New to WIP?
We're a group of makers shipping together. We help each other stay accountable and reach our goals.
Apply for access
Topics
Back
Question
For those of you who have successful job boards, how did you get started?
Have you gotten to at least $1,000 MRR with one of your job boards? If so, I'm curious of what strategy you used to get eyeballs on the site and start making money. I think it could be interesting to make a job board for some niche I'm interested in which is why I'm asking. There are some results on Google talking about this, but I thought it would be interesting to get insights from other WIPers too.
Here are some of the questions I have:
1. I take it usual SEO practices apply, like writing blog articles about the career behind the job post (for example, for AI, maybe writing about PyTorch would help?) to rank for certain job related keywords. Does that sound about right?
2. Did you reach out to companies and ask them to post jobs or did they just happen to find your site? I'm thinking of posting the jobs myself in the beginning by searching LinkedIn and reposting jobs that recruiters are spamming in this niche just to make the site look like it has some content.
3. Either way, did you start out by letting companies post for free and only start to charge once traffic reached a certain threshold, or did you start off by asking for a payment? If you transitioned from free -> paid at some point, what kind of threshold did you look to hit and how did you decide on your pricing?
Thanks in advance!
Here are some of the questions I have:
1. I take it usual SEO practices apply, like writing blog articles about the career behind the job post (for example, for AI, maybe writing about PyTorch would help?) to rank for certain job related keywords. Does that sound about right?
2. Did you reach out to companies and ask them to post jobs or did they just happen to find your site? I'm thinking of posting the jobs myself in the beginning by searching LinkedIn and reposting jobs that recruiters are spamming in this niche just to make the site look like it has some content.
3. Either way, did you start out by letting companies post for free and only start to charge once traffic reached a certain threshold, or did you start off by asking for a payment? If you transitioned from free -> paid at some point, what kind of threshold did you look to hit and how did you decide on your pricing?
Thanks in advance!
👋 Join WIP to participate
I wish you luck!!
I've started creating a job board, but it's a feature of my paid membership (so only members get access to it). I'm learning all about scrapers but I'm starting by looking for high-quality creative gigs on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
My strategy now is just limit it to gigs I find and CSPs in my paid membership.
I'm planning on building it up where it's still just limited to my membership but make it desirable for advertisers to find top-tier CSPs by doing a lot of networking and referrals (and SEO of course). But that way I'm getting revenue from CSPs in the membership AND advertisers who want access to vetted CSPs. This part will definitely take a while to grow and refine, though.
I can give you my perspective being on the other side.
It seems like new job boards scrape company websites or other job boards or manually add jobs. I often saw our job ads on new job boards that we never posted.
Maybe better start by offering free job ads (limit to 1-3) than later when you have traffic you can charge money.
Seems we basically have the same thoughts, thanks for the input. I think I'll get a lot of bites esp. if I offer 1-3 active job ads for free - my LinkedIn connections are pretty much 99% recruiters who want to fill job roles haha
An important metric for a job board you should have in mind is the quality of candidates it attracts.
Agreed, I think some manual filtering of job ads is going to be necessary to make sure they're very good opportunities. The jobs are in a specialized field I know about, so I'll be able to detect BS fairly easily
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…
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.
Yes, high quality content is a great idea and will increase the overall authority of your jobboard.
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.
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.
Create taxonomies of different categories within your niche, to drive SEO traffic to specific low-competition sub-niches.
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.
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.
Monetization is hard. I put together a list that, maybe is helpful for you: www.evernote.com/shard/s99/sh…
I am currently trying out some monetization ideas like affiliate deals or a paid API.
I'm the founder of fractionaljobs.io and wrestling with all these questions myself too. Launched 4 weeks ago.
If any other job board owners out there want to jam together, feel free to reach out. I have a lot to learn.
You're position 7 for "Fractional Jobs" which is pretty good for a new job board.
I like that you're going email first, but I do have to say I was a bit confused that there's no actual job board.
I think you just have to hope that search volume increases and I can see it succeed. If I was you I would look at what 4dayweek.io/, especially all the little details that you don't see on other job boards in the right sidebar for each job. What could those be for you?
How's the email sign-ups going?
Yes 4dayweek is definitely an inspiration. Phil's done a great job!
Email signups I think(?) are great, I'm at 1,600 in the first 4 weeks. I don't really have anything to compare this to though, so no idea. The email open/click rate is 80%/25% though, which seems insanely high.