkist_Job_Board_Revolution.mp3?rlkey=gudo0tzmgoxwhmpe1ee0ogukv&st=6omm6p11&dl=0
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Dude, it turns out that Winston Smart Recruiter's first AI hiring sidekick is taking all the grunt work out of Recruiter's Day. Things like candidate screening, scheduling, all the admin garbage no one actually wants to touch. Winston can do it all.
0:17 Speaker 01 Man, you know I'm a fan of using new tech that takes the boring repetitive crap out of a Recruiter's Day and allows them to have more time to connect with hiring managers and candidates.
0:29 Speaker 00 Yep, Winston is doing the heavy lifting while recruiters kick back and do the actual hiring stuff. You know, like talking to people.
0:37 Speaker 01 I really dig that Smart Recruiters is evolving out of the legacy ATS model and embracing cleaner processes using AI. With most ATS providers, it's like, hey, 2003 called and it wants its 30-minute application process back.
0:53 Speaker 00 No doubt. It sounds like Rebecca and the team are using Winston to push Smart Recruiters into the future while the ATS vendors are basically on an AOL dial-up modem with a dashboard.
1:05 Speaker 01 With Smart Recruiters, Winston does the grind and the recruiters get the glory.
1:11 Speaker 00 For more information on superhuman hiring with Winston, visit smartrecruiters.com. That's smartrecruiters.com.
1:19 Speaker 01 Start using Winston today, or I guess you can stick with...
1:25 Speaker 02 Now we return you to our regular scheduled program in progress. Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
1:51 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. If podcasts are evil, then this one is hell. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, kids. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Soash is riding shotgun as we welcome...
2:09 Speaker 00 Lou Goodman, marketing strategist and author of Job Board Revolution, Our Job Board's Solving the ROM Problem, and Martin Lenz, CEO at Jobico. Lou, Martin, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.
2:23 Speaker 03 Hello.
2:24 Speaker 04 Hi, nice to be here.
2:27 Speaker 00 You sound thrilled to be here. I'll just, I'll chalk it up to that European humility. Chad wants to call this one Three Europeans and an Idiot, meaning there are three Europeans on the show and me. So I'm gonna try to hold my own for my American.
2:41 Speaker 01 Didn't say idiot, I said baby.
2:42 Speaker 00 My American brethren, baby, idiot, my bad, my bad. Now, a lot of our listeners won't know Lou, Martin, Jobico. Give us sort of a real quick Twitter, Twitter bio about what makes you guys tick. We'll start with Lou.
2:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm Lou Goodman. Most recently was a monster, left early last year. I've spent kind of 25-ish years doing marketing in recruitment and I'm based in the UK, as you can probably tell from my accent.
3:10 Speaker 00 Nice. Martin?
3:11 Speaker 03 Martin Lenz, based in Vienna in Austria. I'm a computer scientist by trade, so I used to be a software engineer. I spent a lot of time in management consulting and software engineering and I just joined the industry nine years ago and it seems already pretty long as when I say this, this is now my ninth year. And I was joining the industry when Joel was already saying jobbots are dying. So I'm still around and.
3:39 Speaker 00 We'll get to that, Martin. Don't you worry. We'll get to that. We'll get to that.
3:43 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me.
3:44 Speaker 01 Thanks for coming, guys.
3:45 Speaker 00 Welcome. I have not been to Vienna. Have you been to Vienna, Chad?
3:48 Speaker 01 Oh, hell yeah.
3:49 Speaker 00 Yeah? Lou, have you been to Vienna?
3:51 Speaker 01 Martin's taken me out for drinks and yeah, no, it's always a good time.
3:54 Speaker 00 Should I go? Should I go? What's the, what's the, what's the sell, sell Vienna?
3:58 Speaker 03 It's the second largest German-speaking city in Europe. So it's probably also the most livable city. So we usually win this ranks of most livable cities. So there's a lot of culture and a lot of things that you can do.
4:14 Speaker 00 He clearly doesn't know me, Chad, because he would have started off with some, some. Some worst or some uh some beer sourbrowd. I don't know.
