By: Joshua Finley 

The modern talent acquisition marketplace has undergone tectonic shifts over the last 20 years. As it has transitioned from face-to-face interactions to predominantly online engagements, a substantial gap has developed between the lived experiences of employers and job seekers. To explore these market changes, we reached out to entrepreneur Sarah Springsteen Trumble. 

Sarah is a trailblazer and an expert in the evolution of the modern job market. She also contributes a weekly column to The Pinconning Journal, addressing residents’ pressing questions about the workplace. She explains that online job marketplaces are vastly different from real-world ones and discusses how the online experience can be significantly improved for all involved.

Understanding the Dynamics of Two-Stakeholder Online Marketplaces

One of the first distinctions that Trumble highlights is how online marketplaces represent something truly unique. ‘Two-stakeholder online marketplaces are different from real-world two-stakeholder marketplaces,’ she said. In the real world, there is often a preexisting relationship between stakeholders. For example, a father buying his daughter a Disney World ticket will base his decision to return on the evaluation of their experience after leaving the park. 

The difference with online marketplaces, however, is that they often function more like estranged relationships—where the stakeholders have never met and may never interact post-transaction. This means there is far less pressure for job market vendors to provide a good experience than in the real world because when there is no post-transaction evaluation, there’s no feedback loop to determine whether the ‘park’ should be revisited.

Another issue with online marketplaces is their individualized nature. As Trumble explained, ‘Online marketplaces like Facebook give the illusion of an identical experience, but in reality, they are highly individualized because the algorithms are designed that way. We’re all familiar with the clickbait on YouTube and Instagram. We sit next to each other and laugh at how different our feeds are. But we forget that job platforms work similarly. Their role is to deliver individualized content to keep you engaged—something they think you specifically will click on. 

We see this as job seekers, which is why a project manager in Seattle will be shown different job options than a plumber in Texas. However, we overlook the fact that when stakeholders don’t engage off-platform, this clickbait-driven individualization becomes invisible. There’s no collective understanding of how these platforms are personalized. This creates the illusion that you understand the experience of job seekers or employers on the platform when, in reality, you don’t. Even among job seekers, there’s no broad understanding because we tend to conceal our job search activities. On top of that, we literally feed job platforms our resumes, and the algorithms use that data to analyze your background, education, and employment gaps. So, a project manager in Arkansas with no employment gap might not see the same job postings as a project manager in Michigan with a significant gap. We couldn’t possibly know because there’s such a stigma around open, honest communication about the realities of job searching.

The Power Dynamics of Talent Acquisition Marketplaces

As Trumble explained, this creates an additional imbalance in the online talent acquisition space: who controls the narrative? She says that if the hiring industry were truly transparent and based on real-life experiences between both parties, it would be dramatically different. For now, the market is one-sided, with vendors selling their services to employers and controlling the entire narrative of what it’s like to be a job seeker under their care. She explains that when employers focus solely on the outcomes of their hiring needs rather than on the user experience of job seekers, they don’t incentivize companies to create better solutions—they incentivize companies to profit from it. ‘If you don’t care that LinkedIn is like a jail for job seekers rather than a solution, and you only care that job seekers are present on the platform, then you’ll continue paying LinkedIn for your talent shortage while blaming job seekers for not properly breaking their chains.’ In this analogy, the chains consist of scam jobs, ghost jobs, zombie jobs, and technical dysfunction on the platform.

Trumble goes on to demonstrate that the economic numbers back up her assessment. Indeed—’Indeed’s revenue in 2023 was $3.9 billion, LinkedIn’s revenue was $15.5 billion, and Workday’s revenue was $7.25 billion. Do you know how many recruiting firms, ATS platforms, and job platforms are million-dollar profitable?’ On the other hand, she says, ‘U.S. economic losses in 2023 due to unfilled roles were about $12 trillion, according to Yahoo.’ In addition, ‘more than 27.4 million U.S. workers were occluded from the talent acquisition process due to standard practices, according to a Harvard study from 2021,’ with Trumble pointing out that this number was expected to rise even further.

Addressing the Issue: Authentic User Experience Data

While discussing potential solutions, Trumble emphasizes the pressing importance of transparency in collecting real user experience data from both stakeholders to bridge the existing gap. She says, “The only solution in two-stakeholder marketplaces that exist online, where the stakeholders don’t know each other before entering the marketplace and don’t really engage afterward, is to collect authentic user experience data from both stakeholders. It’s how eBay, Facebook, Etsy, and all online marketplaces function.” Without this transparency, industries working on such platforms have little incentive to sincerely support the needs of stakeholders. Instead, they may create barriers to protect their profit margins.

Considering this, Trumble advocates for providing ways for job seekers to offer employers honest feedback about their experiences with job market vendors. “What my platform essentially does is create windows in the walls so that you can actually evaluate whether the product that exists helps address hiring issues or aggravates them,” she says. Furthermore, Trumble states, “Hiring evaluations also offer solutions to the challenges job seekers face. It gives them a space to gain actionable insights into their job search—whether or not HR has the time to provide that feedback in an online space. Whether they are immediately rejected or make it to the second interview, they can better understand what to do or avoid to improve. They are also far less likely to fall for ghost job click bait schemes because the bad actors behind them are called out.

Final Thoughts on the Talent Acquisition Industry

Speaking of professional feedback, questions have been raised about whether Trumble’s new job platform fits among existing players. She responds by explaining that her platform is focused on the hiring process and is not intended to be another Glassdoor: ‘I’d like modern job market vendors to be subject to the same user evaluations that every other online marketplace, from Etsy to Yelp to Rotten Tomatoes, uses,’ she affirms, making clear her mission to reshape the landscape of talent acquisition.

Trumble hopes to continue scaling her platform in the coming months by signing deals with municipalities for API access to local job boards and building out a franchise of regional job networks. The result, she says, is a hiring ecosystem that is transparent, user-friendly, and representative of all its constituents’ experiences.

For more insights from Sarah Trumble, visit her LinkedIn page.

Published by: Martin De Juan