I interviewed a candidate just now (Im a third party recruiter) and had to smile at his final comment. “Thank god for job boards, its much easier to find jobs now because of them”. This candidate is at GM/Director level in HR and has worked with some of our countries largest NGO and corporate organisations. Maybe job boards will survive another year or two. I hope so.

Recruiting (the movement of people in and out of organizations) involves 160 Million people and 7 million hiring establishments in the United States alone.

The idea that people (candidates, employees) will join 'communities' whose purpose is to keep an employers talent pipeline full is a little naive. The people you want most in those 'communities' don't need to be there. The people you don't need so much come in droves.

The reslut is that the people (candidates, employees, potential candidates) who populate the 'communities' have to belong to enough communities to hedge their bets. That's probably seven to ten.

No one has that much time on their hands.

So while social recruiting has its place, it's just one tool in the toolbox and not very likely to become the predominant tool.

With the nearly infinite variety of combinations of work place (7 million) and worker (160 million) it's unlikely that smaller operations (most people work for companies with fewer than 100 employees) will ever be able to cost effectively run a 'community'.

So, there will always be a large need for companies that make the market easier to navigate by consolidating opportunities and people who are looking for those opportunities.

We're in the process of re-building our college job board to put much more emphasis on content and community and much less emphasis on the traditional job board tools such as postings. We'll certainly still have postings and you'll find a search engine on the front page and hundreds of employer, location, and occupational field specific pages with postings for each pre-populated right on those pages (i.e., you'll see all of the postings in Dallas when you go to the Dallas page) but we're emphasizing real content — not postings — and building community around that content.

People won't form communities simply because they are able to or because the web site they're on encourages them to do so. But when the content resonates with them and therefore matters to them, they'll want more and today's college students and recent graduates trust user generated content far more than the press release type content that oozes out of many organizations. They're also far more inclined than older generations to contribute that content — when it matters to them.

Whether we're successful in engaging our users to the point where they contribute their own meaningful, relevant content about specific employers, locations, or occupational fields remains to be seen. But with hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month, even if only hundreds become well engaged then we'll have a significant win on our hands in a much smaller yet similar way to what LinkedIn has seen.