4:23 Speaker 03 There is no Chipotle uh in in in Vienna to my knowledge, but there's a there's a great number of burger uh burger places. And uh steak places. So you will definitely have a have a good time in Vienna.
4:35 Speaker 00 Europe has no steak places. They don't make steak in Europe. I'm sorry.
4:40 Speaker 01 Joel is biased.
4:41 Speaker 00 I have yet to have a steak, a real steak in Europe, but that's beside the point. Let's get to this survey. Lou did some extensive uh research, put together a fifty four page document. Uh Lou, tell us about it.
4:55 Speaker 04 Um yeah, it was a little bit of a labor of love, but um the idea really came after Martin and I met at Jobboards Connect last year. And there were a few things that were mentioned there about um it was about balancing the need from, you know, how you balance employer needs and candidate needs. And it just kind of got me thinking, particularly after, you know, seeing what was going on with Monster around that time. It really kind of got me thinking about what some of the challenges are that are facing job boards and what you would need to fix them. And every time I thought about something, it kind of opened up another thing, which was, well, what about ATSs and how about employer behavior?
5:35 Speaker 00 Right.
5:35 Speaker 04 And really kind of just spiraled from there. And then, you know, as I'd met Martin, I talked to him about whether it would be something he might like. And as it was, it kind of it was something I was able to then follow through the thoughts I was having around. You know, what are the challenges facing the job board industry and what would what would need to happen to to address them?
5:55 Speaker 01 As another Monster alum, I would have to say that the Monsters, the Career Builders, it feels like it's just the products that were offered back in the day and the products that are offered now, pay per click, pay per app, they're not really designed to solve the problem, the real problem at hand. They're designed to make you buy more stuff, right? It's very, it's very capitalistic in in nature. Where it's like, nah, we're not really going to give you what you want or need, but we're going to build products that actually make more money for us. What did you find in this research around? Around the actual problems versus the solutions that we've been providing over the years.
6:33 Speaker 04 Well, just for say like it wasn't actual bespoke research and there wasn't a survey as such, but it was more just, you know, desktop researcher around them. But I think when you talk about the the problems, that was one of the reasons we landed on that as a title, which is that actually what are the problems that need solving? And in a two sided marketplace, you need to be solving more problems for both sides, which means that, you know, the problems that you need to be solving for candidates are helping them find jobs and for employers is helping them get the right people. And then to your point, Chad, it was that actually if that is what you were designing job boards for today, you would design them in different ways.
7:13 Speaker 04 You know, job boards came about a long time ago, thirty years ago, and everything in the world was so different then. And actually, the volume problem, really, I think it's the volume that used, volume used to mean that you would get enough people, you know, that you would get enough candidates, you'd get enough applications to find the right people. But that used to be a kind of proxy for quality or a good enough proxy for quality for enough people to keep it going. But it hasn't been for a while and it's the economy and the advances in technology that are really kind of exacerbating that issue of of volume. And I think it's the economy was one of the things that always struck me as one of the most interesting things about recruitment.
7:57 Speaker 04 Is that, you know, other two sided marketplaces don't kind of swing so from one extreme to another with the economy in quite quite the same way. So probably a bit of a perfect storm at the moment. But coming with AI and changes and everything else is going on this, enabling candidates to submit a lot of applications, felt like it was creating a real inflection point.
8:18 Speaker 01 Well, one thing, though, you said this two sided marketplace, but it it almost feels like the candidate is not getting what they want. The employer is not getting what they want. The piece in the middle, the monsters, the career builders, the indeeds today, they're the ones that are devising platforms that literally just feed themselves with more money, right? As opposed to, and I think we also, trying to blend a couple of things here. So those are the model problems. I think we also have another problem where we we talk about quality. Nobody knows what the hell quality means. We need to stop talking about quote unquote quality and talk about one thing, qualified. We know what qualified looks like. That's the thing. So when we start talking about quality,
9:03 Speaker 01 well, we need a quality application. That means something to me, it means something entirely different to Joel, something entirely different to you, and something entirely different to Martin. But when it comes to qualified, that's entirely different. Those are hard edged, black and white things. So can you talk about those two things? We've got models that focus on quality that is very gray, but then the solution that we really need, and we've needed for very, very long time, is a qualification, a qualified solution. Can you talk a little bit about that?
9:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I love that distinction between quality and qualified. And I wish I'd heard that before the report was being published. We do talk about that in the report. And one of the things that we talk about is that actually, it's really about, you know, especially there's a lot of focus on disposition data, which I know you've talked about a lot, and you know, job
9:53 Speaker 01 Oh, we'll get into that.
9:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, right. It's really, I think that there's, quality doesn't need to depend on disposition data. I think it's about job boards starting to define what they mean by quality or qualified, to use your term. Because actually, it really needs to be, if you can't understand the hiring outcome, and I don't think that job boards should be focused on the hiring outcome, because there's too many factors in between the application and the hire.
10:17 Speaker 01 Yes.
10:17 Speaker 04 That, you know, completely outside of your job as a, really as a media agent to send that application over. But it's really about saying, how I think I phrased in the report is, it's about providing the applications that the customers say they want, that your, the employers say that they want.
10:34 Speaker 01 Right.
10:35 Speaker 04 Now, with AI and AI applications, that does mean that there has to be more about matching. It's really talking about the fact that the real product of job boards, or the problem they should be solving is matching, rather than hiring. And so therefore, then there's going to need to be some authentication, and how are you making sure that you understand that that candidate really is a match? Which means, instead of kind of just sending a flow of applications over that you may be going out and finding people, you know, you online, you put something in front of them. The part of the job board where you add value is how do you understand that that Person is who they say they are and you know, you've got their profile, the application matches. So really understanding a bit more, bringing more in that sourcing. So you're right, the qualified really needs to be more about saying, this is what you said you wanted.
11:20 Speaker 04 And this is us delivering what you've wanted and we verified it within reason. But that does also then mean that there has to start to be some more, in my view, assessment of what, you know, the of the jobs, you know, and if you don't have salary, how do you understand whether somebody is really qualified for that? And is it reasonable? Like, is the job reasonable? Are you asking for something that actually really requires a huge salary? Because you're asking for so many different types of skill sets, which is a new area, I think, for kind of job boards to go into.
11:51 Speaker 00 So back in the day, job boards were unapologetically traffic drivers. And the the line was, that's what we do. Uh, it's up to your ATS, it's up to your screening service or whatever to handle that. Two part question, are are ATSs failing? And that's why everyone's saying it's the job board's job now. And secondly, are job boards prepared for this? Because when you have a transformation in an organization, ultimately, the people who sell a product that is, hey, post this and we'll get traffic, now have to sell something much more complex. And a lot of companies' job boards aren't prepared for that. I think that's going to be a serious problem for them.
12:34 Speaker 00 You can't just flip a switch and like, okay, now we sell screening, we sell disposition, we sell app, you know, quality. And like, that's very hard to make that culture shift. So two part question, why are ATSs not doing this? And secondly, how many job boards are prepared for this?
12:50 Speaker 04 So I I mean, with ATSs, I haven't worked that closely with a lot of ATSs. So I don't, I don't know, I mean, why they're not doing this. But I I think it's because it's kind of multifaceted as well, that ATSs really need the input from employers. So how much of it is that employers don't really know what they want? That if you look at a lot of job descriptions and how they're written, are they really the best ways to get the best people for the job? And I think, and that's not meant to be like a criticism. A lot of employers, I think there's probably a real gap for a lot of employers. You know, when you talk about skills based hiring, which I know is kind of much maligned by some people understandably for some reasons. But actually, is that a good way to be hiring people? But if it is, what does that look like? How do you do it?
13:35 Speaker 04 Like, how do you understand what the best practice is? And then our ATS is structured to be able to communicate like that. And then whether job boards are prepared. I mean, I, I don't know. I'm sure a lot of them aren't. I know that, you know, when I was a monster, there was so much focus on just trying to get the performance back to where it needed. But thinking about changing like this, and I'm sure that with the economy, there's a lot of, you know, apart from the really big ones. I think a lot of job boards are really struggling to just try and keep the numbers where they need to. So this kind of thinking about what the kind of transformation is needed is really difficult. One of the points that I make in the report, though, and I know that Martin and I have discussed it at length, is that this change is going to be coming. Really, you know, if you look at the market at the moment, with this kind of howls of frustration from every single side of it.
