4 job search tools to attract UK’s independent workforce

The UK job market is being taken over by independent workers at an unexpected rate. In the last three years alone, Britain’s gig economy more than doubled in size to comprise over 4.7 million workers. So what does that mean for the job market and job boards like yours? It means that you may have to adapt faster than you thought you needed to before. With increasing independent workers in the British workforce, the traditional job board model won’t work anymore. Employee turnover rates will increase as long-term roles begin to diminish. Employers will look for new workers on a more frequent basis. Similarly, independent job seekers will look for new roles more often. 

To thrive in such a scenario, you may have to upgrade multiple aspects of your job board. You’ll need to: 

• scale your operations up massively to meet the increased demand for new jobs,
• ensure that you maintain the quality of job information to connect the right worker to the right gig, and
• differentiate yourself from other job boards and gig economy platforms by offering greater functionality than that of a basic job search tool.

To do all this, you can offer independent workers a set of job search tools that can help them secure new gigs with greater ease and reliability.  

Job search tools for the independent workforce

As the UK job market transitions into a gig economy, job security is becoming a major concern for job seekers. Since they mostly work on short-term projects, independent workers look for a job board or a gig economy platform that can be a reliable source of new jobs for them. In order to stand out to independent workers, job boards will have to consistently offer them a high volume of relevant jobs. This will ensure that they don’t remain idle for too long between gigs. Incorporating job search tools like the following can help independent job seekers to find new jobs quickly, and make your job board a reliable tool that they keep coming back to.  

• Automatic job update

To become a reliable job search partner for independent workers, your job boards should offer them with a constant supply of new job postings. To do so, you must gather as many job postings as possible on a daily basis. More importantly, these jobs must be checked for validity and updated regularly. That’s because, due to the decreasing length of job contracts, the validity of job postings is also decreasing. A job posting may become invalid as quickly as within a couple of days after being posted. This means that your job board must work extra-hard to weed out invalid jobs and replenish your job database with fresh jobs on a constant basis. Otherwise, independent workers visiting your job board may get frustrated browsing through one expired job posting after another. And you don’t want that, do you?

To ensure you have a high volume of valid jobs, you must have a job wrapping tool that comes with an automated job update capability. These tools can process large volumes of job data to verify and validate each individual posting. They validate the job data and update their database by regularly checking the source website for any changes, ensuring that every job posting on your job board is up to date.

• Customized job feed

Customization and personalization are effective ways to enhance the customer experience and retain more customers in any business. The same applies to job board users, too. In addition to offering job seekers a high volume of jobs, job boards must match job data with the individual profiles of job seekers. They must be able to offer customized job feeds to each of their users by classifying each job based on criteria like skills required, qualifications, experience, commitment required (full-time or part-time), location, pay, contract duration, benefits, etc. For that, they must be able to leverage job categorization tools. 

Premium job wrapping solutions come with advanced job categorization capabilities, which allow job boards to categorize jobs based on associated criteria. These jobs can be suggested to job seekers based on their profiles automatically. This eliminates the need for them to manually search for jobs every time they log into your job board. You can ask regular job boards users to create their profiles on the job site to facilitate repeated use. These profiles can include the preferences and qualifications of job seekers, which can enable job boards to offer highly-tailored suggestions to individual job seekers. 

• Advanced job search tool

With the help of detailed job categorization or job classification, job boards can enable job seekers to search for jobs using a wide range of search criteria. Job classification allows job boards to attach highly descriptive tags to job postings. These tags make job postings more easily searchable. As a result, job seekers can find jobs that are highly relevant to their search terms, no matter how complex and detailed they might be. Thus, users looking for any kind of job can easily find them on your job board with unparalleled accuracy. If your job board can offer such capability, it can easily stand out among other job boards.

• Portfolio builder and matcher

Independent workers do not build careers or resumes, they build portfolios. With every gig they work on, they gain experience and add that gig to their growing portfolio. Job boards can attract more independent workers by helping them to leverage their portfolios to secure better jobs. Job boards can enable employers to find the right people for their vacant positions by directly reaching out to job seekers with the suitable portfolios. This way, job seekers won’t always have to look for jobs but have employers approach them directly if their profile fits their requirements.

Enhancing the capabilities of your job board using these job search tools can ensure that the rise of the gig economy becomes a period of great opportunity for you and your job board. However, you’ll need to ensure that you have the right technology to support these added features and job search tools. For that, you need job board tools like those created by Propellum. Propellum’s job wrapping solutions can scour the internet for the latest jobs, check the data gathered for quality and compliance to your standards, categorize them, and post them to your job board. They can constantly check the source for any changes in the job postings and update your job board accordingly, thus giving your users a reliable source of job postings, be they traditional job seekers or gig workers. Thus, Propellum’s tools can ensure that regardless of the state of the job market, your job board stands out from the rest!