Executive Summary: Job Board Revolution?

Job boards sell applications (easy to count, easy to monetise), whilst employers want hiring outcomes, and candidates seek meaningful employment. The gap between what’s sold, what’s bought, and what’s needed is the industry’s structural fault line, revealing an operational model that, increasingly, struggles to serve either side adequately.

The labour market has transformed over recent years. The economy is sluggish, so employers have fewer jobs, making them more selective, and are deploying more AI throughout the hiring process. Candidates, facing fewer jobs, tougher competition, and rampant ghosting, use AI application tools to increase their chances. This creates a doom loop in which more AI-generated applications drive greater employer demand for AI screening, which, in turn, drives greater candidate reliance on AI applications.

The job board model that worked when average tenure was seven years, and candidates applied selectively, is straining under conditions it was never designed for, resulting in a system that optimises and monetises activity rather than outcomes.

This report examines what job boards are really selling, and whether they can redefine it for a new era before someone else does.

Theme 1: Defining quality

Employers and candidates define quality differently, and both definitions are valid. Without a shared meaning of “quality,” job boards optimise for volume, the only metric both sides provisionally accept. The report examines why this isn’t just a technical problem waiting for better algorithms, but also a definitional problem rooted in diverging expectations about what employment relationships should look like.

Theme 2: Power and control

Job boards are two-sided marketplaces, but they don’t control the critical transaction. The application disappears into an ATS, the candidate often hears nothing, and the employer receives applications stripped of context with no signal about match quality or intent. The report maps where power actually lies, why it is so challenging to address systemic issues due to fragmentation, and how power is consolidating at the infrastructure layer (Google, LinkedIn, Indeed, major ATSs) even as the job board market diversifies, creating both constraints and opportunities for different types of players.

Theme 3: Design, trust and market behaviour

The tactics that maximise short-term revenue often undermine the trust that sustains long-term value, creating a monetisation paradox for job boards. The report examines how design and monetisation choices either build or corrode trust, where job boards create value in the hiring process, what prerequisites enable quality accountability, and what recruitment can learn from other marketplaces like eBay, Facebook and Groupon that either built resilience through trust or accelerated decline through extraction. It identifies which capabilities create a defensible positioning and the foundations that must be in place before transformation becomes possible.

Theme 4: External forces and internal choices

The external forces threatening to disrupt the job board (and wider recruitment) industry are consequences of the way the recruitment ecosystem has evolved. Staffing agencies, employers, ATSs, job boards, and candidates all optimise for individual short-term interests; while understandable, this collective behaviour creates the systemic dysfunction that new entrants are exploiting. The report examines what saying yes to volume meant saying no to, how it created the white space that AI platforms like HireEZ are bypassing job boards entirely to fill, and what strategic choices remain available to the job boards willing and able to make them.

About the report

This is the Executive Summary of a comprehensive 20,000-word thought leadership report, developed by independent consultant Lou Goodman and commissioned by Jobiqo, that examines the structural challenges facing job boards as AI and market forces reshape recruitment.

The full report expands on these arguments with detailed analysis across four interconnected themes. Drawing on platform economics research from Platform Revolution, case studies from eBay, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Indeed, and analysis of global recruitment trends, it examines why quality has become an empty word in recruitment, why no single player can fix the system alone, how monetisation models create trust paradoxes, and what external forces are accelerating the need for change. 

Rather than prescriptive solutions, it provides diagnostic frameworks and strategic options for job boards to escape the volume trap and build defensible competitive positions through audience ownership, trust-aware design, and focusing on Recruiting Outcomes. 

Written for board operators, technology vendors, and industry stakeholders, the report is designed for both comprehensive and non-linear reading.

Author: Lou Goodman is an independent strategy consultant with 20+ years of experience spanning recruitment marketing agencies, consumer brand work, and B2B marketing leadership. She brings systems thinking and platform economics expertise to the recruitment industry’s challenges.

For more information:
Speaking engagements or strategic advisory: hello@lougoodman.co.uk
Connect: linkedin.com/in/lougoodman 

This executive summary may be shared freely with attribution