14:21 Speaker 04 Job boards, employers, recruiters and candidates. So that is a market that is ripe for disruption. And with AI coming in and changing things, job boards could risk just becoming, you know, if I, if a Gentic AI really takes off and that's how people find jobs. Then our job boards, just the kind of, you know, unseen pipelines of data behind that. So I think sometimes, I think the transformation is coming, whether they're ready for it or not. I don't know how quickly it's going to come. I mean, I, I wouldn't profess to be an expert on AI and it's quite hard to know where it's going, but change is definitely coming.
14:54 Speaker 00 My take is eighty percent of a budget goes to LinkedIn or Indeed, at least here in the States. Twenty percent is, is programmatic. It's hey, I love ZipRecruiter or this job board or that job board. And I don't see that twenty percent, which I think is what you're talking about primarily in this report of who needs to change and where things are going. I think they're very ill-prepared to have the resources, the expertise, the sort of just.
15:19 Speaker 01 That's why Martin's on the show. So we can actually talk to somebody who deals with technology on the job board side.
15:25 Speaker 00 I mean, you deal with these guys, like. What's your advice to them, Martin?
15:29 Speaker 03 So maybe to your question first, I think, and Blue writes about this in the report really well. There is a lack of incentive for ATS to really create standards in this ecosystem. Because they're still serving a different business model and need. And whenever we have a presentation, we always show our products on the recruiting funnel. And the recruiting funnel doesn't stop at the point of application. But there are so many more steps that are typically in different systems. And there are so many systems along this funnel. And we try to really create this end-to-end solution, but we stop at the application typically.
16:10 Speaker 03 And there is a growing, I would say, solution ecosystem that provides integrations to ATS systems. And then it goes also to this discussion about disposition data. But there is also a lack of interest around employers to really share what they are, how they are actually really evaluating who they are hiring, right? So just because you get the disposition data and you know this person has been hired, you don't know anything about why this happened.
16:41 Speaker 00 Right.
16:42 Speaker 03 Was it the skills? Was it the salary? Was it because you got more budget to hire more people or you had a cost cut or whatsoever? You don't get this information. I don't think that employers want to share that. On the point of are they prepared? I mean, this is ultimately the reason why we wanted to get this report out. Because it really outlines why there is an opportunity for job boards to create more value in the market. Because if they just play the volume game, if they just follow this, what we call an entitification process, get more margin out of it, get more revenue out of it.
17:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
17:22 Speaker 03 You will definitely create a less, a worse user experience. And ultimately, you will not be able to compete with the big ones. But here is where there is a lot of opportunity around curation, the matching, especially when you're a niche. Or a regional site, also around customer success and customer support. If you are, if you are able to get in touch with your customers and try to understand why this, why this job is working well or not. And Lou actually, in the, in the report creates a very simple idea of what are the minimum requirements that a job should have. So you should actually accept it to make it comparable. Uh, if you created, if it's measurable, if you create a good match.
18:07 Speaker 03 So Lou is talking about this, uh, in the report. There's a lot of, of things that you can experiment. So I think the report will definitely help job board operators to think about that. Because at the moment, everyone is stuck in this, what we call marketing myopia. We're just trying to optimize the products that we're selling. And we're trying to measure the metrics that we know. And you know, we are, we are building job boards. We are technologists and technologists love things that they can measure. And, uh, but we measure clicks, uh, apply starts, applications and et cetera. Because we are able to measure it, but not because it's the right thing to measure.
18:48 Speaker 03 And this comes to this point of, well, ultimately it's a very subjective reason why one per, uh, one person fits to this company and, and to the other.
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19:49 Speaker 03 I would even say it's like a hyper subjective world that the recruiting space is in. And we can't measure this, but this here's the opportunity.
