2 years, 5 months and 27 days after selling his first job board to media group Trinity Mirror and Mr Secs (a.k.a SecsInTheCity founder Jon Grocott) is back. This time with a new network of niche job boards branded ClearlyJobs.

This news is hot off the press, but we can confirm Mr Grocott has teamed up with Robert Schofield (ex-CEO of GAAPweb) and a technical team who have a history of building successful job boards.

ClearlyJobs, has initially launched with presences in two niche sectors: finance and secretarial. However we expect to see the network expand into additional sectors throughout the year.

At least one of the niche sites appears to have been ‘primed’ ahead of the network’s launch. Both topFinancialJobs and clearlySecretarialJobs have Google PageRanks and the former site appears high up the search results for financial-based searches.

At this stage we’ve not had an opportunity to fully review the sites, but we understand the job boards are focusing on a ‘keep it simple’ strategy. We are not expecting to find video products or referral recruitment techniques on these sites.

Both Mr Schofield and Mr Grocott have proven track records in the UK job board sector, which makes this news more interesting than the average job site launch.

In addition, the network will be going head-to-head with some well-established job boards (including the owners’ previous sites). ClearlyJobs will be competing in sectors that are already well catered for by existing job boards, many of which have significant resources at their disposal.

We hope to have more information on this story for the next born podcast, in the meantime this new network is clearly one to watch.

This week whatjobsite, an information site for direct employers, announced that UK job boards are letting down small-to-medium sized businesses. The findings are based upon new research conducted by the company, combining user surveys and a study of 30 popular job sites.

Following the announcement we interviewed Karl Schweppe, Managing Director of whatjobsite, about the research, how job boards are failing SMEs and what actions they should take to rectify the situation.

The interview is available to the right, or you can listen while you continue to browse by using the born Audio Player.

Perhaps one of the most important points raised in the interview is that the issues affect a range of job boards, from generalists to specialists.

This news comes less than two weeks after Forrester Research found that US career sites were failing job seekers. It would seem that both home and abroad, job boards still have some work to do in satisfying both sides of their client base.

© Ivonne Wierink | Dreamstime.com

Last year FuseJobs launched to the UK market. The site has an interesting business model, which is a cross between a niche job board and a vertical search engine.

This week we took the opportunity to speak to Director Amanda Lacey about the site, why the company selected the ‘entry-level jobs’ sector and the challenges in aggregating job content.

The interview is available to the right, or you can listen while you continue to browse by using the born Audio Player.

Amanda makes some interesting comments about how the site currently handles expired jobs and duplicate adverts, including giving some insights into future developments.

The UK aggregator market is becoming well serviced by the likes of Indeed, WorkCircle and WorkHound so it is perhaps surprising there are not more niche vertical search engines like FuseJobs around.