First published May 2025. Restored in full in October 2026.
After 15 years straddling both recruitment and job board worlds, I’ve watched the same conversation happen in parallel universes. Each side thinks they understand the other, but the gap is widening, and candidates are falling through it.
AI is apparently reshaping these industries while economic pressures and customer expectations force everyone to justify their worth. After attending Job Boards Connect (May 2025), I was struck by a troubling disconnect:
Job boards and recruiters are speaking different languages while trying to solve the same problems.
Here’s what I learned about where we are and where we need to go.
I’ve written about how job boards and recruitment agency models are merging before. Here’s my take from February 2024, if you want to see how it has evolved.
Uncomfortable truths about volume vs. quality
“Someone applied for 325 jobs in 24 hours.”
This wasn’t a hypothetical example. It was a real case shared by Lee Biggins, CEO of Resume Library, at the conference.
While extreme, it highlights what many recruiters already know: the current system rewards quantity over quality.
There was plenty of rhetoric laying the blame at Indeed’s door, but I’m not inclined to agree. The problem is misaligned incentives. Payment models between the brokers of jobseeker traffic are based on the volume of applications, not the quality.
Indeed may take the lion’s share of traffic and therefore suffer from the “problem” of high volume but, as Garreth Hayes, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at Indeed, put it, they still only “have a small market share of an industry worth $250B globally.”
Meanwhile, recruiters drown in applications and candidates wonder why they never hear back.
Nobody wins in this scenario.
Employers and recruiters waste time filtering unqualified candidates, often missing good people buried in the pile.
All whilst job seekers are ignored and dehumanised throughout the job hunt.
AI: friend, foe, or just misunderstood?
The most heated discussions centred on AI’s role in recruitment.
Indeed is already using AI at scale for content generation, reportedly saving $10M a year.
But their message was clear. “Human-in-the-loop” remains essential. They see dramatically better results when AI supports human judgement rather than replacing it.
As Hayes put it: “Robots won’t replace people, but someone using robots better than you will take your job.”
Alexander Chukovski spoke most eloquently and in the most depth about AI. He believes job boards should focus on three areas:
- SEO enrichment through niche-specific taxonomies matching search intent
- Better matching algorithms that truly understand roles and candidates
- Screening and validation of candidates, an area currently lacking good options
Interestingly, Indeed is using AI to personalise job alerts and seeing a 20% increase in conversion rates.
This suggests AI works best when it improves the human experience rather than replacing it.
Current hiring processes are fundamentally broken
Lou Goodman, former VP global B2B marketing at Monster, made an analogy that stuck with me:
“We have a better experience booking travel than we do in our job search. Yet changing careers is a much bigger decision than going on holiday.”
This gets to the heart of our industry’s challenge.
The traditional CV model is inherently flawed. It represents your past rather than your potential.
Referencing dating sites, Hayes commented: “It’s like using pictures and details of your past partners to inform your future partner choice.”
What we truly need is outcome data, information about what makes placements successful long-term, but this remains the hardest data to capture.
The shift to value-based models
An interesting trend is emerging amongst niche job boards: the move toward productised recruitment services.
These offerings deliver a higher yield than traditional job postings but cost significantly less than full recruitment agency fees.
They use automation, offshoring and/or AI with crucial human oversight, guaranteeing employers qualified candidates rather than just volume.
It’s a direct response to the market’s shifting needs:
- Traditional job boards sell exposure
- Major platforms shifted to cost-per-application
- The new model focuses on qualified candidate applications
This evolution makes sense when you consider that “volume isn’t a sell” anymore.
Employers use Indeed despite the flood of applications because “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”, and the same can be said of Indeed. All in all, recruiters would prefer something that delivers quality without the noise.
Are job boards dead?
Job boards are often hit with the same stick as recruitment agencies. Both industries have apparently been dying out for years.
It was said that job boards survived the shift to mobile and social media giants’ attempts to disrupt them, and that they’ll also survive AI. They’re the source of all jobseeker traffic, after all, and HR tech would be nothing without them.
I get this argument, but when there is so much inefficiency in the system, job boards are under threat in much the same way that recruitment agencies are.
Employers want to hire directly.
External recruitment support, which includes advertising, is in the “necessary evil” category.
In the same way that it’s a small leap to build a talent team to lower spend on external recruiters, it’s also a small leap to optimise traffic to owned employer career sites.
Job boards aren’t dead, but they cannot rest on their laurels.
The future isn’t a better job board. It’s a completely reimagined connection platform that bears little resemblance to today’s post-and-pray model.
I’d say the same about most recruitment businesses. The course correction after the current downturn is not a swing back to what came before: high headcount, graduate hiring, contingent recruiters spraying and praying.
