If you want an easy and quick way to start a job board, patiently read this article. It shows how to start and create your own job board website in minutes, collect job postings, and charge companies for uploading jobs.
How To Start a Job Board: Six Easy Steps
From start to finish, we’ve written a full guide on how to make a job board. By the end of this article, you’ll know everything you need to know to start building and growing your platform.
Step 1: Pick the kind of job board you want to create.
Step 2: Select a platform for your job board.
Step 3: Choosing a domain name.
Step 4: Post jobs on your job board.
Step 5: Make your job board SEO-friendly.
Step 6: Launch your job board
Let’s look at these steps more in-depth and learn what to do and what not to do when making a job board.
Step 1: Choose the Type of Job Board You Want to Create
As mentioned above, every job board has its function. By choosing what job board you want to start and the features you need to reach your goal, you can also choose the right tools for your platform.
Based on our experience providing a platform for hundreds of job boards, we’ve listed the six most common types of job boards and the features they usually use most. Check out the list below to decide what type of job board you want to make.
Job Board as a Business
Most job boards aren’t a part or an extension of a business; they are a business by themselves. Most of these businesses find a niche in the job board market where there is still room for them and build their platform around it. You can choose a niche based on a specific business, geography, or job-seeker demographic. A good example of this job board type is AirlineJobs, which is focused on the aviation business and has over 40K related job posts.
Here are the things we’ve seen job board businesses use most:
Monetization: The most important feature of such job boards is having advanced monetization options that can help you create more income from your job board. You can do that by offering several services to employers, such as pay-per-single job posts, job posting packages, access to the resume database, or subscription packages that can include all the choices above.
SEO: Before the monetization step, you need to have enough traffic on your site, and the best way to do it is through search engines. This is why it’s important for this kind of job board to use a platform that offers good on-page SEO (good page speed, ability to change the meta titles and descriptions, auto-generated Sitemap.xml, Google Jobs integration, etc.).
Email Alerts: To keep a user base, you must set up email alerts to tell job seekers of new opportunities and constantly engage them. An email list is also a huge tool that boosts your ability to bring in candidates for your clients. In fact, the bigger your email list is, the higher you can charge companies per job posting.
Job Board for Associations
The main goal of association job boards is to have an extra source of income through advertising employment opportunities to their community members. Non-dues income (revenue from any source other than membership fees) can help associations maintain and improve their finances.
Based on the purpose of association job boards, here are the three common traits for them:
Monetization: You need as many effective monetization choices as possible to improve your non-dues revenue.
Professional Members Database: By collecting the resumes of your members, you can build a database and help employers find candidates for certain fields. By doing so, you’ll also be able to create income by charging employers for access to the database.
Email Alerts For Members: Regarding association job boards, all roads lead to the features that can help you monetize their site. By collecting the emails of your members, you can constantly involve them by advertising jobs through email and charging employers for the service.
Job Board for Staffing and Recruitment Agencies
Adding a job board to staffing and recruitment agency websites can greatly boost the exposure of clients’ open positions and bring in new potential candidates that can be added to their database.
To make the most out of their job board, recruitment firms usually look for these features:
Resume Database: A must-have feature for these platforms to collect the resumes of potential job seekers in one place and later use it when looking for a candidate for a particular role or charge employers for giving direct access to the database.
Email Alerts: This is an additional way for staffing and recruitment agencies to contact prospects and promote suitable jobs.
Customizable Forms: Since many recruiters need to collect specific information about candidates, you need to have customizable forms that you can change according to your preferences.
Job Board for Schools and Universities
Many schools and universities take it upon themselves to create their own job board to guide their students to relevant internships and job opportunities. With enough depth, such a job board can go as far as having different categories of employment possibilities for each of their provided programs.
Some of the functions we’ve found this type of job boards use most are the following:
Student Profiles: Many school and university job boards prefer to have a tool with which students can register in the system and fill out their profile information. Also, based on the profile data, later employers can search for students suitable for particular positions and contact them directly. This way, students who are not actively looking for a job will also get noticed by employers, increasing the possible number of students who will find a job through your platform.
Advanced Reporting: Since the main goal of educational institutions is to help students find chances, you need to have proper metrics to see how it’s performing. The metrics this kind of job board usually cares about the most include the number of students looking for a job, the number of students using their website, etc.
Email Alerts For Students: With this, school and university job boards can automatically warn the students whenever a new job is listed on their portal. As a result, more students will see the new listings.
Job Board for UGC Marketing
With SEO and digital marketing becoming increasingly creative in the ways they seek to reach potential customers, job boards have become a brilliant example of user-generated content marketing (UGC marketing) done right.
