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31 Comments

How do job board sites work?

Obviously I get it at a high level. But I found a niche I'd like to experiment with a job board in and don't really get how y'all do it.

  • Where do the listings come from? Do you just scrape them?
  • When someone clicks on a scraped job link, do you get paid? Or is that just to build traffic for when there is enough critical mass to start charging for listings?
  1. 9

    Hi! I think I can answer this question pretty well since I've built in the space (www.techinternship.io) and have quite a bit of knowledge of the filed.

    • For most sites, listings are scraped. For my site, I pull them from a number of sources, including lever, greenhouse, and LinkedIn. I also add some manually, for platforms that I have not yet built scrapers for.
    • I do not get paid when somebody finds a job on my site and applies. There are various monetization strategies that I have see other companies in this space take. I'll try and outline a few of them:
    1. Only allow companies that pay you to post roles on your board. This strategy is pretty straightforward, but you would need a lot of traffic to pull it off. It suffers from the two-sided marketplace problem.
    2. Post jobs for free and charge companies to promote their postings.
    3. Post jobs for free, collect user data/resumes and charge companies to recruit those users directly.
    4. Post jobs for free, and charge users for related services like interview prep or application tracking.

    I think that the easiest path is to go with a hybrid of 2-4. They don't suffer from the chicken and the egg/ two-sided marketplace problem. This is the strategy I have been taking for my site, and it has worked well thus far.

    The most important strategy is to find a niche and completely own it. That is what I'm attempting to do/have done with the tech university recruiting space.

    Good luck!

    1. 1

      Love it, thanks for that. That's what I had assumed but wanted to make sure I had it right.

      1. scrape to get content
      2. promote to get users
      3. eventually / slowly / intermittently replace scraped listings with paid
    2. 1

      Can you talk a little bit about your tech stack please? I have a super narrow niche that i have been planning to do this for but I am not so technical. Thanks in advance.

      1. 2

        Sure, I'm happy to share my stack. This is just one of many possibilities for building something like this.

        1. Python/Flask server
        2. Vanilla JS for dynamic frontend content
        3. UIkit for styling on the frontend
        4. Dynamodb for persistence
        5. An in-memory cache
        6. A digital ocean VPS for hosting it
        7. CircleCI for continuous build and deploy
        8. Sentry for monitoring
        9. Reflect.run for automated regression tests

        All in all, it costs about $15/month. Sentry, CircleCI, and Reflect all have very generous free plans.

      2. 1

        We are techies, so we built and launched RemoteWorkJar.com in just a week using C# and MySQL database. We are 21 days old as of today - launched exactly on Friday 30th July 2020. We think we are getting decent traction.

        The hiring managers are visiting and doing their own posts as well.

        We are also getting a request to develop API so that the companies can post jobs and curators would be able to pull as and when the job is posted.

        Please have a look at the site and feedback will be highly appreciated!

        1. 1

          Hi,
          I wonder how you promote your website? Also, can you share any stats on visits number, paid accounts etc?
          Thanks!

          1. 1

            Hey,

            We are using mostly Twitter and Google to promote (not at all aggressively).

            We are not charging companies to post their remote jobs as of now. Here is the screenshot of stats we have got as of now.

            https://i.imgur.com/lPSOJdg.png

            Please share your feedback if you have any idea how we can promote and improve things to add more value.

            Cheers!

            1. 1

              It's a pretty good result!

              Saying "Google" do you mean "Google ads"?
              I also wonder, how you started - entering posts manually or using scrapers? When did companies start posting on your website?

              I would repost any new position in your social media. Or, maybe not the whole ad but just a title to make people follow your link.

              Good luck!

              1. 1

                We are posting jobs manually by screening through them.

                Google means we do list all jobs on Google Job Postings. The companies have also started posting jobs.

                Thanks!

  2. 3

    Hey Andrew,

    I know you posted this a few days ago, but thought i'd jump in.

    My last business was a job board business. Grew it to 7-figure revenue and 500k+ users.

    To solve the chicken/egg problem we first found the content (jobs) and shared them with our users (candidates). Once we built up a big enough audience we were comfortable charging companies to post jobs.

    We monetised employers with jobs and candidates with events and courses.

    Key thing is to own a niche and make your brand / positioning as remarkable as possible. There are a million job boards out there and scraping has become so easy.

    If I was doing it again now, I'd certainly experiment with different business models.

    In terms of building it... you can throw something together using no-code tools in a few hours.

    There are also loads of job board software platforms that allow you to auto-fill jobs from around the internet.

    Feel free to reach out if you need any advice :)

    1. 1

      Thanks @mikeyh

      If you were starting over from scratch today, (and it was only you) what are some things you'd try first to create an audience?

      Would you throw ads against it?
      Content?
      Twitter?

      1. 3

        So this depends on the niche, type of employers/candidates that you're targeting... but if it was me on my own I'd go for building authority first, with quality content.

        Assuming I'd be targeting a relatively interesting niche, with interesting employers/companies...

        I'd do loads of video interviews with CEOs (maybe also hiring managers or specific job roles too) of companies, asking questions that would be interesting to the types of candidates wanting to apply to those companies. I'd turn those videos into podcast episodes, blog posts, tweets, and newsletters.

        I'd outsource/automate most of the process with the exception of the interviews themselves.

        This strategy means you're building relationships with your customers (employers) while you build up the audience.

        With a bank of high quality content / insights, you could start monetising candidates first. Paid newsletters, paid podcasts, ebooks, etc.