It’s lean, customer-centric businesses run by humans who are augmented with bleeding-edge technology. (If you can buy the tech at RecExpo, you’re probably too late.)
I’ve written about how agencies can run lean.
Horses for courses
Indeed picked up a lot of heat at this conference, which was full of their smaller competitors and suppliers to the job board sector. No shock there. However, they’re the market giant for a reason.
Having used Indeed and their challengers for over 15 years, I have a good feel for what works best and when. I recently used Indeed to hire retail workers for one of my SMEs, and it was fantastic. It served as an ATS for a business not at the scale to need one, and the cost per hire was tiny.
But I can imagine that when recruiting for a white-collar, remote-first role with high jobseeker demand, it’s a nightmare. So don’t use Indeed for that role. It’s simple really. Find a better way to recruit.
This is where services come into play.
I predict that we’ll see a complete collapse of the middle market for recruiting.
What will emerge is a split industry: high-touch boutique services for specialised roles and fully automated options for everything else.
Who powers what is up for grabs.
What job boards can take from recruiters
Despite owning valuable data and traffic, many job boards fundamentally misunderstand how recruiters operate. To be more useful, job boards need to:
- Think beyond the click. Success isn’t measured in applications but in successful placements. Job boards should track and optimise for quality matches.
- Embrace the human element. Recruitment connects people with opportunities. Technology should improve this relationship, not replace it.
- Invest in candidate experience. The job search remains unnecessarily painful. Job boards that improve it will win loyalty from both sides.
- Develop role-specific insights. Generic job descriptions and one-size-fits-all algorithms don’t work. Sector expertise matters enormously in making good matches.
What recruiters can learn from job boards
Equally, many recruiters don’t understand how job boards operate and miss chances to use their platforms well:
- Scale through technology. Job boards excel at processing vast amounts of data. Recruiters need similar tools while keeping their human advantage. I’ve written about what this looks like in practice for a recruitment firm.
- SEO and digital marketing. Many recruiters remain surprisingly behind in digital marketing. Learning from job boards’ traffic acquisition could change their candidate pipelines completely.
- Data-driven decision making. Top job boards are ruthlessly analytical about performance. Recruiters should be just as rigorous in measuring their effectiveness.
- Personalisation at scale. Indeed’s success with personalised job alerts shows how technology can create better individual experiences while operating at scale.
Where does this leave employers?
If you’re hiring, these insights should reshape your approach:
- Quality beats quantity. The era of casting wide nets and hoping for the best is ending. Target your efforts and invest in better attraction and screening. Scrutinise more closely where you are spending on hiring.
- Your job adverts probably aren’t good enough. Generic postings attract generic applications. Be specific about what success looks like in the role.
- Consider hybrid approaches. The most effective strategy may combine job boards’ reach with recruiters’ expertise in screening and assessment. Job boards are fantastic for the top of the funnel, but you must find a way to triage applications: automate, delegate or eliminate.
- AI will change everything, gradually. Don’t expect it overnight, but do prepare for AI to affect every stage of hiring.
Finally, where does this leave the job seeker?
For those navigating the job market, the ground is shifting beneath your feet:
- Personalisation matters more than ever. Generic applications are increasingly easy to spot and filter out. Tailor your approach to each opportunity. Build connections with hiring organisations, particularly for roles you covet.
- AI is reviewing your application. Increasingly, your application may not reach human eyes without first passing AI screening. Understand how these systems work and adapt accordingly.
- The future is skills-based. Despite the conference’s lack of discussion on training and development, the shift toward skills-based hiring is unmistakable. Focus on demonstrating capabilities, not just experience.
- Quality of applications beats quantity. Spray and pray is less effective than ever. Spend more time on fewer, better applications. Job boards will begin to actively ban AI spam applications.
Bridging the gap
The most striking thing about the conference was the missed opportunity for collaboration.
Job boards, recruiters, employers and training providers all hold pieces of the same puzzle but rarely work together well.
Those who can bridge these worlds, connecting recruitment, job discovery and skills development, will find themselves at a big advantage.
The future belongs to platforms and agencies that understand the whole talent market, not just their corner of it.
Rather than fighting over the same shrinking pie, we should be expanding what’s possible in hiring. Both job boards and recruiters need to move beyond their current models toward solving the fundamental challenge: connecting the right people with the right opportunities at the right time.
The technology and the data already exist. What’s missing is the vision to bring them together.
It’s an area I’m hugely interested in, and I’m constantly evolving our models at Boltjobs.com and Bolt Search to test what works against what the market needs.
The changes I’m proposing aren’t just good business, they’re necessary for the health of the talent industry. I challenge others to reject the status quo and build things that truly serve everyone in the hiring process.
If you run a job board or an agency and want your application triage, matching or job alerts built properly, book a 30-minute call.