19:59 Speaker 01 You can't be responsible for it either. I mean, if you can't measure it, you can't be responsible for it. And it's also like you'd said before, there are many aspects of the actual hiring process where you have no control. So therefore it's kind of like people talking about getting paid per hire. That's the dumbest shit I think I've heard of in so long because there's such a huge gap in which the job site has nothing to do with the process. They might have a crappy manager, they might have a crappy culture. There could be a ton of different things, not to mention if I'm pushing 50 candidates on you and you're hiring one, I just sent you 49 different leads for the next shot. Right?
20:40 Speaker 01 So, I mean, it seems like we are trying to PhD the hell out of a solution that literally just needs a primary school solution to it. And it's like we do this as human beings.
20:52 Speaker 03 Yeah. And some of these things are quite simple as you say, but I think it's very tentative to think that you can control it. And a lot of what we are talking about in the report is that potentially this match is more is a better recruiting outcome that you can generate than just the number of applications or the number of clicks. But there is still, there's still a question, how much are they prepared? From a technology perspective, I would say everybody that runs on a job vocal platform is well prepared because we are, we are equipping our clients for adaptability. And I think this is what is needed in like, you know, AI is coming, everything is changing. You need to be resilient in times of weak economy, but you also need to be able to
21:37 Speaker 03 run experiments like in the report, we talk about, okay, let's, let's assume you run a health job board, maybe you want to experiment with a certain customer segment, like how you curate jobs, like you don't accept any job that has no salary on it. And you don't accept any job that has not a clear comparable and benchmarked requirements list on it. And you just accept this and and and and see how it's working. And it's much easier for smaller sites to to do this and and and they're equipped if they have the technology. Technology is usually in the background. So this is, uh, I, I, the, the, the bigger discussion is, are you able to adopt your business model and the way you're selling?
22:19 Speaker 03 I think this is much harder than exchanging the, the technology. The technology just must not be in your way, right? So there is this agentic layer, so you need to be able to handle different API requests, different level of data exchanges. There is, I, I wouldn't say this is all table stakes, but this is a growing demand that all these technology platforms have that you need to solve. But ultimately, we need this input and understanding from the operators of the sites to curate this, this whole experience. I think that the mo- most parts of the market are not well-prepared. But we are trying to educate them with the report and guide them a little bit because everybody is afraid
23:01 Speaker 03 to even lose the last piece of revenue that they, that sticks around, right? And protectionism of
23:07 Speaker 01 We saw that with Monster, we saw that with CareerBuilder, but indeed smashed them, right? So it's like, if we don't evolve, this is exactly what's gonna happen.
23:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:16 Speaker 01 Right? So Lou, i- in the paper, it actually talks about activity versus outcomes, right? Can you, can you dig into that a little bit?
23:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's really kind of what Martin said is, you know, you're act, you're monetizing activity. So clicks, your traffic, those are
23:32 Speaker 01 Apps.
23:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, apps, you know, really those things aren't outcomes. Now, when we say outcomes, people automatically think hiring outcomes, which is why we, we had quite a discussion on it. But we use the term recruiting outcomes because that is broader. If you say hiring outcomes, people automatically think hire. And for every reason we've discussed, people can't always be, um, you know, you, you can't deliver to that. I do see sometimes when job boards are talking about, you know, the quality and what we can deliver. They say, well, we don't get access to this disposition data. And there can be a little bit of helplessness around that. And so how do you, how do you identify what the outcomes are? They, at the end of the day, if you deliver what you say you're gonna deliver. And you, people value what you've delivered. It doesn't need to be a hire. If it's a good match.
24:17 Speaker 04 One of the things I think I talk about is, um, you know, especially with the hiring thing, you know, what you're saying is if you, if you pay for a hire, but quite often hiring managers will want to make sure, particularly in a market like this, that they've seen enough people to feel like they've got a list that they can choose from. And so you, do you need to provide them with forty candidates? Just, you know, so a hiring manager who's doing the interviewing feels like they've seen enough people. And that, you know, that is okay if that's what that company wants, if that's how they operate. And that's what the recruiters know they need to do, then your job is to provide them with enough good matches for the hire, for them, for the hiring manager to make the choice. You don't need to get the right person who's hired. So really with the outcomes, I mean, that is difficult.
