As much as its CEO impresses me, we’ve never been big fans of Branchout here at StaffingTalk. We’re not alone.
I was following a thread on human capital over at AVC and this comment came out from John Rorick, a VP of Global Talent at a very large manufacturer:
One thing I can say with certainty, I have yet to speak to anyone in my network that has used or recruited a soul using Branchout. I chuckle when I read articles trumpeting their growth in registrants.
Rorick also had this to say about how monetization is playing out in the job board and recruiting space:
I recently negotiated/re-upped all of our global job board and talent contracts. There was only one vendor I could not choke revenue the life out of: Linkedin. Very little leverage. Caveat, this is in the context of large corporate, not startup environment. We have 14k associates; put the churn at 15% and do the math on recruiting volume.
While many candidates decry the value of Linkedin as nothing more than a poor online version of a rolodex, it is where the monetizing audience is flocking, and where most professional level candidates are told to be if they are not already on the system. Aggregators play a huge role as well, with Indeed as the clear winner in the space, at least in the US, with Simplyhired having stubbed its toe in the past few years.
I would rank the current recruitment world as: aggregators, linkedin, niche job boards (think Dice, cpgjobs.com, etc), then traditional and flagging job boards (cbuilder, monster which is now up for sale) and facebook.