        Any other questions just shout, happy to dive into things further :)

      2. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  3. 3

    I don't scrap them. I reach out to the companies talent teams or communications departments. I partner with them at first (list for free), and I hope to up-sell eventually once I can demonstrate the value of the board.

    The reason I partner with them is such that I can use their name, logo, website, etc. without legal risk as per an agreement I had drawn up with them. My "terms and conditions" if you will.

    I use the term partner here loosely. In most cases it's a subscription free-trial, but a couple companies have talked about partnership, and agreed to both parties (my business) and their corp signing a legal release for promotion and mutual benefit.

    Hope this helps.

    1. 1

      I agree that's a safe route to go. Also very smart, because when you do want to monetize it, you are not "new" to them anymore, they have an agreement with you!

  4. 3

    I really liked this article which I read a while ago by @coreyhaines which may give you some additional insights? See How I Launched a Profitable Job Board for Marketers with No-Code Tools in 3 Weeks

  5. 2

    When you say "y'all" exactly which sites are you referring to? Obviously some scrape and some don't. The same applies to links. Some are affiliate links and some aren't.

    Job boards are a great business. I know two people who have funded the last 20 years of their living expenses through owning small job boards. They don't scrape any job ads from other sites. They directly charge employers $100 - $200 per post to post job ads or they sell monthly or annual posting packages.

    I don't know what it's like today but the owners of these job sites got all of their business by doing direct sales themselves. They cold called large employers, meet them in person, and closed job post deals. When you take the time to drive to their office and you're a halfway decent sales person, I don't think many people are going to say no to spending $100 on a job posting, if you sell it correctly. The trick is to meet them in person and be really personable. If they like you, it'll be hard for them to not spend $100 that they have a quota to spend. People and companies make huge donations to charities all day long for nothing in return.

    When I first heard this, I was surprised because it doesn't seem like it would be an efficient way to close $100 sales. I didn't see how it would even cover parking and gas fees. But it works because you do most of the work on the phone and then only meet people who are likely to close and it's a number game so 50% of the people end up paying you thousands of dollars upfront for annual packages. It's not like you're selling life insurance and these are all people who have hiring quotas from their employers so they actually need to find more sites they can post job ads on.

    But these people started 20 years ago when SEO was easy so they have tons of free traffic from google. This model won't work today because even if you go out and close a million paid job posts, you won't have any people applying to those jobs unless you have tons of traffic. Back in the day, all you had to do was show your potential customers your google analytics charts and that would probably be enough for them to buy paid job listings from you.

    1. 1

      When you say "y'all" exactly which sites are you referring to?

      ... job boards. https://remoteok.io/ etc. not sure where the confusion is.

  6. 2

    They are scraping each other . Thats why in 2020 they are all so ... 😴

  7. 2

    It's easier if your definition of a job board is flexible. If a blog has job related content on it, startups (maybe not big companies) will pay a decent amount to post a job listing on it, industry standard for funded startups is around $100-300 a post, this is also dependant on the number of page views/sessions that you get.

    Startups, not necesarrily big companies with great brand names pay a lot of money to get on anywhere that has a following of job seekers that they want to hire. That's the incentive for companies, the incentive for job seekers to consistently get on your platform is something that's a bit more nuanced. Keyvalues.io helps manage expectations to job seekers, elpha is a forum and both make a killing off of advertising job postings and companies.

    1. 1

      actually the number might be more depending on the size of the startup, just use that to do some back of the envelope calculations

    2. 1

      I'll give you 2 more examples a bit close to my heart, Indeed and Connectifier, both which used scraping to form the content that brought job seekers to their site, then once they get a critical mass, they can charge companies to advertise on their site.

      They've fought a lot of legal battles and ultimately won almost all of them (can't say more than that), so it's a model that works, but you have to be really technically good to make it work. Or flip that logic on it's head and say that you'll be really technically good once you get it to work, which I think is more valuable long-term.

      1. 0

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

        1. 0

          If I was, would I tell you ;) ?

  8. 1

    I run https://remoteleaf.com, I mostly curate the jobs manually and send it to the users. I charge job seekers to access to the curated lists.

    1. 1

      This is an interesting business model. I assume it's working for you?

      1. 1

        Yup, so far so good. All our metrics are here -> https://remoteleaf.com/open

  9. 1

    Two options

    1. Display sponsor's job advertisement (kind of featured jobs). This is B2B. You need high traffic to get B2B to pay you.
    2. There are some models which will charge the end users as well to see the available jobs. This is B2C. You need huge list of jobs for B2C to pay.

    This may help you once you have the list ready. To convert the list into a job board https://siteoly.com

    1. 1

      will probably build a unique experience.

      and my guess is that you actually don't need high traffic if you have a more qualified or more engaged applicant pool.

  10. 1

    I worked on a Job Listing website that aims to connect students with internships in Vietnam. Though I abandoned the project after 4 months since I don't feel connected.

    Here is my experience:

    Where do the listings come from?

    Depends, I figured out there are many companies posted jobs on Facebook groups, but since FB groups have a terrible way of organizing posts.

    • 80% from Facebook groups (internship)
    • 5% from company websites
    • 15% elsewhere

    Earning:

    Since it's pretty early, I focused on gaining the traction of the website rather than earning. Though, a few ways I have thought of:

    • Connect with companies to get candidates, earning from each hire
    • Job listing sponsor ad to be placed on top
    • Premium membership: access tools to filter out candidates, etc

    Since I follow SEO practices, after a few months, there is small but steady traffic comes to the website. Until all the jobs are way out-dated

    Hope it helps!

  11. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 2

      This is an ad for your product. Not helpful.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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