Businesses can use job boards to build a user base that matches their customer profile. Instead of monetizing the job board through selling services to employers, they monetize it through marketing their own goods and services to them.
This kind of UGC marketing is mostly popular for SaaS companies, which target job seekers in the same industry they sell their products.
For these job boards, bringing in many relevant visitors is far more important than attracting employers as clients. In fact, many such job boards might not even charge companies for job postings, and the features they usually want to have the most include:
Automatic Job Scraping and Categorization: Since the main goal for this kind of job board is to attract professionals in a particular niche, you first need the right content. The most effective way to do it without spending time and resources is by automatically scraping and categorizing jobs from other websites.
SEO Tools: SEO plays a huge role in job boards for UGC marketing since it helps you to reach a wider audience. To achieve the desired result, you need to have the ability to change the meta titles and descriptions, integrate Google Jobs, auto-generate Sitemap.xml, etc.
Email Alerts: Through this feature, you can connect with your audience and possible employees and notify them about new job openings in their company. You can also use this to promote your business, services, or products and send them their newsletter and latest announcements.
Job Board for VC Firms
Everyone knows how important the workforce is for organizational success. Not having the right team is among the top 3 reasons why startups fail, and that might explain why venture capital (VC) firms have a strong interest in making sure their portfolio companies have an easier time finding the talent they need. Starting a job board is one of the ways VC firms seek to help their portfolio companies on the talent acquisition front.
One collective job board hosting job listings from all portfolio companies can boost awareness of these vacancies. Based on our experience with venture capital job boards, here are the most popular features that we’ve seen them use most:
Automatic Jobs Aggregation: Many VC firms have hundreds and even thousands of job openings across all their partner companies. Constantly collecting and updating all these jobs is too time-consuming and feels like a full-time job if done manually.
To avoid unnecessary problems, you need to automate the process. This is why the most important feature of these job boards is the automatic jobs aggregation, allowing you to quickly import jobs from portfolio company career pages into your job board without wasting your time and resources.
Talent Network: VC job boards help connect portfolio companies with talented people looking for a job. But what if the candidates are not actively looking for a new position? In comes the talent network feature, through which VC companies can collect the resumes of their network. Later, you can access their companies to find professionals with the necessary skills from their network.
Email Alerts: This feature helps venture capital firms tell their talent network about the new positions in their portfolio companies, leading to more candidates applying to their job openings.
Step 2: Select a platform for your job board
After identifying the type of job board you want to start and the functionalities it needs, it’s time to choose the platform for your job board.
There are four popular options to choose from, each with its pros and cons. Check them out below and pick the option that matches your resources, time, and budget.
Job Board Software
Using job board software to build a job site is the most common practice in the list.
Built mainly for this purpose, good job board software has all the necessary features, such as monetization, job scraping, SEO tools, email alerts, resume database, job seeker accounts, Google Jobs network integration, and more…
Moreover, setting this all up and getting your job board ready to run will take no time with a job board website builder since the features are specifically built for job boards, and all you need to do is just setup them based on your needs.
In short, this is a perfect option for those who don’t want to waste their time and budget on hiring development teams to build a job board and want to focus on marketing and growing their job board.
Pros
✅ Advanced features: Including job scraping, SEO tools, resume database, email alerts, and different monetization choices.
✅ Support: Job board software platforms are skilled in this field, so they have all the answers to your questions, especially if it’s about their platform. In case of any technical issues and requests, you can call the support team and get the information and help you need.
✅ No extra costs: With this, you get an all-in-one option that includes job board hosting, maintenance, and all security updates. So, no extra money will be needed for new features and updates.
✅ No coding skills required: Since every part of your job board can be configured in UI, you don’t need any technical background and skills to set up your website.
Cons
⛔ Costs more than a website builder: Because job board software contains more advanced features that are specific to job boards only, they usually charge more to explain the cost of implementing and maintaining the advanced features.
⛔ Limited customization in terms of design: Although you’ll be able to update the main style elements of your job board, you won’t have advanced design tools to greatly change the existing themes. So, if you’re looking for something over-the-top creative, job board software might not be your first choice.
Estimated Cost
- Starting cost: $0
- Setup time: 1-5 days
- Monthly expenses: $125 – $425 (depending on the deal you choose)
If you think job board software would be the best answer for your job board, it’s important to mitigate the limitations mentioned earlier by choosing the right vendor. Make sure that the job board style is to your liking and that the vendor is actively improving the software and adding new features to the software.
Besides, not every job board website builder has the benefits mentioned above, so before picking a platform, ensure you know exactly what functionalities they’re offering.
