Re-launching my job board
I set up a niche job board back in 2016 and got some decent traction, but life got in the way and I had to shelve it :(
It worked by using an aggregator to automatically lift job listings from other job feeds, just like remoteok.io. But I also copied and pasted some jobs from other websites (I know).
Now I'm thinking of launching it again.
So my question is, I always noticed that the homepage alone accounted for about 90 per cent of my views, so would it be worth just posting links to individual job listings on the employer website, rather than posting the entire job listing on my own board?
It would save me a ton of time, be more ethical, and I think the impact on my traffic would be fairly minimal. I just don't know any other job board that does it. Or maybe I'm missing something?
I know the guys behind www.jobagent.ch (horrible website). It's for the job marked in Switzerland only. But what they do is pretty interesting: they don't get their jobs from other job platforms, but from the employers websites directly.
They show the original job posts within an iFrame. It's not very elegant but it works.
Any idea how they make money? I'm wondering if employers still pay to be on the site since they get jobs from employers' websites already. Or do they have another business model?
They make money with 'top listings', that appear on top when someone searches. But they have other applications for this data, for example a tool for headhunters called 'profil matcher'. Headhunters can add their clients data and get informed when a job fits that person.
Ah thanks for the info. I had an idea for a niche job board myself and it would have to use the same method to get jobs.
Other good friends of mine built a niche job board for web professionals in Switzerland: https://freshjobs.ch
They don't do any crawling, though. It's a side project of a wordpress agency. Happy to connect you guys if you want.
Thanks. That's basically what I'm thinking of doing for my country. I'll reach out to you if I decide to move forward it. I still need to do some more research.
Actually a lot of job board aggregators do just what you described. For example juju and Jobs2Careers.
I used to do a lot of work aggregating job boards for my open source project JobApis, so if you have other questions, feel free to shoot me an email: khughes.me@gmail.com
The official/unofficial job board for Laravel https://larajobs.com/ just links out to other sites for the actual job postings, they do quite well :)
Cheers mate, I'll have a look.
Less content could impact your natural SEO, and if you do link externally make sure you put nofollow on all those links.
Thanks for the feedback peeps. It's great to see some poof of concept :)
I'm not really thinking of aggregation on an industrial scale, more like 10, maybe 15 links a day tops. With a big focus on quality.
The only possible downside I can see might be convincing employers to pay for a link to their original job post, rather than a full job post on my site.
From my experience with the hr world (I co-founded silp.com a few years back), they love if applicants land on the company website instead of a 'duplicate' of their job ad. Mainly for branding reasons, but also that they don't have to change their ad on multiple sites.
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It's a real slog.
I focused 90% of my marketing on Twitter, because it's the platform for choice for my niche (journalists). This mainly involved tweeting the best jobs about 1 to 3 times per day, and then gaining a bit of traction from retweets, likes and recommendations. But I'm not going to lie - it took the best part of a year to reach 500 followers. It's not setting the world alight I know but it's a base to build on. The key is to be consistent and don't overpost.
Other than that, I had an email marketing account to grab addresses of my visitors. And did some basic SEO.
I want to start doing serious content marketing when I relaunch though. Think this will be a game changer.