How do you populate a job board with postings when you're just starting out?

Question

I'm thinking of creating a job board for a specific niche, and regardless if it has both paid and unpaid listings I was wondering how I could populate it when it's just starting out.

Should I scrape relevant jobs, post them on my own, and then alert the businesses they're on my site? Or would a different method be more recommended?

Ashish Kumar (Ashfame) 🐲 · Accepted Answer

Yep, aggregating on your own (manual/scraping automatically) would be the first steps to gain initial momentum.

Then once it looks like its not a ghost town, let people post for free in the beginning (they would again only post if they think they stand to benefit from posting).

Then try getting it featured / covered in blogs / press.

Then once you see traffic starts building up or people start posting jobs on their own, introduce paid listings for highlighting certain posts to stand out.

And once you have managed to keep it going, turn paid listing with a small pricing which you will keep on increasing regulating the supply-demand.

Mohammed Rafy · Answer

These days there are quite a lot job boards and I started one as well. I made it without coding using Carrd and Airtable. It's here - https://communitymanagerjobs.co/ 

I'm focusing on community manager and related jobs. Manually adding all the jobs from LinkedIn, AngelList, Product Hunt, etc. I had also reached out communities of community manager and push the MVP there. Now there are also people posting jobs on their own (which came as a surprise for me because I wasn't sure people will post). I'm stuck here as of now and talking to community managers to get feedback on this. 

Next steps - I don't know. Talk to more people, talk to more communities. 

Would love to see your approach and what you are building.

Pug Pugson · Answer

Scrape remoteok.io, I dare you 😜️

I mean there is an "API" that @levelsio made recently: https://remoteok.io/api

Filip Triner · Answer

My vision is to build a jobboard for my blog www.mindsparklemag.com - Do you guys have any recommendation what platform or cms you have built it on? I am not a dev. btw. Any experiences what would make it easier to jumpstart it and accelarate is highly appreciated. Thanks

Andrew Schmelyun · Answer

Sounds great! Thanks for the detailed walk through!

Brian Ball · Answer

Other job boards have the goal of getting something to work for their paying customers. So, if you contact that board owner and ask if you can re-post -- telling them it'll help them at first, they might be open to it.  One thing you might consider is discovering what part of the "work" you enjoy. Maybe it's a part that could be provided as a service to other boards.

Go to Homepage	`g` `h`
Go to Done Todos	`g` `d`
Go to Questions	`g` `q`
Compose a New Todo	`n`
Go to Search	`/`
Show this dialog	`?`

How do you populate a job board with postings when you're just starting out?

Keyboard Shortcuts