Can you build a job board from scratch?
Yes.
Should you build a job board from scratch?
Uh, probably not.
There are many job board owners out there capable of building their own job board from scratch, but sometimes it’s not the best decision for their business. But job boards are awesome and deceptively complicated.
I’m not trying to be mean or snarky with the title of this blog post, but when I read How I built a CMS, and why you shouldn’t by Petr Palas, I was nodding my head all the way through. Palas started his career building a Content Management System for an intranet system, and then later created a CMS designed to be used by any developer in the world to create any website.
Careerleaf got its start as something akin to a job board and then expanded to become a white label solution that can be used by any job board anywhere in the world. Our founder and CEO spent 15 years building a specialized recruiting firm. Our Director of Sales and Marketing has worked as a recruiter and has managed a large network of job boards. The rest of us are marketers and developers who are living and breathing job boards, listening to and working with our customers all the time to continually update and improve our software.
It’s not an exact parallel, but like Palas, we often hear from customers and prospective customers who have sunk a good chunk of money into building their own solutions from the ground up. Sometimes, they’ve had a system that worked for a good ten to fifteen years, but have reached a point where they can’t deliver the technical solutions needed to keep up with the demands of their business. In other cases, entrepreneurs aspire to present something different in the marketplace and have a hard time mapping their vision onto SaaS products that are designed to suit many types of customers.
The running theme that we hear in the stories of these job board owners who attempt to build their ideal job board website from scratch, is that it’s always more expensive and more complicated than they anticipated or were quoted.
Consultants, web development agencies, and other types of professionals involved probably know the scenario well: a client asked for something and the developers give them a quote for the work. But once the work begins, the developer receives further clarifications, and the scope of the project expands as the client reveals more of the unspoken details they took for granted. The client is overwhelmed by the real cost and has to decide either to scale back their grand plan or cut their losses.
As a job board owner, you probably start evaluating your options with a list of features, which you then expand into the specifications for the work to be done. You’ve got your budget and expect the work to match your outline. From your perspective as the job board owner, it’s incredibly frustrating to realize the developer didn’t understand what you were asking for in the first place. The little things you take for granted as a natural part of recruiting and job search weren’t obvious to the other party, and now you’re left with a hard financial decision.
So, why shouldn’t you build or rebuild your job board from scratch? Because you’ll probably waste a lot of time and money trying to reinvent the wheel. Partnering with a white label SaaS technology provider like Careerleaf is the alternative that makes sense for most job board owners.
We built job board software so that you don’t have to – however, the choice is yours.