Reports of job boards’ death have been greatly exaggerated. They remain an important — and evolving — tool for staffing firms.

“Job boards is always an important topic for staffing firms to consider,” said John Nurthen, executive director of global research at Staffing Industry Analysts. “Job boards have never had the best of reputations, people have sort of expected job boards to fade away and die, but that’s certainly not the case. In fact, we estimate that job boards are growing at almost twice the rate of the global staffing industry.”

But the job board landscape is evolving fast. There are still ‘standard’ job boards out there, he said. However, there are now several varieties of job boards with different business models that include job aggregators, job distributors, social media sites, online classifieds and others.

Different methods of payment have also emerged that include paying for results instead of just paying for an ad.

This past year also saw fundamental shifts in the market when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, the second-largest job board globally, and Randstad acquired Monster, the fifth-largest job board.

Staffing Industry Analysts estimates job board revenue rose 11% in 2015, and although the large number of small providers makes an estimate of market size difficult, it pegs the global market at somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion.

However, job boards remain as opaque as ever regarding data they make available to help customers gauge their effectiveness. It’s essential, therefore, that staffing firms, one of the largest users of job boards, figure out what works best for them. To that end, Nurthen is hosting a panel on job boards and social media best practices at the Staffing Industry Executive Forum North America later this month. The job board panel takes place at 1:30 p.m. on Feb. 14.

The panel will also look at the future of job boards. And Nurthen expects there to more consolidation in the space going forward and metrics on what ads work and what don’t will become increasingly important.

Panelists will include Jeff Dickey-Chasins, owner of the Job Board Doctor LLC; Jocelyn Lincoln, VP, sourcing & recruiting for Kelly Services Inc.; and Monica Maralit, VP of program management at PSG Global Solutions.