Are Job Boards Passé? What the Monster.com Buyout Says

In case you hadn’t heard, Monster.com was recently sold  (opens in a new tab) for $429 million—not circus peanuts by any means, but far from its peak value.

During the height of the dot-com boom, Monster was worth $8.4 billion  (opens in a new tab), and for years it held its value. A decade ago the company was worth $7.5 billion  (opens in a new tab).

But despite its profitability, the company has struggled to maintain its market position. CMS Wire writers Noreen Seebacher and Dom Nicastro  (opens in a new tab) attribute that to what they suggest is an outdated business model. (To compare, LinkedIn sold to Microsoft for $26 billion in June.)

They note that many jobs these days are filled through networking rather than via job boards—which isn’t great news, of course, if you run a job board, as many associations do.

“As online recruiting evolves, what’s old is somehow new again—including the old adage that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” Seebacher and Nicastro write.

And that might mean thinking hard about what your job board means to the people who use it.

Plan Ahead

http://twitter.com/SmoothThePath/status/769146262641860609  (opens in a new tab)

If you’re first engaging your new attendees when they get to your convention, you’re probably doing it wrong.

That’s according to Amanda Kaiser of Smooth the Path  (opens in a new tab), who recommends putting a lot of energy into pre-conference communications.

“Let your first-timers know what to expect,” she writes in a blog post. “Help them plan their conference schedule. Communicate with first timers in exclusive pre-conference communications, invite them to an orientation or a breakfast, have a special agenda for them in the program, and give them VIP (not new-member) ribbons.”

That said, when they finally do arrive, make sure you give them a big welcome, she adds.

Other Links of Note

Twitter does a lot of stuff, but it has plenty of features you probably aren’t even aware of. At Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog, social media adviser Kerri Karvetski highlights a few things  (opens in a new tab) I didn’t even know about.

When your organization has been treated as a second-class citizen by the people you help market, how should you respond? In the case of Spotify, Pitchfork reports  (opens in a new tab), it means giving less promotion to album exclusives handed to competitors. Good strategy or bad one?

Have a side hustle of some kind? Do you list your house on Airbnb, for example, or occasionally pick up freelance work? The IRS has a new resource  (opens in a new tab) that will help you figure out how to properly report that income.

The Monster.com mascot. (Bryn Salisbury/Flickr)