Over a rainy windswept two days last week, nearly 200 job board and recruiting technology pros gathered at a soccer (err, I mean football) stadium in Dublin. The final keynote was given by one of Google’s Bogomil Balkansky who heads their job cloud services.

The unique venue was complimented by a gathering at the Guinness storehouse where we poured each other pints and talked shop. Afterwards a hearty group of souls led by Clinch Talents’ Shane Gray (a Dublin native) ventured on to Temple Bar in the heart of Dublin to continue the conversation.

Their were a lot of European job board execs in attendance. The opening keynote was by the CEO of JobCloud Renato Profico, Switzerland’s top job site destination. He showed off their matching technology and talked about how they are trying to “disrupt themselves” by continuing to innovate and iterate on their currently platform. It was a good reminder that job boards need to continue evolving to meet the need of today’s employers.

What struck me more though was how entrenched his job board is in the hiring process of swiss employers. Jobcloud is a $100 million dollar business for a small country of $5 million people.

Let me repeat that. Jobcloud is a $100 million dollar business. If you put that company in the US it would probably be worth a billion or so to today’s venture capitalists.

I also spoke to a guy from Jobware one of Germany’s top job boards. They charge in excess of $1,000 per job posting! That is about 7x-10x what most sites in the US or UK charge. These sites are able to charge as much because of their dominance in the local market. Use of staffing firms is also strong as well in Europe and they typically charge 15-20% commissions.

When it comes to hiring in Europe, things seem to have not changed in many years.

Some other notable items I jotted down;

• Blank job search is #1 search…(no keywords) on ZipRecruiter
• 81% of companies say Talent Acquisition is biggest challenge of 2018
• Retail marketers are moving to product recommendations….so will jobs.
• 60% of TA leaders are confused by Artificial Intelligence
• Marketing could learn from recruiting and vice versa, marketing needs to give recruiting  a higher priority
• Only 8% of applicants are “considered good quality” accord to a Pando Logic survey
• But 50% of employers say they would pay money for tools that fixed their job ads

To see my pics from the event click over to the Recruiting Headlines Facebook page.

I also spoke with a few vendors including Talenya, Clinch Talent and Jobboard.io. Below is the podcast with that audio.