For recruiters, using a job board is one of the most effective actions to take to find qualified candidates for an open position. If you’re thinking about creating a job board yourself, it may make sense to choose a smaller niche to focus on in order to attract the highest quality recruiters and candidates alike. Niche boards allow you to have a more refined marketing strategy, and to get to know the demands of your clients inside and out for a better product. Here are a few factors to think about as you compare potential niche areas for your job board.
Author: Maddy
How to Make Recruitment Marketing Work for Your Job Board
“Recruitment Marketing” is another one of those phrases you’re probably hearing about more often lately. It’s the concept that in order to recruit and to hire, you need to market to candidates.
It’s the kind of idea that seems obvious in retrospect. I’ve already written about how job boards can help their customers create great candidate experiences by thinking about job seekers as customers, and recruitment marketing fits right in with that.
If the candidate is the customer, then the employer (or the job they are hiring for) is the product you’re selling to them. In order to sell it to them, you have to market to them. Marketing a job or an employer encompasses a variety of components, including:
Continue reading “How to Make Recruitment Marketing Work for Your Job Board”
Growing Your Association Job Board
Professional associations often have their own set of challenges and advantages when it comes to job boards, so we’ve gathered up our best advice for them.
Your Quick Crash Course in Analytics for Job Boards
We’re all seeing “Analytics” and “Big Data” in headlines and predictions about the future of recruiting, not to mention present-day recruitment.
Getting swept away in the buzzwords and marketing rhetoric surrounding the long list of analytics and data-tracking tools and software out there is easier to do than not. And when I find that happening, it’s always a good idea to step back and ask what the heck everyone is really talking about, and how it applies to me, and you, in reality and on a practical level.
Analytics tends be a bit misleading as a term, because while an analytics tool should take data and format it for you in graphs and charts, none of it means much if you don’t actually analyze that information once you’ve got it.
Data-gathering and information overload is easy, sifting through it to find something you can use, something you can act on to improve your business–that’s the hard part.
Continue reading “Your Quick Crash Course in Analytics for Job Boards”
So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 5 – Cover Your SaaS
This blog post is the fifth in a series that will examine the pros and cons of different methods of creating and running a job board as the focus or part of a business. There are many reasons for creating a job board﹘it can be the centre of your business, a way to pipeline talent for your recruitment firm or staffing agency, or a way to help monetize your already traffic-heavy news/media website. This is the fourth installment of our series, and covers the ins-and-outs of installing software to run your job board’s technology. Also see: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
SaaS is the sassy-sounding acronym for the term “Software-as-a-Service”. It refers to software that lives on the Internet. The software is hosted by the service provider, and often in “the cloud”, as opposed to their own in-house servers.
SaaS can be delivered to the customer either through a shared online portal (e.g. all customers log onto the same website to use the software), or it can be delivered through unique customer instances (e.g. everything is hosted by the software provider, but is accessed through a customer’s own website).
Let’s get down to it, then. What’s good and bad about using SaaS to power your job board?
Continue reading “So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 5 – Cover Your SaaS”
So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 4 – Software Install, Legacy Catch-All
This blog post is the fourth in a series that will examine the pros and cons of different methods of creating and running a job board as the focus or part of a business. There are many reasons for creating a job board–it can be the centre of your business, a way to pipeline talent for your recruitment firm or staffing agency, or a way to help monetize your already traffic-heavy news/media website. This is the fourth installment of our series, and covers the ins-and-outs of installing software to run your job board’s technology. Also see: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
You’ve ruled out building your job board entirely from scratch, you want something more powerful than WordPress themes and plugins, and you don’t want to outsource a custom build. So how is that job board of yours getting built? (Or re-built, as the case may be.)
There are a lot of choices in Job Board Software out there, and although there are many ways one could categorize them, one very practical way to sort them out is those that are hosted or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service, like Careerleaf), and those that require the software to be installed and/or self-hosted.
So, what does installed job board software mean?
