If you’ve been following our blogs recently, you’d have a fair idea of how competitive the job board business is becoming. Adding to the fierceness of the competition is the high rising wave of job aggregators. Job aggregator sites are gaining popularity due to the convenience they offer to candidates looking for jobs. The site offers job seekers with a single interface that offers the widest and most niche job search experience possible, doing away with the need to visit different job sites. And going by the kind of revenue job aggregator sites have been making, going forward, job boards may just have to take the aggregator route to stay relevant. This means job boards are going to need a job feed service that gathers jobs from all over the internet for them.
Turning your job board into a job aggregator will not only present higher growth opportunities but also long-term sustainability. A job board will not only attract more traffic but will also get to make money on the side with some projects around advertising. The higher the traffic on a job board, the more interested are employers in advertising on the board. However, transitioning into a job aggregator from a job board without the right job aggregation tools and software will only end up giving sub-optimal results. You’ll end up being nothing but a glorified job search engine, displaying tons of jobs filled with inconsistent and low-quality information. The remainder of this article, therefore, helps you understand what it takes to go from a job board to a job aggregator successfully.
Gathering data comprehensively
The biggest advantage a job aggregator has over job boards is the sheer volume of jobs that the former can gather. Gathering jobs from every source available online creates a one-stop job repository that can be conveniently and quickly accessed by job seekers. To make this possible, job aggregators use job crawling tools that automatically search for job postings from various employer and recruiter sites.
What empowers such comprehensive job data gathering are premium job feed tools. These tools can handle large volumes of data and can effortlessly scour the Internet and employer sites for job postings. For instance, Propellum’s job feed service can process millions of jobs feeds per minute. Such premium job feed services use sophisticated algorithms to identify and extract job data from various possible sources, regardless of the complexity involved. Tools like Propellum capture jobs that an ordinary job board fails to, giving job aggregators a competitive edge.
Job feed tools can be programmed to make them highly selective regarding the kind of jobs they should or shouldn’t pick up. For instance, a job aggregator that’s interested in listing jobs postings in New York only can use a job feed tool that has its algorithm tweaked accordingly. All postings on the job aggregator site will, in this case, come to focus on the keyword ‘New York,’ regardless of the industry or job type.
Balancing quantity with quality
Although job aggregators trump job boards when it comes to quantity, job boards certainly have an advantage when it comes to quality. The information provided by job boards is more qualitatively consistent than that provided by their counterparts. This is because job boards source jobs from a limited list of employers who provide adequate and relevant information. However, when gathering a large number of jobs, job boards may fail to focus on the quality of job postings. Merely increasing the number of jobs and ignoring job data quality will only drag your job board into obscurity among other job search engines. To truly differentiate your job board as an aggregator, you will need to furnish candidates with the hottest and most sought-after job postings.
Using premium job feed services allows job aggregators to find the perfect balance between the quality and quantity of job data. An intelligent job feed service searches not just for jobs but also for all other related an relevant details for the job. This ensures that the job seekers visiting the job aggregator site get all the information they need before applying.
Standardizing your content
The most preferred job portals, be it job boards or aggregators, are the ones that offer job seekers an easily navigable and intuitive user interface. This means displaying jobs in a manner that is convenient for job seekers to browse through. Creating such a standard, uniform, user interface requires consistency at the back-end of a job aggregator site. A major drawback of collecting data from a myriad of sources is that it leads to inconsistent formats. Different career sites have different job posting formats. Standardization gives a data pool, with varying formats, a consistent look and feel throughout a job aggregator site. Achieving this manually can be a real hassle, involving a lot of effort and time over a non-core activity for your business. This problem can be easily solved using automated job feed services.
Job feed services can do all the heavy lifting for job aggregators, taking care of the end-to-end aggregation process. In addition to collecting and filtering job data, automated job feeds can also fit the data into a standard format. This means there is no need for manual data entry at any step of the process. Using job feed services ensures your job aggregator site is regularly updated with the latest jobs in the most user-friendly format possible. This goes a long way in boosting traffic and attracting more job seekers as well as employers.
Scaling up effortlessly
Usually, scaling up business operations requires a lot of planning, research, and resources. Upscaling from a traditional job board to job aggregating, which deals with more data, can be a sensitive affair. The transition may disrupt the operations if there isn’t enough preparation and planning involved. Making the shift may also involve high set-up and implementation costs, pushing up the existing cost overheads. However, regardless of how risky it may seem, making the shift to job aggregation is necessary to stay relevant and competitive. An effortless transition can be achieved with automated job feed services.
Automating your job aggregation process will free up your time and resources, which can be invested in the more strategic activities. Using premium job feed services like that of Propellum ensures end-to-end job data management, with no involvement from your end.
Propellum’s team of experts ensure that your job board gets a customized, state-of-the-art, job aggregation solution. This will give you a solid groundwork for plotting your future business goals, without having to worry about data management.
