Ways to validate a job board from the perspective of a job-seeker?
Hi guys, I'm new here and it seems like a great community for side-project advice!
I've carried out PPC marketing tests before for e-commerce products by creating a landing page with an "Early access" sign up, and I'd like to do the same thing for a job board. It feels like the audience who would click through a Google Ad for a job board would be expecting to see jobs now rather than sign up and wait for email updates, so I'm not sure of the best way to put something out there to test the response.
I'm not completely opposed to building out the job-seeker part of the website before running PPC but I would like to validate it first!
Does anyone on here have any tips? Thanks!
You should check out Courtland's podcast interview with Lynne of Key:Values. It is really good for learning how she started her job board. And it's a great job board too--because it is different and provides value to the candidate.
But for my 2 cents, because I've spent the last 4.5-5 years building a company in the HR Tech space, job boards in the minds of our customers are a very polarizing topic--it's interesting because the modern job board takes the form of a site like Built In (i.e. https://www.builtinboston.com/) or the Muse or Key:Values and sites like that can yield great candidates who are thoughtful about their careers and find the companies by doing research about the company (that's why those sites are content-first job boards). But there are a lot of other job boards that send our customers a ton of candidates that aren't the right fit, and those job boards quickly lose credibility in the eyes of the customer.
I think it'd be hard to validate the job board idea from a candidate quality perspective with just a landing page and a Google Ads campaign, especially because people who apply to jobs by just searching "data science jobs Boston," for example, may not be as thoughtful about their careers. And the job seekers who are thoughtful about their careers (i.e. potentially higher quality candidates) would want to be presented with more information about the company before they choose to apply or click-through to a job. We power career sites for our customers, so we see the analytics data around how candidates research an opportunity/company and how that leads to them clicking on a job posting and this behavior is validated from the data we're seeing.
I guess I'd ask what niche or focus you're hoping to target and what your goals are from the job board? Because there might be another way to validate it more effectively beyond a landing page and a Google Adwords campaign.
Thanks, I really appreciate the help. I listened the podcast with Lynne and it was really useful. Think I’m going to speak to more people that I know on both sides to get their reaction initially.
I'm looking into this space too, so I'm interested to hear any tips as well.