Website Builder
You can also use website makers like Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace to start a job board. Unlike job board software, website builders don’t offer features that are specific to job posting sites. Instead, you can build a job board using their templates and adjust them according to your brand.
If you’re looking for a way to quickly make a simple job board that doesn’t need robust monetization, job scraping, or candidate database functionalities, then a website builder can be a good choice.
Pros
✅ No coding skills is required: No coding is necessary. However, you’ll still need to understand the platform to set up your job board.
✅ Themes: Offers a large range of themes for various platforms that you can customize according to your branding.
✅ Manages the technical part: Handles servers, maintenance, and security, so you won’t need to worry about the technical aspect.
Cons
⛔ No Google jobs integration: Your jobs will not be listed on Google Jobs, and as a result, you will lose the potential traffic from that platform.
⛔ Learning curve: Considering creating a job board is not as easy as creating a basic website, you will need some time to learn how to set up the website builder.
⛔ No professional help: Even though you’ll be able to receive general support for the technical part of your job board, it will be limited since they’re not specialized in job boards․
⛔ Limited user experience (UX): Normally, website builders don’t offer smart data-saving options, so users might need to share their resumes with every application because they won’t be saved.
⛔ Limited features for job boards: Since these platforms are not mainly made for job boards, there will be some important features missing, such as job scraping, resume database, company and job seeker profiles, targeted job alerts, etc.
Estimated Cost
- Starting cost: $0
- Setup time: 5 – 20 days (depending on your skill with the tool)
- Monthly expenses: $9 – $300 (depending on the connections you will use)
WordPress
WordPress serves 43% of all websites as an open-source content management system. It gives a variety of ready-made templates that you can customize according to your preferences and set up a unique platform.
You can add almost any feature to your job site by setting up WordPress plugins. However, will also need to add some paid extensions to have the features job boards offer on their site, such as application forms, a resume database, job alerts, etc.
Pros
✅ Various themes: Offers a wide variety of themes that can be customized.
✅ Wide range of plugins: You can add over 50K plugins to your platform.
Cons
⛔ Needs a developer: Although starting a simple website on WordPress might seem easy for a beginner, you might need some coding experience or a developer’s help if you’re starting something as complicated as a job board.
⛔ Complicated updates: You’ll need to constantly update your job board on WordPress, which might be challenging since the new updates might come with issues of their own, resulting in unplanned technical difficulties, such as taking you back to the default mode of your website.
⛔ Slow speed: Some themes contain a lot of unnecessary generic codes, which will slow the speed of your job board, lowering your traffic as a result.
⛔ Security issues: Since WordPress is an open-source platform and is wildly famous in the market, it’s a target for many hackers. And once someone finds an issue in a tool or WordPress core, it will also affect all the platforms using it. This is why you will need to constantly monitor the installed plugins to ensure there are no new vulnerabilities in them.
Estimated Cost
- Starting cost: $1000 – $25,000 (including development time and plugins cost)
- Setup time: 2 weeks – 2 months (depending on the difficulty of your project and how much custom code the developer will need to write)
- Monthly expenses: $200 – $1000 (including developer’s time for maintenance, security updates, and server cost)
Starting From Scratch
However, if none of the above choices is suitable for creating a job board, you can start it completely from scratch.
You must have enough computer knowledge and experience or hire a developer(or development team) to build the job board. Besides costing more money, starting a job board from scratch is also time-consuming and a never-ending process since you’ll need to follow the market to constantly update your job site with new features.
So before taking this road and spending your money, time and resources, make sure there is not already an existing job board software option that can solve your task. And if you don’t find an answer that can help you, only in that case, it makes sense to spend so much energy on starting a job board from scratch.
Pros
✅ Fully customizable: Since you’re making a job board from scratch based on your own coding, you can fully customize it according to your tastes and based on your developer’s skills.
✅ Wide variety of features: You can apply custom features according to your needs.
Cons
⛔ knowledge is needed: Hire a developer or have coding knowledge.
⛔ Time-consuming: Building it from scratch will take way longer than all the choices above.
⛔ Expensive: This will be way more expensive compared to other choices.
⛔ New features from scratch: We must build features from zero.
⛔ No support: You must handle possible performance and security issues yourself.
Estimated Cost
- Starting cost: $5,000 and more (depending on the size of the job and how much you pay your developer)
- Setup time: 2 – 4 months (depending on the complexity of your project and how many custom features the developer will need to apply)
- Monthly expenses: $500 and above (including developer’s time for upkeep, security upgrades, and hosting costs)
Step 3: Choose a Domain Name
Once you know what type of job board you want to make and which platform you will use for it, it’s time to come up with job board name ideas and register a domain. Choosing a domain name is an important step you should take carefully since it’s the first thing website visitors see and get ideas from. Therefore, it’s better to choose a short choice that will also give an idea about what your job board is about, such as JobsMaster.com.ng, RemoteOk.com etc.