Continue reading “So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 4 – Software Install, Legacy Catch-All”
So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 3 – Outsourcing Sorcery
This blog post is the third in a series that will examine the pros and cons of different methods of creating and running a job board as the focus or part of a business. There are many reasons for creating a job board–it can be the centre of your business, a way to pipeline talent for your recruitment firm or staffing agency, or a way to help monetizeyour already traffic-heavy news/media website. This is the third installment of ourseries, and covers the ins-and-outs of outsourcing the work of building your job board. Also see: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
We’ve already covered what it takes to build a snowman job board from scratch as a Do-It-Yourself project, and what’s involved with building a job board entirely with WordPress.
Now let’s say you want the final product to be similar–something customized, something where you get the final say in every detail–but you either can’t or don’t want to do the building of it first-hand. So, you want to explore the option of paying someone else to do that work for you.
If you just need someone to build a WordPress job board for you, you’re looking at hiring a web designer on a short freelance contact. As discussed, the barriers-to-entry of creating a WordPress job board is comparatively low, but at the same time, hiring a designer who knows WordPress well can be money well-spent if that kind of work is not your personal forté.
If, however, you’re looking to create something more ambitious as far as the design and technology of your job board goes, outsourcing the development will become more involved. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing the building of your job board?
Continue reading “So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 3 – Outsourcing Sorcery”
So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 2: “Frankenstein’s Monster”
This blog post is the second in a series that will examine the pros and cons for different methods of creating and running a job board. There are many reasons for creating a job board–it can be the centre of your business, a way to pipeline talent for your recruitment firm or staffing agency, or a way to help monetize your already traffic-heavy news/media website. This second installment covers the ins-and-outs of building a job board using WordPress technology. Also see: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
Why did I title this method of building a job board “Frankenstein’s Monster”?
Let me state up-front that I love WordPress. I’ve used WordPress in both my work and non-work life to blog, and to create and manage websites. WordPress is awesome. (I’m also quite fond of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, come to that.)
This blog runs on WordPress, and its Content Management System is the go-to CMS for most business websites. There are tons of free resources for beginners, and you can find free and premium/paid themes, plugins, and other add-ons to enhance a WordPress site’s functionality.
Bottom line, if you need a website for your business, start with WordPress.
There are now a number of WordPress themes and plugins that provide basic job board functionality, which means you can combine them to create your job board. I call this WordPress job board option “Frankenstein’s Monster” simply because it involves using tools and elements created by others, and fastening them together to create a final product.
Alright, so what’s good and bad about this option? Many of the pros are similar to those for building one from scratch yourself, because you are in charge of your hosting, your content, and how you use your technology.
Continue reading “So You Wanna Build a Job Board? Part 2: “Frankenstein’s Monster””
So You Wanna Build a Job Board, Part 1: The Do-It-Yourself Project
This blog post is the first in a series that will examine the pros and cons of different methods of creating and running a job board as the focus or part of a business. There are many reasons for creating a job board–it can be the centre of your business, a way to pipeline talent for your recruitment firm or staffing agency, or a way to help monetize your already traffic-heavy news/media website. This first installment covers the ins-and-outs of building a job board website yourself from scratch.
I love Pinterest. I particularly enjoy browsing the crafts and “DIY” category, just to see what kind of things people come up with. That said, a lot of projects posted there are more complicated than their pretty pictures allow for. Google “Pinterest DIY disaster” and you’ll find a long line of failed real-life attempts at replicating the final products depicted. But you can also find some beautiful, legitimately successful examples creativity that comes from a little bit of Pinterest inspiration.
So, what’s it like when the Do-It-Yourself project is something as complex as a Job Board, and not party decorations?
Continue reading “So You Wanna Build a Job Board, Part 1: The Do-It-Yourself Project”
Careerleaf and UK Part Time Jobs Are Onrec Award Finalists
Careerleaf is proud to share the news that we are among the finalists nominated for the 2015 Onrec Online Recruiting Awards. Careerleaf is pleased to have been made a finalist in the category of Best Online Candidate Experience for a supplier, and for our very own Careerleaf employees, Roman Lyashov and Jon Gaulin, to have been nominated for Personality of the Year and Unsung Hero of the Year, respectively.
But that’s not all!
Continue reading “Careerleaf and UK Part Time Jobs Are Onrec Award Finalists”