As a job board owner, your primary purpose is to serve as a medium for recruiters and job seekers to connect with each other and fulfill their needs. To do so, you should build a platform that attracts a large number of job seekers by having a large collection of jobs. If you can build a base of visitors that is big enough, your job board will, in turn, bring in more employers looking to hire from this pool of talent. And if they find that your job board helps them find new recruits easily, they may consider choosing you as their preferred channel for hiring new talent. They will want to partner with you and make your job board site the exclusive outlet for advertising their jobs.
That will allow you to attract even greater job-seeker traffic, which will give recruiters an even broader pool to find the right talent. And before you know it, you will have set in motion a growth cycle that leads your job board to the top of the industry — in terms of popularity, preference, as well as profitability. But it all starts with attracting a large volume of job-seeker traffic in the first place. And to do that you’ll need to gather more job postings than most job boards. And to do that, you’ll have to use tools that will automate the process of aggregating jobs through a process known as job spidering.
Job spidering helps build job databases
Job spidering, or the process of gathering jobs using web spidering, i.e., automatically gathering specific information from across the internet, is a method that is popularly used by job boards to gather job postings. Job spidering is achieved using a spider bot or a web crawler. A crawler is a software tool that automatically “crawls” through different websites looking for data that it is programmed to find. So, job spidering tools or job crawlers look specifically for job data from the internet. And the efficacy of these web spiders is what determines the quantity of job data gathered and posted on a job board. Thus, in a way, it decides whether the job board is capable of attracting large numbers of job-seekers or not through the job data it collects.
The most effective job spidering tools can process large volumes of data to identify job postings and identify vacancies that are valid and authentic. However, due to the ever-growing vastness of the volume of data on the internet, job spidering tools are usually unable to gather all the possible jobs that are available. Thus, for a job board to perform better than its competitors, it must use job crawlers that can cover the most distance on the web. This will enable the crawler to gather more job postings than those collected by competing job boards’ tools. The job spidering tool must be able to process large volumes of information to identify jobs, regardless of how obscure its location on the internet may be. It must also be smart enough to identify job information posted in unconventional formats, in order to populate your job board with jobs that competitors’ tools couldn’t read.
Being able to find and aggregate more jobs than other job boards, including niche and rare jobs, using intelligent job spidering tools will help job boards garner large numbers of job site visitors. But, if you think that having a smart job crawling tool will be enough to make your job board stand out from the rest, then you’re mistaken. Job spidering is only a part of the entire set of operations that must be performed well for ensuring job board success. All a job spidering tool does is help you build a database of jobs that can be posted onto your job board website.
Job board operation involves more than just building job databases
Nearly every job board nowadays uses job spidering technology to aggregate links into its database of job postings. Thus, having a job crawler is just the bare minimum required to keep up with other job boards. And to exceed these job boards, you will have to look at your job board and its operation from a big-picture perspective. You will realize that operating a job board, in addition to aggregating job postings, involves other steps as well. This includes parsing the necessary accompanying information relevant to the jobs collected and validating the same. It includes cleaning the data and identifying any discrepancies in the information provided. The process is completed by posting the verified job data on the job board in the desired format, complete with all the requisite details.
Doing each of these tasks deliberately with a focus on quality will ensure that job-seekers have an easy time browsing through your job board and finding relevant jobs. Having a large number of jobs gathered using job spidering tools will help job-seekers with a one-stop repository, eliminating the need for them to visit multiple different sites in search of options. Posting jobs that verified and validated for accuracy and relevance will help build trust, and consequently, loyalty, among the user base. This will naturally result in increasing popularity among the job-seeker community. And then, the continued growth in the traffic will help your job board to become the most preferred medium for employers to post their vacancies.
To get to a position where your job board becomes the primary choice for both job-seekers and employers, you will have to have a unified job board solution that handles more than just job spidering. You need a tool that can perform automated job wrapping.
Automated job wrapping builds successful job boards
Job wrapping solutions offer job boards a way to automate job board operations, by taking over every step in the process of posting jobs. This means that all functions — from finding jobs to posting them on job boards to removing invalid and expired jobs — are performed by a single solution.
Automated job wrapping solutions use cutting-edge technology to handle the entire process of job wrapping which includes:
- crawling through job sources
- automatically finding relevant jobs
- extracting vital job details like location, experience, job type, salary, etc.
- verifying the links to employer sites
- validating job data
- posting the job data on the job board
- removing expired and filled positions
These automated tools ensure that the job board owners have the freedom to focus on important functions like marketing and strategy without having to constantly monitor their job boards’ functioning. Thus, job board owners should deploy automated job wrapping solutions like EasyPost by Propellum to have a job board that requires minimal investment of time, money, and other resources. You don’t have to use different tools to perform job spidering, data validation, and job data posting. Once you deploy EasyPost, you can rest assured that your job board will automatically have the highest number of jobs without compromising on data quality.