A Glassdoor Clone: How to Create a Job Board like Glassdoor?

Website development takes a lot of time – it’s necessary to select appropriate programming languages, develop a concept, come up with the web page design, and the like. The development also requires an idea, which will form the basis of all the work. It’s easier to act on the basis of an existing portal – you can get a new ready product by changing structure, design, and functionality a little bit.

A job board is a service that offers a job seeker and an employer to find each other remotely and rate the offered terms of cooperation. There are common websites and thematic websites: the first ones allow adding any advertisements and the second ones are focused on a certain theme. Extensive work is needed to be done to create a Glassdoor clone. The best option is to address a specialized agency for custom development and to adapt Glassdoor to a specific target audience and a specific request.

Glassdoor’s singularities

Glassdoor has become one of the most well-regarded and quoted websites with statistical data in 13 years of existence. Developers’ goal was to make a resource, which would help people find a decent company and conclude an employment contract with it. Service’s database includes more than 6 million reviews of famous companies – salary ratings, working conditions, interviews with job seekers and employers, office photos, lists of advantages of a particular company.

The main difference between Glassdoor and other job boards lies in the fact that information about employers, their rating, and advantages are specified not by employers themselves, but by their staff. In addition, the site can boast the candidates’ quality – here are thousands of advertisements of people talented in various fields. A well-thought promotion system helps to recruit people effectively and offer employers and job seekers candidates, who are suitable for their needs.

Website’s key features

To create a clone, you have to review the service’s functionality in detail and understand what particular features are used for. Developers’ main goals were to create a portal, which would provide transparent information about companies. Resource’s main features, which are available to users, include:

• vacancy search – it works like a standard search for the advertisement of a certain theme;
• search for specialists – companies can look for employees via Glassdoor just like usual job seekers can look for vacancies;
• possibility to see working conditions in a company – reviews usually contain information about the work schedule, salary, photos of a working place;
• possibility to speak out anonymously – this feature allows companies’ employees to tell about the company’s internal affairs calmly and honestly;
• rating view – rating systems are available and help easily understand how the users rate an employer. There is a separate rating for a company’s director (people rate his actions).

What capabilities do users, companies, and moderators have?

The creation of a clone of a foreign job board that would be adapted to the audience of CIS countries is a labor-intensive process, which requires knowledge and skills in the field of custom development. A high-quality Glassdoor clone should have as good features and capabilities as its prototype. To do so, you can work on the basis of special features of the portal (they are described in more detail in the table below).

The best existing analogs of Glassdoor

Glassdoor is a company that has evolved over the years. Initially, it was created as a simple site with a database. Then the portal’s owners decided to develop a mobile app as well. As of 2021, there are many job boards – foreign, domestic, and even regional. But not every site with advertisements or vacancies is a Glassdoor analog as some of them have a completely different objective and others don’t have the main features of Glassdoor.

The following web resources can be attributed to the Glassdoor clone category. They are divided into paid and free apps:

• Indeed – a free site with a big number of job offers;
• com – one of the largest job sites. The majority of features are free;
• CompanyWide – a paid thematic website and an app with advertisements for constructors;
• PayScale – a free database about salaries and their comparison on the leading professions;
• OneJobSlot – a paid app for recruiting with built-in marketing features and a convenient candidate tracking system;
• Kununu – a leading free web platform that makes it possible to rate employers. It also has ratings and reviews.

There is one Russian analog called SuperJob and its developers hold itself out as a Glassdoor analog. The portal contains information about salaries, working conditions, and offers from famous companies in Russia. The only shortcoming is that a company’s consent is required to place data.

Comparison of Glassdoor to its main competitor – the Indeed service

Glassdoor is a great platform as due to its functional capabilities that allow employees to leave anonymous reviews, it’s possible to promote a company in the rating and attract talented people. The main competitor of Glassdoor is a platform named Indeed, which is the largest portal in the USA to recruit staff. To create a Glassdoor clone, you need to know the service’s strengths and weaknesses to use the knowledge gained to develop a better and adapted version in the future.

