Starting a Job Board

This week’s blog post comes from Jonathan Page, Careerleaf’s Director of Sales and Marketing.

Every week I have conversations with entrepreneurs researching technology solutions for a new job board or career portal, and often provide advice on their value propositions, target markets and initial launch plans. Some of this advice is specific to a particular business idea, but much of the advice crosses industry or territorial differences.

The best advice I can give job board entrepreneurs begins with asking a series of 5 core questions:

1. Where and how are you getting your job seekers? Why are they interested in you?

There is a reason that aggregators and virtually every job board in existence pays or has paid for candidate traffic. Your candidate traffic is why employers will pay you. So if you don’t have an impressive^* number of contact emails for your niche, you aren’t ready to set up your job board or invest in a technology solution.

Priority number one is having something of value to say to your target candidates and start winning them to your tribe.
*The term impressive is purposefully relative – the more differentiated and desirable the candidates the smaller the number needs to be to qualify as impressive. Also, understand that geography is implicit in any Niche and should not be ignored.