Successful jobboards

Posted by Philip W. on February 22, 2008 at 11:16pm in General Topics

I am new to jobboards, and I have been considering building my own site(s). But, with the competition from Indeed.com, SimplyHired, Monster, Dice, etc. I'm having second thoughts. I guess I have 2 questions for the pros:
1) How do the pros compete with the above mentioned sites?
2) Do you derive most of your sites income from paid job listings or from paid advertising? I'm thinking of using Indeed.com and just selling ad space to local employment companies.

Thanks for your time and advice.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on February 25, 2008 at 5:51pm: Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com do not really compete with job boards. They are merely vertical job search engines.
Monster/CareerBuilder/Dice are established but kind of slow. Innovations are almost non-existent there.
So you can compete.

My job board PostJobFree.com competes by providing free job postings and free resume search.

Another option for competition -- target narrow niche (but I'm not in favor of such approach and prefer generalist job boards).

100% PostJobFree income comes from advertisement.
It seems that recruiters are not really interested even in $20/mo premium membership (for some advanced features) if they can post for free.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Philip W. on February 27, 2008 at 12:12am: I just visited your jobboard (PostJobFree.com) it looks great, like an Indded.com or Google search. If you don't mind me asking, what software do you use? I understand if you'd rather not say.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on February 27, 2008 at 2:45pm: I use ASP.NET 2.0 for PostJobFree.com.
So, PostJobFree.com requires extensive software development -- it's not just something that can be setup out-of-box.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bruce Cassels on June 30, 2008 at 7:51pm: Hi Philip,

I have recently gone through the same questioning process as you regarding starting a job board. We started developing software for the automotive industry initially and ended up with a complete applicant recruiting system that includes job boards, with Applicant Tracking, Screening questionnaires, assessments etc.

We have ended up with three products, public job boards(see www.automotivejobfinder.com), Corporate Recruiting Sites(see www.automotivejobfinder.com/afs) or we can act as an ASP and lease the software to you.

We have learned a lot in the past 3 years and would be happy to give you more info. We are just starting to look for channel specialists that want to run job boards and market corporate recruiting sites in other industries.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Paul Pickthorne on July 16, 2008 at 10:32am: I agree with Dennis. My site, Smuz.com is also free and ad revenue driven and I firmly believe that this is where the market is headed. In this business model, Indeed and SimplyHired are valuable sources of traffic, not competitors.

Good luck,

Paul Pickthorne
Chief Free Officer
Smuz, Inc
paul@smuz.com
www.smuz.com; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David Charles on August 7, 2008 at 4:31pm: Don't let the status-quo of the current competition scare you away. David took down Goliath.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by John Sadler on August 8, 2008 at 9:13am: I reckon niche boards are the way forward. You must know your industry and have some launch partners from the industry to make it work. That way you are not competing with the Monsters of this world. I think there should be a mix of paid advertising and jobs posting revenue generation.; ▶ Reply to This