Broadbean and the end of the job boards?

Over the last couple of weeks I have been hearing interesting whispers and rants from job boards regarding the Broadbean job posting service. Apparently Broadbean have put their prices up and not by a small amount either.

Anybody in the business of online recruitment will be aware of the central role Broadbean has played and continues to play in the distribution of job ads around the many thousands of job boards in the UK. It’s a valuable service for recruiters saving them from the tiresome process of having to post jobs to all these sites.

Broadbean was bought by Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND), the digital division of DMGT and the owners of Jobsite, back in October of 2008. At the time, there was a collective intake of breath from all the small and independent job boards across the UK. What would the acquisition mean? Why did AND buy the company? Was there any reason to be fearful? Well, it might now be becoming clear.

Traditionally, Broadbean used to charge job boards a small fee (a couple of hundred pounds) to be registered on their network and then be able to automatically receive jobs from the Broadbean recruitment clients. But recently, so we have heard, new job boards have been quoted many thousands of pounds to be added to Broadbean.

For small and newer job boards this price increase is proving prohibitive. As a consequence smaller job boards simply can’t afford to plug themselves into Broadbean and are, therefore, being starved of the  jobs from rec con clients. They simply can’t get or keep the inventory necessary to reach or maintain critical mass. And, obviously, rec con clients won’t make the effort of posting jobs on multiple job boards themselves.

So new job boards face a real challenge. In one simple move, Broadbean may have effectively ended the profusion of job boards.  We at whatjobsite feel there are far too many job boards in the UK and anything that helps to tidy up the market is welcome. However, one has to feel a little anxious about what this Broadbean move will mean for the future of independent job boards.