Job Boards Real Threat - Aggregators

we are all a bit bored by the "social media will sweep away job board" debate aren't we? (FWIW - my view is there has never been such an efficient way for a person to access and apply for jobs than job boards - so there is plenty of life in that model)

What i think is really quite interesting is what the role of aggregators will be in UK over next couple of years. Aggregators are a slightly dirty secret in all that most (all??) major job boards use them to get qualified job seeker traffic but don't like to talk about it.

Data quality can be poor - we get clients complaing about Indeed, Simply Hired etc and how there jobs got up there and can we get them down.
But.....

Due to their very nature (aggregating job content) they appear high in Google search results for all common searches. The sites have helped them build this leading SEO position.

So what's stopping them selling direct and bypassing the job boards as they do in USA. Answer - nothing and now they are doing so. So have the job boards created a monster which is now going to turn on them and destroy their marketplace and yields. Who knows??

The big brands of the jobsites (Monster, Total,Jobsite) would legitimately say they have spent millions building trusted brands and that will maintain their market leading position. But are these brands really that strong??? i mean....really???

So forget Facebook - if i were a media owner i would be looking in another direction for my next big competitor.

And a brief aside - in early days of OME - i had a meet arranged out of the blue by someone with SimplyHired and they came to our office - now my excuse was it was a busy day and i had to pick my daughters up from school - but i could only end up having 15 minutes with them and i had done zero prep. and had to leave them half way through the cup of coffee (having been shouted at by the mother of my children to get my arse out of office and get to the school).
one of the people i met was Gautam Godhwani who i subsequently discovered was $$$$billions. I think he saw me driving off in my mum's old car she had lent me after taking pity on me, times were tough in Year 1 and 2.
I wonder what he thought of one of the self proclaimed UK thought leaders in digital recruitment...

OME's Offsite Day

Without trying to be too grand - the 5 board members of OME had a day out of the office and tried to right all the wrongs, deconstruct the company, show a path forward to glory and riches.
Now my view on these things is that if you end up with a bunch of overambitious commitments, it ends up being very demotivational as you set yourself up to fail. At same time, if you end up patting yourselves on the back and not striving to improve, you end up stagnating.
So we tried the middle ground.
Everyone ended up with 2 actions, everyone has a pet project they believe in. And best of all i made the notes of everyone's commitments.

So i can name and shame any one who falls short and subtly edit my own promises if they are looking unlikely to be delivered.

i think that's called win-win.