Companies and recruiters are often slow moving and hesitant to try new platforms. So the challenge with these strategies lies in proving the exceptional value your niche board offers to those companies.
So how do you get your job board off the ground and start generating revenue by listing relevant roles? Read on…
1. Populate your first jobs from other platforms
While we certainly don’t recommend relying only on this strategy, it can be a helpful way to provide initial value to your job seekers.
This is important because as a new job board you’ll likely run into the “chicken and egg problem”: For a successful job board you need:
- Job seeker traffic (which will only come to your board if you have relevant roles), and
- employers to post jobs on your board (which will only pay if you have an audience that actually wants to fill those jobs).
To get out of this vicious cycle, start by listing existing roles from other job boards or aggregators on your board. Here are your options:
a) Use automatic backfill
Backfilling simply means pulling jobs from other sources, such as Appcast, Talroo, Indeed, or Ziprecruiter. You set the criteria to get the exact jobs that fit your job board's niche.
Job board software providers like Niceboard offer this option as part of their services. You can filter the jobs by country, category and keywords to ensure that the only job listings pulled are highly relevant to your job seeker niche.
b) Job scraping
Job scraping is a similar strategy if you don’t have access to an automated backfill. It also involves extracting job listings from other websites, including company websites.
It’s important to be aware of the privacy laws in your country when scraping job listings. But in most countries, once a company has posted a job online, it’s considered publicly available information.
If it’s legal to take the company’s contact details and post them on your own website, you can simply re-post the job on your website. If not, try to contact the company and offer to re-post the open position on your website. This benefits both parties—you get more positions on your website, and they get more exposure for their job listing.
c) XML import for individual roles
If you want to extract a specific role and display it on your job board, Niceboard has another useful feature to make this easier. With XML import, you can copy and paste a job’s URL and automatically populate it to your job board.
Look at some big employer websites and re-post their positions on your site.
Having those initial jobs also shows employers that your job board is active and attractive to post their own roles to.
2. Use your existing network
As a job board owner in your niche, you might already have connections in your industry. Now is the time to nurture and leverage them.
Start reaching out to your immediate contacts and broader network. This might be recruiters that helped you land a role, past employers in your niche, or colleagues from the HR department.
- If you provide a job board to a professional niche community: your members already understand the value of your community, so why not ask them to post a job on your board when their employer is hiring. Sponsors or advertisers might be interested, too.
- If you are running a job board for an educational institution: contact successful alumni to share your job board with their new employer or reach out to companies that attended job fairs.
- If you are managing an association job board: your member companies should be your first resource, but don’t forget to consider your advertisers or donors.
Actively help employers fill jobs
To prove your value and get some success stories from your closest connections, get active and help them find qualified candidates yourself.
Think like a recruiter!
Beyond advertising the job on your job board, reach out to job seekers in your community and collect suitable resumes. Talk to your connections in the industry and get them to spread the word about what you are doing. Once you have a good amount of quality resumes collected, send a shortlist to your employer client.
This way, they can sample the quality of candidates you have, become familiar with your board, and hopefully see results. If you have matched some great employees to jobs, the word about your job board will spread.
3. Reach out to employers
Another good starting point is finding employers in your niche that are currently hiring. But how do you find them?
- Search for “Jobs in [your niche]”
- Set an alert on Google Alerts to get automated notifications for specific actions, keywords, or mentions. For example, if you’re looking for developer roles at Google, you can set an alert for “software developer job” + “Google”.
- Look at your competitors’ job boards
- Scan generic job boards or job aggregators like LinkedIn and Indeed. You can also set alerts here for specific companies, roles or niches.
a) Incentives to pitch
If you don’t have an engaged job seeker base, getting employers to move from big job boards to more specialized ones like yours can be difficult. That’s why we recommend offering some incentives to your first employers to build your reputation as a job hub in your niche.
- Give a discount or offer a 30-60 day free trial to employers posting roles. They won’t say no to free exposure, and once they see some success they’ll stay and pay.
The option to post free jobs will be especially attractive to SMB and startups. With a limited (or non-existing) recruiting budget, they will highly value the exposure. - Provide employers with performance data, like website visitors, time spent on your site or job alert subscribers to prove your value. Another great option can be a media kit with demographics of your job seeker base. Success stories from other employers that filled a role through your board can be powerful as well.
- If you don’t have any convincing insights to show yet, you can offer help in sourcing candidates for their jobs. Do this yourself by tapping into your network or use a recruiting agency.
b) Outreach template
If you’re doing cold outreach via email or telephone, keep it short, direct, and focused on the value for the recipient. Here’s a template you can use:
[Relevant observation to catch attention]: I noticed you are currently hiring for a Cybersecurity Director, but haven’t found a great candidate yet.
[Insights connected to the observation, stating a problem]: You may already know this, but jobs posted on generic job sites get a lot more unqualified applicants that specialized job boards.
[Offer solution to the problem]: My cybersecurity job board has an audience of 10,000+ professionals that are looking for jobs specifically in the industry. We’ve filled every role within 30 days of posting.
[Call to action]: You can post your Cybersecurity Director role here.
Optional: [Offer discount, incentive, or objection handling]
c) Which positions to reach out to?
- At small companies that don’t have a dedicated HR department yet, it’s usually department heads doing the recruiting (e.g. Director/Head of Marketing).
- At medium-sized companies, HR managers or HR leaders are the ones you’re looking for.
- For enterprises, dedicated recruiters for each department are your point of contact. They might also outsource their recruiting to a specialized firm.
d) Provide resources for employers
There’s a lot of talk about providing resources such as resume help to job seekers, which can help boost your job board’s success; but offering content to your prospective employers is an underrated strategy.
Resources for employers could be blog posts on how to filter for great candidates or write effective job descriptions. You can also provide in-depth recruitment guides for your niche.
Need some inspiration for employer blog content? Start with these categories for your niche:
- job market insights—salary ranges, industry trends, remote work trends, regional trends
- job listings—optimize job listings, must-haves on job listings, how to attract great talent, responsibilities
- guest interviews—insights from employers in the industry, guest posts, managing employees
4. Establish new connections in your industry
Besides reaching out to employers with a direct pitch for your job board, you should also start networking in your industry.
A great place to get started are local industry associations (think: association of cybersecurity professionals) or chambers of commerce in your niche. You can also attend industry events, conferences, trade shows, expos, and startup events in your niche to network with potential employers. If you have existing industry contacts, ask for a personal introduction.
If you don’t have the resources to show up in person, you can easily network online, for example on LinkedIn. Focus on providing value and feedback in comments when starting out.
💡 LinkedIn engagement tip
Once you have a list of accounts you’d like to network with by engaging with their posts, LinkedIn allows you to access a timeline with posts from these specific contacts.
This is how to configure a saved search:
- Start a search on LinkedIn
- On the results page, go to “All filters” and input the names of your target accounts under “From member”
- Click “Show results” and bookmark the URL to go back daily for engagement
Note: Whenever you update your filter, a different URL is created which needs to be saved again to access.
You’re all set to convince more employers to post jobs on your board now. But keep the “chicken and egg problem” in mind: you also need to invest resources to get job seekers on your board with these marketing strategies.
Because if you have an engaged job seeker audience in your niche, the value to employers becomes obvious.