Reviews and interviews – the main singularity of Glassdoor

To create a fully-featured clone, you need to understand a website’s particularity and its goal – developers launched their project after deciding to help people get to know the internal policies of the companies, which offer vacancies, better. In the case of custom development of an analog, particular attention must be given to the information component of the site, you need to make it as convenient for users as possible and provide anonymity.

Job board creation – planning before starting the development

A business plan for a Glassdoor clone should contain a lot of information – before you draw it up, it’s important to understand for what purpose a website is being created. Obviously, it’s going to be a job board, but it can be of different kinds – for a certain country or city, on a particular theme, or it can focus on various industries. It’s also necessary to make an original budget plan – calculate the cost of service creation, hiring SEO specialists, a designer, advertising purchase, and other nuances.

Another important thing is a market analysis and a choice of a target audience. Based on that, you are able to understand if the website is going to be popular, what competitors it has, and how to create a marketing campaign properly.

Choice of a platform to create a Glassdoor clone

To create a clone, it’s best to use custom development, which can adapt a foreign portal to a particular theme, change a concept a little bit, improve the resource functionality.

The Glassdoor website was developed with the help of the FBML format that is a form of XHTML markup. Thereat, JavaScript and jQuery were involved aside from FBML. Such programs and programming skills as Bootstrap, WordPress (you should use paid plugins Directory Pro or WPAdverts), HTML markup are suitable for the creation of a clone. It’s also possible to involve specialized scripts such as free Osclass and paid Tamaranga or Elite-Board.

Is your own domain necessary?

Purchase of a website domain is necessary for the situation when the portal owner wants his site to be found by users and have its own address in the «websitename.ru» format. You may use the uCoz service to set a domain – they offer free third-level domains and starting from the second level, domains become paid. If you don’t want to set a domain on your own or you lack the knowledge to create resource records, you can use the services of automatic settings.

Particularities of a job board’s design

A job board like Glassdoor is a site with a minimalist design. The simpler and more understandable it is, the more attractive it will be for users. You should use harmonizing bright colors and rectangular shapes when creating a design of pages – thematic images in small numbers will look great on the main page. There are numerous templates that are good for job board creation on the Internet. You may find decent choices among them, which can be additionally improved and acquire a theme with the help of an experienced web designer.

You shouldn’t get hung up on visual effects, but you still need to add an interactive map. The most important thing is to think about users’ comfort when making content – you should create an intuitive interface that fully clarifies the website’s capabilities.

The Osclass service offers ready templates; for example, the «Eva» template. Such templates as «ClassiPress» and «Jobork» are popular on WordPress.

Smart SEO is a key to the website popularity

The creation of a fully-featured Glassdoor clone is not limited to the website development and its design – you need to fill the job board with content well to promote this job board. You should obtain the support of SEO specialists who can create interesting posts. Additionally, copywriters will be able to create first interviews, reviews of top companies by writing key requests and geo-marks in them properly. You also need to assemble at least a minimum database of companies and attract as many job seekers as you can.

Benefits of using custom development when creating a Glassdoor analog

The essence of custom development lies in the change of an already existing product and its adaptation to a certain audience or theme. Such a development implies taking a specific resource as a basis and changing it a little: the site is being tailored to a client’s preferences and it’s being staffed by necessary items and other elements. Benefits are next:

• high level of adaptive capacity;
• excellent performance driven by functionality optimization;
• are easily subject to adjustment – you can make changes constantly;
• unlimited growth – this type of development makes it possible to create a website of the size that the client requests.

Development of a clone is impossible without skillful professionals, who can make the resource’s basis as well as create an appropriate design and fill a job board with content. There are many Glassdoor analogs so it’s important to determine the target audience and develop a website for the chosen range of users – after the promotion, you can think of expansion.