How to Create a Job Portal Website: 5 Easy Steps

Websites such as CareerBuilder, Dice, and Indeed help people find jobs, companies fill open jobs, and their owners earn money. From our article you will learn how to create a similar site for finding work and personnel, attract users to it and monetize.

1. Choose a project niche

There are two types of web portals aimed at assisting with employment and hiring personnel: those that cover all sectors, and niche ones that focus on a particular type of work, industry, or profession. Creating sites of the first type is not worth it, as in this case you will have to compete with market leaders, which requires a lot of money, time and effort.

It is much simpler, cheaper, and wiser to create a highly specialized project, become a leader in one niche, and then expand your influence in other industries. Fortunately, the size of the market allows this. So, the Indeed website alone has about 200 million unique visitors per month, and even if only 5% falls on one niche, then it is 10 million users. To make your website profitable, it’s enough to attract 10 thousand users, that is 0.1% of the niche (Indeed site).

There are at least three ways to choose a niche:

1. The simplest is personal experience and knowledge. If you know that some niche is not represented (or poorly represented) on job search and staff sites, then this is your chance. Also, a good option would be to create a site for recently emerging professions (data science, artificial intelligence, VR-design, etc.).
2. The second option is to analyze the blogs of market leaders and portals such as Quora and Reddit. On the sites of the main players, you need to look for user requests to create new categories for certain professions / industries, on Quora and Reddit, to track the popularity of new professions.
3. The third option is to use tools to analyze search traffic. So, using Google Trends, you can track the growth in popularity of search queries for specific industries, vacancies, types of work. Google Ads can help you collect data about each request and average cost-per-click (recommended bid) for each word. This will help determine the competitiveness and cost of attracting one user for each niche.

In addition, the popularity of niches and professions can be found in the reports of large job search sites and personnel. This information is not always free, so be prepared to pay from 10 to 100 dollars for one report (depending on the source and amount of information).

2. Select a site type and business model

Bulletin boards. The easiest option for the portal, helping with the search for work and staff. We need to create a website where employers and job seekers will be able to place ads and communicate with each other through internal chat or external services. It is relatively simple, cheap and fast. Most market leaders started with this option, and as they grew in popularity, they got new features and capabilities.

Examples:

1. A site for searching any job and any employee. Search by company, job title, keyword, type of employment and location.
2. One of the oldest sites working since 1995. In 2008 was the largest in the United States. Has many partners and regular users (employing companies).
3. A project where you can find advertisements for full-time, internship and volunteer positions in the non-profit sector.
4. Non-public announcements about job search and hiring people for leadership positions.

Aggregator sites. They collect ads on one job or employees from multiple sources on one site, allow you to go to the source site, subscribe to new ads and much more. The simplest aggregators collect information from open sources using special search algorithms. Such data quite often has problems with relevance. More complex projects integrated with bulletin boards.

Examples:

1. One of the first aggregator sites that has been operating since 2004. Represented in 19 countries and is considered one of the largest in the world.
2. CrunchBoard and Smashing Jobs help with job search and software development staff.
3. Collects information on 58,000 sites, available in 50 countries, supports 19 languages.
4. Oilwork — oil-oriented website.

Concierge service. Sites that help jobseekers fill out resumes, LinkedIn accounts, cover letters, and application submissions. Moreover, such sites work both with individuals and with educational institutions, ensuring that their graduates receive invitations to at least one interview. Some of these sites also help employers with screening candidates and job interviews.

Examples:

1. A network that brings together 1,000 professional writers and various industry professionals. Here they will help to write a resume, conduct interview training and direct them to relevant continuing education courses or change of specialization.
2. com. They will help with resumes, cover letters and page optimization on LinkedIn. Each service is paid separately (package).
3. LinkedIn ProFinder. The service will pick out one or several professionals who will help create a resume customized for a specific industry, company and / or vacancy.

Career Portals. Information and / or training sites that provide useful information to help you find a job. This information may include a library of articles, courses and trainings, webinars, podcasts, and videos. In addition, such portals can collect industry news and provide a catalog of job openings.

Examples:

1. Providing quality information on skills development, human resources, education, training and related things. The project has five sites: Skills Portal, Careers Portal, Jobs Portal, HR Portal and Skills Universe.
2. Online service for training and mentoring students, helping to find a job or internship in the United States.

Professional Social Network. Business-oriented online communities. In fact, these are the same social networks, only users do not share their thoughts, private photos and videos, but professional experience, business contacts, cases, etc.

Examples:

1. A social network with 400 million registered users from 200 countries that work in more than 150 sectors of the global economy. This is the most successful project of its kind.
2. AngelList connects startups (and their teams) with investors.
3. Creative Oriented Network.
4. LinkedIn for Germany.

