How I built an automated job board in 1 week

I couldn’t pass on this opportunity because I own a fantastic domain, dataengineerjobs.com, and the short tail keyword, “data engineer jobs” is low difficulty and high traffic. I had a great time building it, mostly because I could nerd out on automating the backfilling of jobs.

Starting a double-sided marketplace is difficult. In the job board industry - and yes, it’s a whole industry complete with APIs, consultants, and books, (I admit my dev mind completely trivialized it) - using an API that serves freshly scraped postings is the way to start. Here’s how I went about it:

How to backfill jobs

Why should you care about backfilling jobs? Google prioritizes and distributes job postings when setup correctly. If job postings are compatible with marketing your product, you could experiment with creating a page with backfilled jobs to improve your SEO. This is how you build it:

1. Pick a backfill service. I used this one (I am not affiliated).
2. Calculate how many jobs you want to post and how often. Minimum cost of 5 cents per 10 job posts.
3. Create your search query “data engineer in San Francisco”.
4. Schedule a cron job to fetch new posts every few days.
5. Delete jobs that are expired. Jobs count as expired when the validThrough is earlier than the current date.
6. Display the jobs on your page.

Generally, I found that most scraped job postings from my service are well formatted, though you may run into hiccups.

Why I am not going to develop it

Niche tech job boards seem difficult to scale. Talent collectives are way more in demand. This conclusion is based on the fact that Gergely Orosz shut down his job board, despite his ability to consistently keep his massive newsletter readership growing and interested. I won’t get into the weeds as he explains his reasoning pretty well here. Suffice to say, that Gergely went the extra mile with very little to show for it.

For these reasons, and since I simply don’t care enough about job boards, I won’t be monetizing dataengineerjobs.com. Instead, I will improve its backlink profile and attempt to sell it as a strategic purchase for someone who wants to drive more traffic to their website. Wish me luck!

One last tip

Backfill services can provide valuable statistics and data on the labor market, such as knowing how many jobs are available for a given period in a state or city. This is a great start for an article to improve your SEO. Perhaps, you could even use it to reach out to journalist to feature your data and so create backlinks. This will be one of the first things I do to get some more backlinks.

Hope that was useful for you!