Jeff Dickey-Chasins's Page

As anyone who has tried to lose weight or exercise regularly will attest, changing your behavior is hard. You’re fighting years of mental and physical conditioning – and (unfortunately) many times the old habits win out.

That was the challenge that job boards faced in the mid-90s – how to change the ingrained behaviors of job seekers, to move them from searching want ads in the newspapers…to searching want ads online. It took many years, but eventually job seekers did change their habits. The m… Continue

In the spirit of the season, I thought it would be worthwhile to give some thanks (sometimes you forget about it in the midst of everything else). So, in no particular order, here are a few things that I’m particularly thankful for this year:

* You: Seriously. I appreciate the time you spend reading this blog. I hope you find it worthwhile.
* Monster: It’s very useful for our industry to have a ‘big’ company to kick around. Plus it keeps the target off everyone else.
* Employer… Continue

When was the last time you asked your job board customers what they want? Not just a one-off question to a few clients – but an systematic, organized survey of everyone who uses your site? Employers and job seekers?

A recurrent theme in the ‘job boards are dying’ blog posts that I see is a feeling by recruiters, employers, and job seekers that the ‘big boards’ are out of touch. In other words, they don’t know what their customers want. Now, I’m guessing that they would argue with this assumptio… Continue

The appeal of applicant tracking systems (ATS) for employers is obvious: they promise to bring order to the often disordered process of managing job applicants. An ATS can theoretically drive all job applicants into a single pipeline, massage their unruly information into neatly ordered database fields set up exactly as the employer desires, and allow HR to actually manage the interactions with applicants.

Sometimes the ATS works well – and sometimes (like all software) it doesn’t. When it work… Continue

Branding often gets a bad rap – as if there is something inherently bad in trying to create a unique, persuasive persona for your job board. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Think about it: most of the truly successful job boards out there have built successful brands. Monster. CareerBuilder. Dice. The Ladders. RegionalHelpWanted. Of course, a brand won’t replace solid technology, good marketing, and SEO. But in combination with these, branding will help push your job board past hundred… Continue