Indeed is a world-known job board. It used to scan data from other websites and index all job advertisements, i.e. it was an online vacancy aggregator. Now Indeed is a job board, which 200 million users visit monthly, and its database contains 100 million resumes. In this article, we will tell you how to create an Indeed clone – an online platform with identical functionality and similar design – and how much it costs.

A niche of an online job board

Such giants as Indeed, Monster, Hired, Simply, and Glassdoor are dominating the job board market since they’re using the «everything for everybody» approach. They collect loads of information about vacancies, employers, and job seekers from all over the world every second. It’s very difficult for a new project to compete with them directly.

In these circumstances, the best decision is a launch of a niche startup, which will be aimed at meeting the needs of a specific target audience. You should focus your site on a certain professional area; for example, SMM, blockchain, web design, or logistics. If you concentrate on one professional area, you can create more effective design, SEO, and a marketing strategy. Moreover, it will save you money.

You can find a vacant niche with various online tools. For instance, with the help of Google Trends. Just enter terms (keywords) relevant to the niche you’re interested in, select a region, and the service will plot a graph that describes trends of a search for these keywords. You are able to select the «Jobs & Education» category from the filters, which will improve the traffic relevance.

Use Google Trends to search for several niches, the popularity of which is growing. Then start collecting quantitative data with the help of Google keyword planner. The service will show an approximate number of search requests per month and a list of related key requests. Another important piece of information is the average price per click for each keyword.

Use this information to estimate how much the attraction of one client to your website costs. Besides, that’s how you can assess the level of competition in a particular niche: the higher the rate per click is, the more competitive the words are, which in turn provides a higher competition in the niche and vice versa.

Try to look for blogs related to your field and such platforms as Reddit and Quora. You can see useful tips from the specialists on what becomes popular and how they’re searching for jobs/job seekers.

Moreover, before making a final decision about what niche to bet on, you should receive as much information as you can about the current players, which are already in the chosen target market. What is their business model? Who are their clients? How much traffic do they generate? Are they growing? Such information is very helpful in searching for growing, but not so competitive niches.

Here are several tools to track competitors:

• Alexa is a tool that helps to carry out a comprehensive competitor analysis, keyword piercing, link mass analysis, etc. Just enter the URL address of the site and study the given information.
• SimilarWeb — this service helps to find out the competitors’ traffic statistics. It allows determining leading industry players; make you aware of their promotion channels and the like. Information is displayed in the form of graphs and tables with a possibility of the following uploading to the file.
• Ahrefs — this online tool of research of competitors helps to get some idea of competitors’ backlinks, ratings of search systems, the content of competitors’ websites, and other data.
• SemRush — another good tool to monitor competitors as it allows tracking the competitors’ experience, conducting marketing research, analyzing website position in search systems and social media, finding keywords automatically, performing an SEO audit of an online resource, and the like.

Monetization of an Indeed clone

Indeed generates most of its revenue from sponsor lists that work like Google Ads with pay per click. Employers post advertisements about vacancies and pay every time job seekers click on their advertisements. The price usually varies in a range from $0.25 to $1.5 per click. The more they pay, the more noticeable their advertisement is. For example, if your daily budget is $50 and the maximum payment is $1 per click, then you’ll be able to get up to 50 responses per day. When you run out of budget, Indeed stops displaying the ad.

Besides, job seekers on Indeed have a possibility to upload their resumes and get a paid subscription that improves their visibility to potential employers, and therefore, the chance of getting the job. The price is $5/day. You can launch a personal hiring campaign on Indeed that is aimed at well-paid professionals.

Employers can create a company page on the site and it will enable them to demonstrate all vacancies on one page. They can specify the company description, logo, photos, and more on such a page. In addition, this page can be promoted separately from the Indeed website.

Moreover, the platform provides employers with the Indeed Hire service. Platform specialists will find and interview potential candidates and choose the best one of them. After that, the employer should approve the candidate. Therewith the employer pays only after he approves the candidate. If the candidate isn’t fit, the employer doesn’t have to pay.

Of course, the site has targeted advertising — ads, which appear in different places of the Indeed platform. In particular, these ads are placed on the home screen of the mobile app, on the page of vacancy viewing, on the page of recommended vacancies, and on the application page.

When launching your clone, you can use a similar monetization model or come up with your way of getting profit from job boards. You may copy the method that other similar platforms are using like the Monster.com monetization model.

Main features of an online job board

You’ve chosen the desired niche and an optimal monetization model. Now is time to define the most important features, which let both job seekers and employers achieve their goals. We’ll divide the platform functionality into two groups for your convenience.

Functionality for employers:

• Company profile. It gives companies a chance to post key information about their business, specify a scope of activities, post employees’ reviews, show benefits of joining the team and objectives for the short and long term, insert links to the official website and social media profiles.
• Job listings. This feature enables employers to post advertisements on your Indeed clone to hire specialists and specify the following things in them: requirements, responsibilities, working conditions, and additional benefits (for instance, a social package) from the company.
• Employee search. Employers should have the possibility to use an internal search system and filters to look for specialists on your site on their own. Here are filters that you should implement: job title, city, distance (from a candidate to a place of work), experience, professional skills, education level, and additional skills.

Functionality for job seekers:

• Candidate profile. To register an account, you need to enter your email address and password (or use social media profiles), location, and create/upload your resume. After that, job seekers will be able to look for vacancies, send their resumes, and apply them to cover letters as well as communicate with employers on the site.
• Vacancy search. This feature makes it possible for job seekers to use various filters to determine a job request more precisely. For example, they can specify a position, salary level, company size, remote/in-office cooperation, etc.
• Salary comparison. It gives candidates an opportunity to check the level of the rates for the specific position within a country, state, city, or different companies. This is how job seekers can understand what salary they may count on.
• Employers’ profile. It’s about a possibility to view company pages, which contain the basic information about the company, vacancy listing, and reviews from current and former company staff.
• Communication with an employer. This may be text, audio, or video chat.

