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:
- 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.).
- 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.
- 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:
- A site for searching any job and any employee. Search by company, job title, keyword, type of employment and location.
- 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).
- A project where you can find advertisements for full-time, internship and volunteer positions in the non-profit sector.
- 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:
- 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.
- CrunchBoard and Smashing Jobs help with job search and software development staff.
- Collects information on 58,000 sites, available in 50 countries, supports 19 languages.
- 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.