Remember how people got jobs back in the day? Job seekers would go through countless classifieds or other printed advertisements before going for interviews. They had to attend numerous interviews for jobs that weren’t relevant to them just to find one that was suitable. However, the advent of the internet and digital technologies has revolutionized the world of recruitment. Through the internet, online job boards came into existence to provide a platform that enabled job seekers to find the right employment opportunities. Using these job boards, recent graduates, as well as employed people, started job hunting from the comfort of their homes. This made job boards increasingly popular among job seekers and led to the emergence of even more job boards.

The rise of numerous job boards also stiffened the competition among them. Every job board joined the race to attract the highest number of job seekers and employers. To stand out from the competition, several job boards started finding their niche and offering additional services to recruiters and candidates. Similarly, today’s job boards have to find ways to rise above their competitors and one of the most effective ways of doing so is creating a candidate-centric job board. Such a job board ensures a user-friendly and sophisticated job hunting experience for job seekers. Thus, using a candidate-centric job board enables you to attract more candidates and have greater chances of gaining repeat visitors. But how do you go about creating a candidate-centric job board? Read on to know the steps involved.

Define your approach

Before creating a job board, you have to decide whether you would post all jobs or only niche jobs. A generic job board posts all types of jobs from different industries whereas, niche job boards posts industry-specific or location-specific jobs.

To develop a niche job board, you need to decide which niche you will be targeting. Generally, niche job boards target narrow categories of job vacancies such as truck drivers, delivery executives, or engineers. Using this approach, you can avoid overwhelming competition with major job boards that attract more traffic and have more resources. Also, you should research how many job boards are offering jobs in your niche. If there are several job boards in your niche, then there will be multiple competitors against you. Alternatively, in case there are no job boards in your niche, then your selected niche may not be profitable in a business sense. Therefore, you must select your niche carefully.  Additionally, pay keen attention to emerging market demands and industry trends. Doing so will help you understand what kind of job vacancies are in demand. Having a niche job board will enable you to attract job seekers that are looking for user-friendly job search platforms in a specific niche.

For creating a generic job board, you have to attract recruiters and job seekers from every industry. However, you will be competing with a lot of other popular generic job boards, which already post large volumes of jobs from various industries. Hence, you must find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and offer something unique and valuable to attract job seekers and employers.

Aggregate all available jobs

To create a successful niche or generic job board, your first priority must be job aggregation. Several recruiter websites frequently post job vacancies that job boards collect for their platform. To collect jobs from various sources, you need to implement comprehensive job scraping. Basically, job scraping is a process of finding and collecting job data from various employer websites and storing them in a centralized location. After acquiring job data, job data optimization is a must. The collected job data will contain critical information in different formats that are used by various employers. Optimizing aggregated job data means categorizing your data according to the job title, job description, job ID, and job location. Several premium job wrapping tools like Propellum offer automated job scraping services that collect and optimize job data efficiently.

By aggregating all available jobs, your platform can simplify the job hunting process for job seekers. It enables job seekers to easily apply to several different jobs in different companies. Also, job seekers would find job hunting for several jobs on a single platform extremely convenient. Hence, your job board will have higher odds of gaining repeat visitors.

Personalize job feeds for job seekers

During job hunting, job seekers may have specific location or salary preferences. Generally, job seekers sort job feeds based on these preferences. For instance, if a job seeker prefers to work in New York as an app developer, then they may sort the job feed to find jobs that fulfill their requirements. However, job seekers may have to choose their preferences every time they visit the job board. To address this issue, you need to integrate candidate-specific personalization in your job board. Doing so will ensure that your job board stands out from the competition.

To integrate candidate-specific personalization, you can deploy machine learning for your job board. Machine learning systems are capable of collecting data about different individual job seekers and their job preferences. This data is analyzed to draw insights and post jobs that cater to different job seekers’ requirements. With this approach, job feeds can display a limited number of job vacancies that are highly relevant to a job seeker’s resume and their preferences. On a job board like this, job seekers won’t have to spend hours and go through hundreds of irrelevant job postings during job hunting. Additionally, machine learning systems will become more precise as job seekers keep using your job board.

Update job feeds frequently

Employers frequently post job vacancies for various positions and remove ones that are filled. Hence, job boards need to stay updated with the latest job vacancies. Failing to do so may lead job boards to have outdated jobs on their job feed or offer slow updates regarding new job vacancies, both of which are inconvenient for job seekers. To stay updated with the latest job postings, job boards may have to keep track of various job vacancies at certain time intervals. However, this approach can be tedious and may consume time that is required for other core tasks, if done manually.

Premium job wrapping tools like Propellum offer a better alternative to manual job feed updates. Job wrapping tools can automatically search for jobs on different websites, optimize them, and post them on the job board after specified intervals. Using job wrapping tools, you can ensure that your job board is always updated with the latest jobs. Hence, you can ensure that your job board discards obsolete jobs and presents only the newest job opportunities to job seekers.

Integrate additional features

You can offer additional features for job seekers that would provide them with a unique experience compared to other job boards. For instance, the following features can be immensely beneficial for job seekers:

• Resume builder: Some job seekers may face difficulties in making resumes. For such job seekers, you can offer resume builder services by asking them for their personal details, qualifications, and work experience. You can offer various resume templates to build a comprehensive resume for jobs across multiple industries
• Salary calculator: A salary calculator helps job seekers evaluate maximum, minimum, and average salaries for a specific job in a particular company. With this tool, job seekers calculate their personal market value based on their qualification, work experience, and current CTC.
• Bookmark a job post: In some cases, job seekers may be uncertain about applying for some job vacancies as they may have different preferences. Such job seekers can bookmark job vacancies to apply later.
• Private/public resumes: Several job seekers may not want their employers to view their resumes on job boards since they are looking for a job switch. These job seekers can benefit from resume privacy features. With this feature, they can select whether their resume is public, that is open to everyone, or private, which can be viewed only when they apply for a job.

By aggregating all the jobs available, frequently updating your job data, and improving the job hunting experience, you can streamline the job hunting process for job seekers. And to do so, you can use premium job wrapping solutions like Propellum, which automates all the aforementioned tasks for you. This will not only make you the go-to job board for job seekers but also leave you with the time and resources you need to scale your job board business to the next level.