Additional capabilities of a job board

If you’re planning to launch a clone in a competitive market, then aside from the main features you also should implement some additional ones not to lag behind or to be ahead of competitors. These can be the following:

Salary calculator. Next to the information about a minimum, maximum, and average salary for a specified position, job seekers can also find out what their market value is. The calculator will request data about the position they’re interested in, location, experience, education level, skills, and other things, and then calculate what salary this person may count on.

Help with resume preparation. When developing a clone, you can add a feature of professional resume preparation. This can be an automated service, which is doing everything in a certain pattern, or assistance of a pro, who specializes in such a service. Large job boards usually implement both options, herewith the first one is free and the second one is a premium paid service.

Save and/or hide a job offer. If the candidate likes the position, but he’s not ready to respond to it yet for whatever reason, he can save the advertisement. At the same time, if a job seeker doesn’t want to see a certain advertisement, he can hide it and block all advertisements from that employer.

Different levels of resume confidentiality. Job seekers don’t necessarily want all employers to see their resumes (for example, job seekers often want their current bosses not knowing that they’re looking for a new job). That’s why some sites have several levels of resume confidentiality. Specifically, Monster allows making resumes public, limited, or private. Public resumes are seen by everyone, limited ones hide contact details and current place of work, and private ones are open only to those, whom the job seeker has specified.

Cost of the creation of an Indeed clone

SaaS solutions

Such software vendors as SmartJobBoard, Madgex, Russmedia Job Board, Recooty, and Monster TMS offer cloud job board solutions in one click. You only need to select a template, set the site, and fill the listing with advertisements. The provider takes over everything else. The cost usually depends on the functionality and place on the listing. For instance, on the SmartJobBoard website, you can get a subscription for $299/month for 10 000 advertisements for vacancies and 100 000 for resumes, or for $600/month — 10 0000 advertisements for vacancies and 300 000 for resumes.

Here are the benefits of using SaaS to launch an Indeed clone:

• Specific knowledge and skills are not required. You can forget about hosting, website design development, coding, quality assurance, upgrades, and other technical side aspects of building a job board.
• The relatively affordable price of SaaS solutions. Surely, if you calculate how much this solution costs for several years, the price will be quite high; however, if you need to check concepts and/or how you can launch a ready solution, the price of SaaS will be reasonable.
• Maintenance and support. If you choose this approach to launching your clone, you don’t need to think about bugs, crashes, performance falls, and platform development. The Saas service provider takes these aspects under control.

Drawbacks of SaaS solutions:

• Lack of customization. These solutions make it possible to launch your site based on a template with very little possibilities to change the design, fonts, color scheme. There are only 2-5 options to choose from.
• Limited control. You have almost no leverages to influence the solution provider in what features to add, what prices to set, etc. You are just a regular user.

When SaaS is a good choice:

• If you want to launch a clone in the quickest time possible.
• If you need to launch a relatively small project that doesn’t require custom features with a unique design.

Content management systems

You can also launch an online job board with such CMS as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. These platforms offer templates and various plugins, which will help you create a site in the shortest time and for very little money: a template costs $0-500, plugins — $0-50 per month, hosting — $10-50 per month.

Benefits of CMS:

• More freedom for customization. Due to modern themes (or theme builders), you can customize most of the platform design elements, whereas plugins allow integrating various additional features.
• A lot of templates and plugins. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of them on WordPress. Due to that, you can always find a suitable option even among free templates and plugins.

Drawbacks of CMS:

• Minimum technical skills are required. Initially, you will have no problems with starting a platform even if you do not have any technical knowledge. Nevertheless, if you want to delve into settings, you’ll need minimum coding skills and programming skills.
• Low cost. The majority of them are either free or worth $10-500. Sometimes, there’s an option of a monthly subscription for $10-50.

When CMS are a good option:

• If you need to launch a site in the shortest term possible (day or two).
• If your budget is limited to the enthusiasm and $50.

Custom software development

Finally, you can entrust your Indeed clone to a development company or a marketing agency, which specializes in these projects. The cost depends on the project complexity and development company location ($10-100 thous.) You can read more about the cost of website creation from scratch in this article: «Cost of building an e-commerce startup».

Benefits of development of an Indeed clone from scratch:

• High scalability. Custom development provides you with the possibility to build an architecture, which allows scaling your project up depending on requirements and platform load.
• Customized UX / UI. Only custom development enables you to build a website with original features and a unique design that is tailored to a specific target audience (niche). You will create a unique user interface valuable for both employers and job seekers.

Drawbacks of development from scratch:

• Time and pricing. Usually, the creation of a job board from scratch requires 3 to 6 months and $10 to $100 thous.

When development from scratch is a good choice:

• If you’re betting on the long term. When creating a website from scratch you have to pay for its development whereas in the case of using SaaS you have to pay continuously. CMS solution will have to be customized over time or you’ll have to create a new site from scratch.
• If you’re planning to work in a highly competitive market. Users will just ignore one-size-fits-all solutions.

Indeed Website Clone – How to Create a Job Board like Indeed? key takeaways:

#1. A niche of an online job board
#2. Monetization of an Indeed clone
#3. Main features of an online job board
#4. Additional capabilities of a job board
#5. Cost of the creation of an Indeed clone
#6. SaaS solutions
#7. Content management systems
#8. Custom software development