How to start a job board
Hey, are you considering starting and building a job board? Then we have some great information on this page that might be of some help to you.
We have built multiple job boards in the past (and are still running them). Because owning, running and making money with a job board is a lot of fun. And can be very financially rewarding if it pays you enough money to be able to live off it.
We learned multiple things by starting, building and even buying job boards. Take a look at for example Sustainablejobs.nl and Fondsen.org. Two of the biggest job platforms we are currently running, next to Jobboardsoftware.co.
What is a job board?
Maybe a boring question to answer as a start. But probably also the most important one. Because most people don't really understand what a job board really is and what role it plays for the clients using it.
Our definition is something along the lines of:
A job board is a marketing channel that sells attention to an audience.
That's it!
A job board is a marketing tool for both job seekers and employers to find each other. So the better the marketing, the bigger the reach, the more specific the audience (niche) and the more job seekers apply to jobs, the more valuable the job board is.
Most job board owners miss this from the start. And focus on building a website with all kinds of functionalities and a great design, but miss the focus on traffic, followers and conversions.
For that matter every job board out there could be two pages. A homepage that shows all the jobs, job filters and a page with a form to post jobs. That could be more than enough to start.
When not to run a job board?
This is also an important question to ask. Because a lot of people are just not suitable to start, build and run a job board. Not because they don't have the skills (believe me, I saw many, many online marketers start job boards) but because they underestimate the time it takes to scale a job board and build an audience that is big enough to justify the money employers pay for job posts.
How do you build a successful job board?
There are a couple of things you need to do to build a successful job board.
- Choosing a niche (industry, region, skill, profession etc).
- Building an audience and generating traffic.
- Generating recurring customers.
Those are the prerequisites to build a successful job board. Now let's dive into them. We also wrote an article on how we built our own job board - Sustainablejobs.nl - from almost 0 to a decent-sized job board in the Netherlands.
By the way, curious how to have an audience and paying customers from day one? Just buy an existing job board and grow it yourself. We wrote a whole article on that too.
Now go see the other steps we wrote articles about. If you have any questions or need help finding your ideas, just let us know.
The definitive start
To start you have to launch the job board (check out the launching package from Jobboardsoftware.co). Set up your socials (LinkedIn is a prerequisite) and define your target audience.