25:01 Speaker 04 And this is where I think the adaptability comes in because different companies are going to want different things. And there's a spectrum that we put in there, which is, you know, what, what kind of job board are you? There's been so much fragmentation in the job board market, but really with the number of suppliers. Haven't really seen it in the kind of service that they deliver. And I, I, I do think that might be the next evolution. So there are the jobs like Uber, Amazon, you know, seasonal workers, those things where the commoditized traffic, where you're just sending lots of applications is what's needed because the requirements for the job are, you know, it's not specialist, you know, you need a number of people and you can have a wide range of people. And those are more like your commoditized traffic brokers.
25:41 Speaker 04 But then you could have some things right up to maybe some people do deliver hires more like an online recruitment consultancy. Although I think it's worth remembering that why recruitment consultancies get paid the money they do is that they take all the risk that they don't get the money unless somebody is hired. And then usually they have to give the money back if they leave within a certain time. So, um, I think it's really just thinking about what is it that you can deliver? And if, do you have the opportunity to deliver different things if different customers want certain things? If there is a company where they need to see a certain number of people and getting that long list is the most important thing to them, can you deliver that? Whereas you might have some other people who may want to. See all the applications or some others who might want you to do some screening.
26:25 Speaker 04 So I think as Martin said, it's the technology allowing the adaptability.
26:29 Speaker 00 Looking to the future and it's sort of a common phenomenon now is the quiet hiring trend. Basically, we don't post jobs. We have a database of everybody on the planet. We can unleash the agents and find people that way. Is this a passing fad? Are job boards preparing for that reality? Like what, what? For both of you, your take on the quiet hiring phenomenon.
26:53 Speaker 04 So that was actually one of the questions that after the job build connect that prompted me to write this was, you know, there was the usual question of a job boards dying. And I thought, okay, well, what if we flipped that? Why should job boards exist? And I do think that there is value in having something where you can see what jobs there are, people can move around. Because you can't get a job that you don't know exists. And so I'm sure that quiet hiring, you know, it's essentially just networking, isn't it? By, you know, AI agents enabling networking at a different scale, maybe widening that out. I think that will always happen. But I do think that there is a role for people and being able to see all of the jobs that are out there.
27:34 Speaker 04 And if they want to move somewhere, move somewhere different, try a different, you know, role that they can do that. And equally, I think that there is something for brands, maybe particularly smaller companies, being able to get in front of a wider audience that they may not be able to get in front of. Now, I don't know whether agents would be able to replicate that fairly. I think the question for me that comes up is like, who then is deciding what jobs get in front of what people and what people get pulled in for what jobs? If it is a black box type thing, how does that happen? There's a transparency, I think, with job boards.
28:06 Speaker 00 It gives control to the employer, right? Because it lets them decide what am I going to promote and what aren't I? And how am I going to promote it if it's with agents or not? I mean, I look at this as a serious threat to job boards. If this is a trend that holds, holds true. Martin, your thoughts?
28:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's a couple of people that truly believe that this quiet hiring, you call it quiet hiring, but that there's basically employers knowing everything about the Candidates and you just yeah, you just ingest like contingent opportunities and job postings there and you just accept and you automatically know. I don't, I don't know if the power really shifts so much to um to the employer and job boards can play a very important role in that. Because they are the trusted system of record also to provide the discovery. And it doesn't necessar- we, but whenever we talk about job boards, we always think about a front end where you can enter like a search query, right?
29:02 Speaker 03 But it could also be an API for an agent. So um there was a recent Economist article that Lou shared with me. Where it said, actually, the uh the candidates currently win the AI race because they are much more familiar using the AI tools than recruiters are. So uh you may have your own agent as a uh as a candidate and you wanna know what fits for best for you. And the agent just gets all the data from the trusted sources that are the job boards. So that could basically shift the power also to the candidate's side. At the end of the day, we hope that there is an equilibrium because.
29:38 Speaker 00 It won't if the jobs aren't out there. If the agent can't find a job, doesn't empower the job seeker.
