Niche Job Boards

 by Maddy

5 Steps to Making More Money With Your Job Board

For job boards that find themselves struggling to retain their past successes in the ever-changing world of recruiting, there are five core things you need to do to stay competitive and make more money.

 

1. Be Niche. Start Niche. Become Niche. Get… Niche-ier.

Generalist job boards – those that deal with all types of jobs on a national or international level – have the most competition. Not having a niche makes it really hard to stand out when it comes to your marketing, your SEO, and your overall value proposition to customers. (If you expect someone to search for “jobs” and find you on the first page of search results next to Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, Craigslist, Facebook, and other big established job boards, you’re going to have a long, expensive, and difficult road ahead of you.)

 

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 by Maddy

Your Guide to Planning a Job Board Tech Update

Established job boards have many advantages in the marketplace – a solid brand, a customer base, job seekers, and insight into their niche about the problems that need solving and what does – and doesn’t – sell. With all that going for them, it’s easy to understand why job board owners who have been around for a number of years might be apprehensive about updating their job board solution. If it ain’t broke, don’t fit it, right?

The trouble is that many older job boards have custom-built solutions that have begun to visibly age or are no longer meeting the expectations of job seekers and employers. And even though they might see their profits shrinking as they struggle to keep up with shifting expectations and changing technology, it can be difficult to make a big change when you’ve become accustomed to your current solution or business model. Reasons for updating your job board tech may vary, but regardless of what you do want to change, you really don’t want to risk losing what is working for you.

 

So how can job board owners reduce the risk involved in making a big change to their technology? I’ve outlined four steps below that can help you prepare and plan for updating or switching your job board solution.

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 by Maddy

Are you niche enough?

The online recruiting industry is a big and bustling place, full of competition, but small job boards that are niche have a lot going for them.

 

Writing for the Society of Human Resource Management, Roy Maurer describes the advantages of niche job boards in recruiting:

“Niche boards may not boast the traffic of mammoths like CareerBuilder and Indeed, but their use often leads to lower cost-to-hire and higher quality-of-hire metrics because they are more likely to attract highly coveted candidates with specialized skills and relevant experience, experts say.”

 

Many new job boards can find themselves struggling to stand apart from both older, more established job boards and those mammoth-sized, generalist platforms. One of the questions we encourage job board entrepreneurs to ask themselves is, “Am I niche enough?”

 

This blog post will outline how new job boards can think about being niche, explore ways to further specialize, and highlight a few helpful tools that may help.

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 by Maddy

Association Job Boards for Non-Dues Revenue Streams

Membership-based organizations tend to rely heavily on the dues or fees that members pay to join and access the benefits offered by such associations.

 

Membership fees can vary greatly, depending on their niche or industry, and on whether the association is a for-profit or non-profit organization. Non-Dues sources of revenue for associations also traditionally include events or conferences, sponsorship, selling or reselling education/training courses, fundraising or donations, and grants.

 

Online career centres or job boards also prove to be effective at generating revenue while adding value for both members and industry partners, and help associations stay true to their mission.

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 by Maddy

The API: Your New Best Friend In Recruitment Tech

API. Ape-y Eye? Application Program Interface. It’s a thing. A big thing. It’s a thing you should know about. If programming languages aren’t your thing, don’t worry. That’s what I’m here for: cutting through the buzzwords to help us all understand what it is and how it impacts recruitment technology.

An API acts like a translator between two pieces of web-based software.

For example: let’s say you use a third-party application to track and analyze how many followers you have on Twitter. When you create your account, it doesn’t ask you to enter your email and a username or password. All you have to do is log into your Twitter account, and give the app permission to talk to your Twitter data.

An API does that.

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 by Maddy

Turning Your Job Board into an Online Community

Job boards are a tricky business. They have two types of customers, and in many ways they aren’t buying what you offer–they’re buying what they have to offer each other.

As a job board owner, you are the facilitator, the venue through which they are able to find each other. You create and maintain a space that attracts both parties.

Despite evidence that job boards are a significantly big, if not the biggest, source of hires, many employers and recruiters don’t always feel like they get their money’s worth. They want quality applicants. If you’re not attracting those applicants to your board, you’re never going to make your recruiting customers happy.

I think it’s important to draw lessons from outside of the job board/recruiting space, and job boards could benefit from viewing themselves more as online communities. Online community building tends to be about creating loyal, engaged, regular customers, as exemplified in this list Momentology.com compiled on brands who’ve done great brand-oriented community building.

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 by Maddy

Choosing a Niche for Your Job Board

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.

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