Here’s what 2009 has in store for job boards - vast change.

•    Employers are scaling back their use of job boards.  They aren’t hiring.
•    Lots of HR managers will lose their jobs.  But, sometimes that helps down the road when they are rehired in new companies, we gain a new customer.
•    Many executive recruiters will throw in the towel and take jobs in less lucrative and less cyclical industries.

Why is the .US country code domain extension so undeveloped in comparison with other country's cc tlds? Until recently I assumed it was a natural bias resulting from America being the pioneer in .com.  But, I've discovered that Google's search algorithms also cripple the .us domain.  

In a chat today, my DiversityJobs.com lead developer showed me this great blog post to make a point:

Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive

Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always.

Consider the average programmer salary here in the US:

Ouch, do we really need to see graphs?

From the Indeed.com blog:

In October, we launched in three more countries: France, Germany and Spain. Indeed’s comprehensive search engine for jobs includes millions of jobs from job boards and company career sites in each of these countries.

Since Indeed.com’s launch four years ago in November 2004, we have grown to include jobs from more than ten thousand websites in seven countries and four languages. More job searches are now performed on Indeed.com than on any other website (comScore Media Metrix, Oct 2008).

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that competition is one of my obsessions...  so, I couldn't pass up talking about Jason Calacanis' ideas on the future of the startup.

I really like two things Jason says - first he calls this the 'try everything' era and truly I believe in hyperactivity as a new requirement for success on the Internet. It is happening as we speak in the job board industry.

Second, he calls longevity a type of innovation - which is funny, as if it were so rare it could be considered something brand-new! In reality, patience and longevity have always been key tools of the trade for most entrepreneurs. But there was a period of time on the Internet when get-rich-quick thinking seemed to dominate. Competition has fixed that!

Google Trends is showing keyword searches with the keyword 'jobs' are up significantly this year starting midway through the year when typically they should be declining based on historical patterns. News reference volume is also up significantly.

See for yourself.

Yesterday we finished our first video, an in-house production giving jobseekers and employers a first-hand look into what it's like to attend one of our Hispanic and bilingual job fairs. 

This video represents a lot of hard work on the part of many individuals and great teamwork - a big thanks and congratulations to all of those involved including the kind and generous exhibitors featured in the video!! You can see it in high-resolution here or watch the YouTube version below. 

This video is about the exponencial growth of available information in our society and what might happen in the future (thanks Doug).  The video is a 2008 remastered version of the original 2006 presentation by Karl Fisch:

So what does it mean?

Coincidentally, I also received this today:

Hacking is one more pressure bearing down on the big job boards...probably an intense one.

If you're running a small niche board, you're not much of a target - I've written about our struggles with hackers but those have always been directed at our content management system and not our job boards.  From ZDNet.com:

Malicious hackers are exploiting a cross-site scripting flaw on Yahoo’s HotJobs site to phish for Yahoo credentials, according to a warning from Netcraft.

In the ongoing attack, Netcraft discovered that the vulnerability allows the attacker to inject obfuscated JavaScript into the affected page to steal authentication cookies that are sent for the yahoo.com domain.