29:44 Speaker 03 But there are opportunities and employers are competing against each other. And you know, this is, this is the same like the question if would it make sense to provide the perfect match to uh to an employer? And what you see on LinkedIn when, when this active search started, especially in IT when the IT demand was increased. There was a strong reputation around the same profiles, like the best developers, they get like ten requests per day. And others get got zero. So there is no, there is no real marketplace uh exchange. And uh on top of that, so, so I, I, I think employers to be able to compete, they need to get their jobs out. Because otherwise, they, they don't know if they get enough of, of the exposure.
30:29 Speaker 03 Or just the biggest one wins or the more, the one with the, the most power to, to, to fuel their agents. Because there is a, there is less transparency around, why do I even get this job opportunity, right? So I, I think that people really demand for this transparency and it will be harder to, to understand. Did I really see all the opportunities or I am just showed a limited number of opportunities?
30:54 Speaker 00 It's commercial time.
30:56 Speaker 01 Let's be honest, half the people applying to your job haven't even read the damn job description. They're just smashing the easy apply button like it's a slot machine. A real job application should be a candidate's actual intent to do the work, not a reflex. That's why Talru built Smart Qualify. Before a candidate can even hit submit, Smart Qualify puts the critical stuff right in their face: pay, schedule, location, certifications, and then requires that applicant to confirm they actually understand the role. No surprises, just real intent. Companies running Smart Qualify are seeing up to 75% more interviews with qualified candidates while slashing their cost per qualified applicant.
31:41 Speaker 01 More qualified applicants, less cash. So if you're hiring in the high-volume space like logistics, healthcare, retail, hospitality, warehouse, manufacturing, you get the idea. Stop wasting your time on resume spam. Check out Smart Qualify at talru.com. That's T-A-L-R-O-O.com. Talru: clarity in job advertising. It's showtime. Well, that's gonna come with the trust, but I think we're missing one big piece here, and I think there's gonna be whiplash because obviously the United States is doing nothing with regard to enforcement around compliance and bias right now, right? That is something that nobody's talking about, this quiet hiring thing. Okay, it's happening now,
32:25 Speaker 01 but as soon as a new administration comes in that actually cares about process enforcement and bias, this is all gonna go away. Why? Because the biggest companies in the world have to post their jobs to be able to get federal funds. Companies who get hundreds of millions and/or billions of dollars, you know how they have to comply with continuing to get those contracts? One of those things is to post their jobs. So yes, I understand that we're kind of in a lawless, Wild West bullshit administration kind of gap, but once that stops, there's gonna be some whiplash. And if companies have not been actually going through the process that they should be, where they're So if CCP, EEOC doesn't matter and they've been getting federal funds,
33:11 Speaker 01 they will get slapped incredibly hard and prospectively taken hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars out. And that is what they worry about the most. So to think that, we're going to go to quiet hiring. To me, with the risk of losing those types of contracts, I don't see it, guys. I just don't see it. It makes for a great byline. It makes for a great discussion. But to be quite frank, being in this industry as long as I have, working with federal government, state government and the tech players, I don't see it happening. I think it's a blip.
33:42 Speaker 03 So on top of that, most of the employers still have not managed to get all their jobs on Google for Jobs. And that was a quite simple thing to do, right? With the ATS involved, I just, I just have a hard time believing that suddenly everybody has such an easier time to get into this quiet, quiet hiring network or nexus. And I think at some point, job boards will again be the activators for that. But we need to, we need to at some point rethink that there's just a front end for discovery. It can also be a gigantic layer where you provide the data and you're still curating and creating the trust. Like you make sure that what the, what the service is to the employer, like, are you actually bidding the right thing?
34:27 Speaker 03 Because if you, if you have this job title with these requirements and this location with this salary, you, you probably won't find anyone. And, and, and maybe at some point it's the service around getting, getting the search into this, I would say, a gigantic hiring ecosystem.
34:44 Speaker 00 All right, guys, it's in the summary. Everyone wants me to ask the question.
34:49 Speaker 00 We'll start with Lou. Convince me that job boards aren't dying, which by the way is a funny question to ask a former Monster employee, based on what Monster has gone through in the past couple of years. So here's your chance. Sell job boards to me.
35:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, I, I don't think they're dying right now and I think we need them. I do think that job boards have a role to play, but I do think that there is a lot of change coming and I do think they need to change. So I think that this needs to be, that they go. Through like, you know, what the phone has gone through. If we look at how people use, you know, we say your phone now, but calling people on it is probably one of the smallest things that we do. And I think that job boards need to go through that similar kind of evolution. So um I think that there is a real need for this. And I think the thing I would say is in that, from that last discussion we were just having, I was thinking that, you know, quiet hiring, do we think that quiet hiring is what companies are going to need to do? Let's imagine, hopefully like that tomorrow, the economy rebounded and everything was going brilliantly.
35:46 Speaker 04 That changes the need of what companies have. And I, I think that that thing as well is when job boards, they, if they can take that specialism, if they can own an audience, if they can become a trusted source then, um then, you know, it becomes a different thing. They can help companies when they are competing for talent again. And let's hope we get back to that soon. Then they can get, you know, companies in front of right people because they're trusted. In times like this, what it needs to be is with the quiet hiring, I think what is attractive for that, for companies is that there's not the overwhelm. So that's where job boards to make sure that they don't die out, they need to be working out how they deliver that.
36:25 Speaker 00 I'm hearing a lot of ifs, ands or buts from you, Lou, but not quite convincing. Martin, your chat.
36:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I was joining the industry roughly 10 years ago at a time when everybody already said job boards are dying. And my confidence is that they're not dying because even like in every phase of also the like development of the job board ecosystem and the recruitment ecosystem. There has always been this immense need for trusted systems of record. And I don't think that all the agentic layers that are around there will be this system of record that provides the data in a certain way. I definitely think that job boards will at some point be commoditized and that there will be more
37:09 Speaker 03 consolidation, if you will, because they are not able to adapt to this new AI technology or to like the new business models because they're stuck in their old business models. But uh I think what we're all searching for when asking this question is, when will the term Job board die because it feels like we need a new way of describing it. And I would agree, the term job board will maybe die ultimately. But the value that they provide, it will probably not die the next 10 years.
37:41 Speaker 01 Next 10 years, cheese man.
37:43 Speaker 00 We just need to call it something different. So that's how we don't kill, that's how they don't die. We'll call them something else.
37:49 Speaker 01 It's like Monster Board. It used to be Monster Board, then they dropped the board, right? They called it something different. Who knows? Who knows what we're gonna call it? But I do know one thing, we need to know where the hell we can find this research. Lou, if somebody wants to connect with you or maybe even find the research, where can they, where can they find you? Where can they download this information?
38:10 Speaker 04 So the research is downloadable on the Jobico site. So until we've released, people can sign up and as, and once it's published, they will, they will get the report as soon as it's out, which will be, we're putting the finishing touches on it now, so it will be very shortly. And people can find me on my website is lugoodman.co.uk or on LinkedIn.
38:29 Speaker 01 How about you, Martin? How can, how can people connect with you and convince you that what we should call job boards next?
38:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, I have a regular discussion with a lot of people about that. So best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm very responsive on LinkedIn, so just type in Martin Lentz and Jobico. I also posted the link, maybe you can highlight it in your, in your show notes. It's jobico.com/job-board-revolution. That's J O B I Q O dot com, job-board-revolution. And you can download it there. And as you say, like in the beginning, you said 80% of the, of the, of the traffic is coming from Indeed. We want to equip this 20% with the right tools and knowledge. So Indeed finally stops the anglicification.
39:21 Speaker 00 There's the sales pitch. There's the sales pitch. It's lunchtime and I'm oddly enticed by Vienna sausages for some reason. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.
39:32 Speaker 05 Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast. The Chad. The cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet, you're listening. It's incredible. And, not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar. Blue. Nacho. Pepper jack. Swiss. So many cheeses. And not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes. Spotify. Google Play. Or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way, you won't miss an episode.
40:17 Speaker 05 And, while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out.
Previous Eightfold Gets Served Next Shredded: Waabi Innovation, LinkedIn, Wellfound, Hirefly, Waymo, Rippling, Veremark & More Page updated November 11, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
