Recruitment classified is set to face new pressure with reports that Google is planning its jobs board following that of the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft.

AIM Group's Brian Blum says that while no details are available, reports that would see Google compete with sites like Monster, CareerBuilder, TotalJobs, StepStone and others are pervasive.

"No one has details, no one is willing to talk on or even off-the-record, and Google itself isn't saying a word," he says.

The Classified Intelligence Report analyst says there has been chatter for about three months - at a meeting of The Network global recruitment alliance in Warsaw in April, at RecTech in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, and at "lots of places in between".

What form it might take, and how it would impact the recruitment classified business is up for speculation. Blum quotes David González Castro, founder of Latin American internet company Red Arbor, that a deep, full-fledged job board would have a high impact, while Przemek Gacek, whose Grupa Pracuj operates job boards in Poland and Ukraine, says Google as an aggregator would definitely impact business as well as other job sites which rely on Google as a main source of traffic.

"We would certainly not allow Google to scrape jobs from our site," he says.

An entry would however, be welcomed by Terry Baker, chief executive of job board network RealMatch, which runs paid search campaigns on Google: "We assume Google would make it easier to buy and bid on employment ads," he says, believing Google would "crush" Indeed (which) he says discriminates "against job boards", whereas Google would be agnostic.

Blum says it would not be the first time Google has dipped its toe into the classified waters, with its Google Base (2004) seen as a response to Craigslist, followed by the 2010 Google Merchant Center.

A 2009 experiment with real estate classified in Australia - with listings added directly into Google Maps - "sent Australian real estate classified publishers into a panic," Blum says, "with at least one stating it had 'decided against giving its listings to Google' in order not to 'create a competitor with the pedigree of Google'.

The real estate listings experiment never progressed beyond Australia and was shut down within a couple of years. Blum says Google also launched several classified sites in various African countries, only to close them after they failed to catch on.

"In our last Classified Intelligence Report, we suggested one possible outcome of Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn was an integration of LinkedIn job posts on the Bing search engine," he says. "Although that's just one possibility, it could make sense if Google launches its own job board.

"And Indeed is a powerhouse global job aggregator, offering a tempting target for Google - although, of course, Indeed generates much of its traffic through ads placed on Google.