So, what do you need to get your own job board online? This blog post will tell you!
1. What is a job board
In a few words, a job board is a platform where employers come to list their job opportunities and job seekers come to browse and find jobs.
There are small to medium size job boards for every niche and industry, and bigger, broader job boards such as Indeed and ZipRecruiter aggregating jobs from all industries.
Job boards allow employers to hire employees by advertising their job listings and job seekers to search, find and apply to new job openings with options to filter results by location, job type, keyword and other filters.
2. The benefits of job boards
Whether you run a community, an association, a city, school or recruiting agency, the main benefits of creating and running a job board can be broken down to:
- Providing value to your community members by showcasing targeted, relevant job opportunities in your niche. A job board can help you become the go-to source for career advancement in your niche, engaging and rewarding your audience along the way.
- Creating a new source of revenue by unlocking the value in your audience: while it is not a requirement, most job boards charge employers to post job opportunities, creating a healthy revenue stream that can power your community and ensure sustainability over the long run. For associations, job boards are a great way to boost non-dues revenue.
- Acting as a marketing tool: SaaS companies, schools and communities alike can benefit from the marketing potential of a job board. As you build up your job board to becoming a leading source for jobs in your niche, the traffic it brings helps to build and promotes your brand in an organic, value-centric way. With traditional marketing avenues becoming more and more saturated, running a job board is an unconventional but effective way to help your company stand out.
3. Who needs a job board?
Whether you run an association, a niche community, a city, a software company or a staffing firm, creating a job board can be just the asset your organization needs.
For associations: job boards are one of the most effective ways to grow non-dues revenue, which is critical for associations with limited budgets. Your association's job board will make you a destination for career advancement in your field and further the value provided to your members.
For niche communities: job boards are an effective way to showcase job opportunities in your particular niche. A community job board connects job seekers and employers in your audience over specific skills or expertise required in your space. On top of this, the revenue generated from job sales will help sustain your community over the long term.
For cities and states: job boards are a great way of showcasing local opportunities and boosting the local economy. Whether you are looking to attract job seekers from other cities or simply highlight job opportunities for locals, a job board can be a great tool for reducing unemployment and fostering economic development.
For software companies: with many conventional marketing avenues now saturated or overly competitive, job boards represent a smart new way of building awareness of your brand and product by hosting an online destination that will bring targeted customers in your industry and help establish your company as a domain expert.
4. How to start a job board website
Now that you've learned about what job boards are and what benefits they offer, it's time to review your options for creating and running your own custom job board.
The main two options are:
- Using a self hosted plugin on a platform such as Wordpress. This is usually a cheap or free option, but it requires you to manage all technical aspects of hosting and provisioning the job board and you will likely run into technical or design limitations as the underlying software can be slow and offer minimal customization.
- Using a fully managed, cloud-based solution: these solutions will charge monthly or annual fees for their service but provide a simple, easy-to-use interface for you to create and set up a fully tested and optimized job board, handling all aspects of hosting and software provisioning for you. Other benefits of note: the fact that the software is continuously improved and you automatically benefit from newly added features as they are released, as well as a responsive support team to help you along the way.
Having built the software behind Niceboard, we know first-hand how much work is involved in setting up a full custom job board from scratch, and have seen many potential customers choose to go the "cheaper" route, only to find that they've wasted weeks in setup and the solution doesn't work for them.
For this reason, we recommend skipping the headache and opting for a managed solution from the get-go.
"We had seriously considered building a custom job board before finding Niceboard. That's a huge task by the time you consider Stripe integration, email subscriptions, back-filling job listings, etc.
Out of the box Niceboard has all the features we would have spent weeks building and testing, now we can focus on the sales and marketing side of building a job board."
- Tony S, Co-Founder & CTO
Here are a few important factors to consider when evaluating job board software:
- Pricing
- Design and overall ease of use
- Payments processing
- Time to market for a job board
- Out of the box features
- Degree of customization
5. Designing your job board's look and feel
Once you've created your job board, you'll want to customize its design to match your brand and make it unique.
Design is an important aspect of the board because it's the first thing job seekers and employers see and interact with. It sets the tone for your job listings, and can make or break a job seeker’s decision to apply for a position and, perhaps more importantly, an employer's decision to post on your board.
The design should be clean, simple, and easy-to-use so users don't get overwhelmed or distracted by too many options when searching for jobs online.
If you are using a cloud based solution such as Niceboard, your job board's base design will be based off of a highly optimized, beautiful base layout that you can make your own with just a few clicks.
6. Setting pricing and adding initial jobs
Adding initial jobs
Before you share your newly created board with the world, you'll want to populate it with a selection of initial jobs.
If you don't already have relationships with employers or a handful of jobs of your own to post, a good way around this is to surf the web and curate job listings you find, adding them to your job board to create an initial offering.
Most cloud based solutions also offer the option to "backfill" your job board with jobs from partner networks, such as Indeed, Talroo or Appcast. Enabling this feature is a good way to make your board look active and provide value to job seekers from day one. Alternatively, you can scrape jobs from other job board websites.
Creating your pricing structure and collecting payments
Determine how you will make money from your job board.
While some job boards offer free posting, it is common for most boards to charge employers for posting, through job posting packages.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Will you charge employers to post job openings?
- Will you offer premium features for a fee?
- Will you charge job seekers for access to certain job postings?
Decide on a pricing structure that makes sense for your business and your target audience.
Pricing for one job posting can range from $49-$399 depending on several factors such as the job board's audience size, the niche/market you are in, whether the job will be featured etc... Pricing plans can also include multi-jobs or unlimited jobs packages, allowing you to sell higher priced items.
Finally, you can choose to charge one time fees to post jobs or create recurring plans, with monthly or annual payments.
7. Promoting your job board
Now that your job board is ready for business, it's time to promote it! Here are a few techniques for promoting your job board and growing your audience:
- Social media marketing: consistently sharing new jobs and companies on social media is a sure way to acquiring new job seekers / employers
- Leveraging your existing audience: sharing the jobs in your newsletters or website, as well as putting out regular reminders to check out the job board are great ways to keep the community engaged.
- Submitting your sitemap file to Google Webmasters Console: once you link a domain name to your job board, your sitemap file will be available at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml: submit that to Google to speed up the page and jobs indexing process and therefore the SEO gains.
- Creating content on the blog: content marketing is a great (although slower) way to improve your site's SEO and gain organic traffic
- Buying paid ads: ads can be useful in some scenarios to kickstart your job board.
Finally, don’t forget to monitor and improve the performance of your job board. This could include adding new features, adjusting your pricing structure, or improving the user experience on your website.
Conclusion
By now, you should be more familiar with the workings and benefits of running a custom job board for your organization. If you'd like to get started today, Niceboard offers a free 7 day trial to set up your job board: it's super easy and takes less than 10 minutes to get your initial job board online!
And if you have any additional questions, feel free to send us an email at support@niceboard.co!