WPJobBoard

7 Reasons Why You Should Start a Job Board

Of late, job boards have started to pop up everywhere online. There’s a steady incline in the number of online job boards, and that trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for the time being.

With the onslaught of hundreds of entrepreneurs tackling this niche, you must be asking yourself: why? Why are people starting job boards? What’s the point?

Sure, there’s money to be had (and yes, money is a large motivator of the trend), but there’s money to be had in every industry. Why start a job board to get the pie?

Well, I’ll tell you why. In fact, I’ll tell you seven reasons why.

1. Largely Untapped Market

Even though there are tons of people starting new job boards every day, the truth is that there is still plenty of space in the market for many more. Particularly if you specialize your job board in a certain niche (i.e. home decor jobs or jobs in a certain geographical area), you’ll have very few competitors to contend with for the attention of your target audience.

The fact that many new job boards are being created however, shows you that the market is fast filling up. If there ever was a time to get into the market and get your own piece of the pie, it’s now.

2. Evergreen Business

Job boards are an evergreen business. Image credit: Luke Jones via Flickr.

Quick general knowledge quiz: what’s one of the most popular issues in politics? Politicians give it big importance in their campaigns, and its sure to be mentioned once in every promotional rally or speech issued by a campaigner. (Hint: it’s got something to do with jobs).

The answer? Unemployment.

There will always be unemployment. No country or region will ever achieve perfect 100% employment, because of simple laws of supply & demand. There will always be people hunting for jobs, year-round, which makes starting a job board an evergreen business to get into.

Sure, you might have spikes in traffic and recruitment posts around the end of summer and other high-recruitment months, but there will be a guaranteed sum of both job seekers and job posters taking to the Internet every day of the year.

3. Large Volume of Traffic

There’s a significant volume of traffic for the keyword “job board” and related ones. “Job board” itself gets a steady 9900 searches per month, a healthy figure.

And remember — that’s just organic search engine traffic. There’s no telling how many visitors social media, paid advertising, content marketing, and other traffic generation strategies can bring in. But based on the 3-figure Alexa rank of indeed.com and the high ranks of similar job boards, it’s a lot.

What’s more, the type of traffic associated with job boards (primarily job seekers) is a recurring type. Meaning, even after the first visit, people will check back regularly for updates to your job board. So even if you only get a lower amount of first-time traffic, you’ll see high engagement levels, particularly in terms of bounce rate, pageviews per visit, and recurring traffic percentages.

4. Build a Personal Brand

When you’re an entrepreneur striking out in practically any industry, it’s important that you’re able to build your personal brand. You and your name should be recognized by other industry leaders and your target audience. In the Internet marketing niche, some big personal brands I can reel off the type of my head are Neil Patel of QuickSprout, Brian Dean of Backlinko, and Noah Kagan of OkDork.

The bigger and more identifiable your personal brand is, the more your target audience will trust you and buy from you.

Creating a job board is an easy way to make a name for yourself in the industry. Since job boards get decent amounts of traffic and it’s the type of website where people will remember the name of the founder, it’s an efficient tactic to quickly build up your personal brand.

5. Little Maintenance Work

Job boards involve very little “heavy lifting” maintenance. Image credit: USACE via Flickr.

A job board is super simple to maintain. With the right software, it can easily become one of those “set and forget” type things that can run on almost autopilot. At the very least, maintaining a job board is a lot less work than maintaining a blog.

All you have to do is setup the job board and then pretty much wait for recruiters to post their ads and job seekers to apply to jobs. All you’ll have to do is review each job listing that is submitted. Checking the background of the company to make sure it’s legitimate and proofing the job listing will take no more than 2-3 minutes per, tops.

The only thing that will require significant input on your end is the process of finding advertisers for your revenue stream. Additionally, the initial stages of marketing, while you’re still trying to get your job board to become a little more known, can be quite time-consuming.

6. There’s Money to be Had

Of course, this is the main reason why people get into the job board business: there’s money to be made. But we know that already, don’t we?

But the truth is, few people know just how much money there is to be had. The size of the online recruitment market is, in fact, in excess of $20 billion. That number also includes freelance recruiters and the like, but the major chunk of that figure is all for online job boards.

Even a teensy weensy slice of the market share can reap rich dividends for your website.

7. Multiple Monetization Strategies

We recently discussed monetization strategies for job boards here on the WP Job Board blog, and came up with 5 different ways you can maximize revenue from your job board. These included:

• setting up third-party advertising (ad networks like Google Adsense or Chitika and direct ad space sales are viable options)
• creating resources for recruiters (ebooks and other digital products on how to find the perfect employee or how to train a raw newbie)
• creating resources for job seekers (ebooks and other digital products on how to apply to job postings and how to outshine other job candidates)

Truth be told, the post only samples a small number of the ways that you can monetize a job board. In reality, the list goes on and on.

Wrapping Up

If those 7 reasons haven’t yet convinced you that the job board business is a great market to strike out in, I don’t know what will.

But for those of you who have decided to take a plunge and create your very own job board, make sure you do that by using our plugin, WP Job Board! You get nifty new features, unparalleled support, and general all-around awesomeness packed into a single plugin.

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