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Remco

Remco

@Remco

Quit my job two months ago 👍
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Joined January 2024
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I run eDiscovery.jobs, which has been the leading job board (outranking LinkedIn and Indeed) for several years now.
It's however way too small of a niche, so not profitable by any means.

The key to success is to offer something that LinkedIn and other big boys don't have. This can be as simple as a niche that they don't serve (like RemoteOK / Web3.career before remote/web3 was hot) Another great example is Marc's job board startup.jobs.
LI and others already post in many niches, so if you are competing with them, you need to offer something more than just jobs. This can be a community like Cat's doing, high quality (SEO) content that drives traffic, niche specific tools, you name it.

To answer your questions.

  1. Yes, high quality content is a great idea and will increase the overall authority of your jobboard.

  2. There's way's to automate this, several ATS like Lever.co and Greenhouse have public API's that you can access for jobs. LinkedIN doesn't and will need scraping/manual.
    I would def reach out to companies as well. Having a large network or being very active in your jobboard's niche can make a big big difference. Especially if you get a little following on social media and post jobs there as well.

  3. Chicken/Egg problem for a marketplace. Companies are not going to pay if you don't have traffic, but I also wouldn't way too long before charging. A strategy could be to offer a free job, promote it heavily, and charge going forward.

In addition:
4. Make sure to set up your Google Jobs schema. This will drive the majority of your traffic before individual pages start to rank.

  1. Create taxonomies of different categories within your niche, to drive SEO traffic to specific low-competition sub-niches.

  2. There's some other great tips in this LI post: www.linkedin.com/posts/chukov…

Super, super helpful post. Thanks for all the detail here!

My last company used Greenhouse and it never occurred to me to check their API docs. I'll definitely take a look at that.

My pleasure, did you already have a niche in mind? I'm actually working on an API which merges several ATS into a single DB, let me know if you want to beta test!

That was my exact thought after reading your post ("I wonder if I can build an API that merges all of this job data together and sell it to job boards") 🤣

Just to be clear, is it basically this? www.jobboardly.com/features/t…

Oooh thanks for sharing, I haven't really found any competition yet. My intention is to do the same thing yeah but platform agnostic.

I wasn't familiar with jobboardly, that's much cheaper than niceboard which I usually recommend!

Cool cool, I'd be happy to test it at some point - though transparently got my hands full with another launch and some keyword research at the moment. I'll let ya know if I get more serious about this job board idea, just doing some initial thinking about it right now.

And yeah, competition is always good. Means there's something there already!

For jobboardly: I saw it on X randomly. Their pricing seems quite fair and I might give them a shot instead of custom building my own job board software if I do end up trying to make a job board.

There's some other great tips in this LI post:

I mean.. if you look at his sites on semrush they get almost 0 traffic. Your site gets more traffic than both of his sites combined.

Hey Jasmin, what ATS do you use (if any?)

Started with Airtable then later moved to lever.co

That explains it, Lever has a public API for each client, this is how they can very easily list your jobs, for example: api.lever.co/v0/postings/rela…

Thanks Marc, the new pricing doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for indie hackers!