5 ways to make your job board better

Consider this a companion piece to last week’s blog. Remember, you don’t want an average job board – you want one that makes job seekers and employers alike enthusiastic!

1. Ask questions. You can never know too much about your job seekers and employers. Survey them at least twice a year. For seekers: Do they use Twitter? How many have found a job on your site as compared with competitors? What websites do they visit? For employers: What is their apply to hire conversion rate for your site? Are they active in social media or associations? What are they scared to tell you?
2. Invest in your technology. You don’t have to be ‘bleeding edge’ – but you need to stay in the middle of the pack, at a minimum. Your site should make it easy for employers to reach candidates, easy to calculate ROI, and easy to integrate into their existing hiring process. Your site should make it easy for job seekers to share what they find with others – and to connect with other like-minded job seekers. And your back end shouldn’t dictate what your front end can do – if it does, it’s time for a change.
3. Over deliver. Think about it – if you consistently over deliver, you will have pleasantly surprised job seekers and employers. You will always be in a position of power vis-a-vis your competitors, and you’ll always have the option of increasing your prices. (And by the way, investing in technology is one good way to keep the cost of over-delivering down!)
4. Fix at least one problem every month. Don’t let problems pile up. Tackle something significant each month. You’ll have a continual stream of positive news for your audience and a feeling of accomplishment and progress for your internal team. Plus you won’t be spending as much when the really big changes roll around.
5. Know what you stand for. Having a clear understanding of the value your job board offers job seekers and employers is critical – and I would argue it has to be more than just ‘make money’. Yes, profits are key, but so is value and clarity. The better you understand your site’s ‘purpose’, the clearer the path forward.

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