However, most job board name ideas you might come up with might already be taken, so don’t start building your brand around an idea without checking the availability of the domain with online tools like GoDaddy.
Root Domain vs Subdomain
Consider whether you need a subdomain like jobs.subdomain.website.com or a new domain like job-board-name.com. This depends on your goals and what you want to achieve with your job board.
We suggest starting up under a subdomain if:
- You already have a known brand,
- your website has a good search engine score and sizable traffic,
- and the job board isn’t the most important part of your business/organization.
This is important to consider because if you already have the main domain, by opening a subdomain for your job board, you’ll easily transfer some of your SEO rankings to it instead of building the job board domain authority from scratch.
Top-Level Domain Name Ideas for Your Job Board
To give you ideas for your job board’s Top-Level Domain(TLD), we took 5,000 different job board domains and studied their TLDs. This resulted in this beautiful graph:
As you can see from the above graph, 56.3% of the job board domain names that we studied have a “.com” TLD, and 23.5% are country-specific, such as .ca, UK, .com.au, etc.…
If your job board targets only a specific location, we suggest going with that country’s TLD. If it’s global, no question .com is the most trustworthy top-level domain. But in case you can’t find a domain with .com, here are some other popular TLDs: .org, .net, .career, and .io (great for tech-related job boards), which can be an excellent choice for a job board.
Overall, TLDs don’t affect your SEO performance, so it’s not a life-and-death choice. You can choose the one good for your pocket and go along with it.
🤓 Fun Fact
From the 5,000 job board domains we examined, 44% have the “jobs” word in their name, and 7% have the “careers” word.
Step 4: Fill Your Job Board With Jobs
Okay, so you have a clear idea about your job board and the functionalities you need on your platform. The name of your platform is chosen, too, and now it’s time to fill your website with content. But wait, because you’re a new job site platform, what company will trust you with a job post?
This is why you need to import jobs from career pages and other job boards because if you don’t have any content, you won’t have any traffic.
So, why do you need to do it before starting your platform? Let’s say you’re going to an ice cream shop, and it looks really tempting from the outside, but once you’re in, it’s empty, and there’s nothing you can get. Wouldn’t it be disappointing? The same goes for a job board. If a job seeker sees your job site and clicks on it in hopes of finding what they are looking for, but if there are no jobs, they will exit the session, and as a result, you’ll lose traffic.
Let’s take a look at another case. What if you enter the same ice cream shop, and instead of ice cream, they have hot chocolate? Hot chocolate sounds okay, but it’s not what you’re looking for. Again, you’ll exit the store, but you’ll also feel misled this time. You must import job posts linked to your niche to avoid losing traffic because of irrelevant content.
You must also constantly update your job board with new content to stay relevant in your niche. Once you collect enough website visitors and have the necessary monthly traffic, you can start putting paid job posts and earn money.
You can add jobs to your job board manually. However, it will take a lot of time to do it. That’s why we’ve built no-code scrapers that automatically import new jobs for you. If you decide to go with JBoard, you can automate this by simply giving the career page URL URL from which you want to regularly import jobs.
Step 5: Optimize for SEO
Now that you have loaded jobs on your platform, it’s time to use them and the rest of your website pages to increase your traffic. You’ll need to optimize your job board for SEO by organizing and tagging your website pages based on job type, category, area, etc.
For instance, if you have a design niche job board, you should have enough data about the jobs to automatically create web pages like ‘graphic design jobs in Canada,’ ‘part-time graphic design jobs,’ ‘part-time graphic design jobs in Canada,’ etc. This way, you will have more useful content to compete for long-tail keyword searches on Google. Additionally, you can check out this piece to learn how to optimize your job board for SEO.
Step 6: Launch Your Job Board
After completing the steps mentioned above, your job board will be ready to be launched and help you reach your goal. However, you should know that the launching step is not the end of it. You’ll need to continually grow your base to get your desired result. Sure, if you’re using innovative job board software, you’ll get the latest feature updates of the industry instantly, but you’ll also need to know how to use them to your advantage.
Conclusion
Starting a job board is not a walk in the park. However, it can be a simple task if you know exactly what you want and what tools you need to realize your idea. By following the steps above, you’ll be able to easily figure out how to build a job board and run it without any overwhelming challenges.
If you’ve chosen to start a job board with an all-in-one solution, you can give JobsMaster a try, we will develop an outstanding job board website for you at affordable price.
Leave a Reply