3. Decide on the functionality and monetization

The key elements for most job search and staff sites are:

1. Appearance of a web portal that includes UI / UX design with CSS 2.0 / XHTML and SEO.
2. Typical or specialized templates for creating ads tailored for specific industries and / or professions. It should be possible to close the announcement (send to the archive).
3. Directory of vacancies. A search system with which employers will place ads, and applicants will search for vacancies using keywords, filters, categories and taking into account the location of the applicant or employer.
4. The panel of the applicant. Functions that will allow job seekers to register and set up a personal page where you can create a resume (portfolio), send messages and view the history of events.
5. Online resume. A separate page where applicants can create a resume indicating key information about education, professional skills, experience, preferences, attended trainings / courses and more. It should also be possible to upload a resume and send it by email.
6. Application for employment. When the applicant finds a suitable advertisement for the search for personnel, he should be able to create an application by writing a few paragraphs of text and attaching an online resume.
7. The employer panel. Registration of the employer (preferably with the obligatory confirmation of the administrators of your portal), creation of advertisements for the search for personnel and a public page with key information about the company.
8. Manager of the employer. View applicants who have responded to ads, with the possibility of grouping them by level of education, work experience, skills, location and more. There should also be a function of communication and approval / rejection of the application sent by the applicant.
9. Payment services. Integration with payment gateways through the API and / or utility payment system, which will allow you to accept financial payments from users for advertising, promotion of their ads and other services. In addition, integration with payment services will make it possible to become intermediaries in financial settlements between platform users.
10. Online messaging. Built-in messenger that will allow employers and job seekers to communicate in real time. It is advisable to integrate the function of notification of new messages via e-mail, Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook or in another way.
11. Admin panel. A personal account where the administrator will be able to customize the site, manage content, track and edit ads and communicate with users.

In addition, you need to decide on how to monetize the site:

1. Advertising of third-party resources and promotion of individual ads: first places in the listing, special design decisions, fields with additional information, a place in the listing of recommendations, and more.
2. Fee for individual services: assistance in the preparation of resumes and cover letters, automatic completion of applications for the selected category, etc.
3. Subscription to new vacancies for the selected category, profession, keyword. You can also take money for subscribing to the newsletter of information content: articles, audio and video to help you find a job.
4. One-click job posting service. Placement of job or personnel search ads on several resources at once, for example on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Monster or on niche StackOverFlow and GitHub.

4. Choose a development approach

Ready solutions. Content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla, WordPress and Drupal will allow you to quickly and for a relatively small amount create a job portal using template themes. Moreover, their use does not require programming and / or web design skills, just select the appropriate topic and configure it for yourself.

Features of ready solutions:

1. Accessibility: most themes and plugins for creating job search sites are either free or cost around $ 100.
2. Flexibility: developers have created a lot of plugins for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, which will allow you to customize the site for yourself, improve the design and add features that were not originally included in the theme.

SaaS- solutions. In this model, you do not create an online service, but connect to it via the Internet for a fixed monthly / annual fee. It is even faster and easier, but the services created in this way are difficult to make unique. Especially in terms of functionality.

Features of SaaS Solutions:

1. Simplicity: you don’t need to do coding, hosting and testing.
2. Support and updates: SaaS provider is responsible for these things, which frees up labor and saves a significant amount.

Custom development. Attracting a development company will require more time and money, but this approach will allow you to create original functions and design, which is critical for highly specific niches.

Custom Development Features:

1. Reliability: individual development will provide greater protection for your site from unwanted problems associated with both errors in the code and protection against unauthorized access.
2. Uniqueness: only development from scratch will create a unique design focused on a specific target audience and niche, which will give greater conversion and user engagement.

5. Fill the site with content

According to the book «Essentials Guide to Launching Your Job Board», your job site will only start making a profit after you receive 5,000-1,000,000 unique visits per month. This is the minimum threshold that will allow you to profit from advertising and / or introduce a fee for employers to place their ads.

To achieve this indicator in an acceptable time frame, you need to start marketing advertising in advance, and also think about where to get the first ads about finding personnel, if this is a message board. The procedure here will be as follows:

1. Once you have decided on a niche, immediately create the appropriate information portal and start filling it with quality content. As the examples of Smashing Magazine, Code Pen, Inbound.org, Problogger.net and GitHub show, this is the best way to attract relevant traffic and then redirect it to the message board.
2. After that, create accounts on social networks and actively promote them through advertising and influence marketing. First, direct traffic to the information portal, and after launching the bulletin board - to it.
3. When you have an almost ready site to look for work and personnel, start negotiating with employers. To do this, use the sites of competitors: view ads on personnel search in your niche, contact employers and offer them to place ads on your website.

It is important that at first, the placement of ads was free and that you provide all kinds of support to employers: assistance with registering, creating announcements, filtering out candidates, communicating with them, and more. Thus, you will create a positive user experience and, if successful, create a network effect when your customers recommend your service to their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and partners.