What the UK’s leading job boards don’t want competitors to know

Do you know the story of Robert Johnson? Robert Johnson was a blues guitar legend, who inspired multiple generations of musicians after him. But, he wasn’t always a blues icon. He used to be a mediocre guitarist who was booed off stage for being ‘too noisy.’ Then, he disappeared for almost a year and a half. When he came back and performed live, he was playing blues music like no one had ever done before. How he developed his unique style of guitar playing is still a mystery for many musicians and his fans. Also, he was secretive about his life just as he was about his guitar playing. He used to stop playing or turn around whenever anyone tried to study his technique. In fact, he even recorded his music while facing a wall showing his back to sound engineers.

Similarly, the UK’s leading job boards have gained the top spot in ways that are unknown to most of their competitors.

The UK’s leading job boards have built their reputation through years of consistent effort. However, constant effort is not the only aspect that helps run a successful business. Well-established job boards develop effective strategies and utilize specific tools to deliver a top-notch experience for employers as well as candidates. However, emerging job boards may not be aware of the techniques used by job board industry giants. This article explores how the UK’s leading job boards function and how they manage to stay at the top. You can apply their techniques to develop a platform that attracts job seekers and recruiters as well as generates high revenue.

Table of Contents

How leading job board giants design their platform

The UK’s leading job boards know that their website is the face of their business. By following their footsteps, you need to ensure that your website is visually appealing as well as intuitive. Check out the websites of your competitors to see how they have designed their layout and various UI elements. But, you must avoid creating a replica of your competitor’s website and use it only as a source of inspiration. Observing competitor websites can be a great starting point for you in website development. Also, collaborate with an experienced website developer to understand the various technicalities involved in job board website development.

While developing your job board platform, pay attention to various design elements. For starters, ensure that the layout is easy-to-understand and attractive. Also, be mindful of your color scheme and select colors that are suitable for your color-blind audience. While designing navigation menus and different sections in your platform, ensure that they are easily accessible. Navigating to crucial sections using too many clicks can be inconvenient for your end-users as stated by the Principle of Least Effort. The Principle of Least Effort states that humans prefer to get a job done using the least possible amount of effort. Along with these measures, make sure that your website is interactive and consistent across different sections and create pages for including content such as blogs and newsletters.

How the UK’s leading job boards update their job data

Despite market uncertainties due to Brexit, the UK’s job market boom managed to add 167,000 jobs in the final quarter of 2018. Also, the employment rate in the UK has maintained a record high at 75.8%. The UK job boom is a great opportunity for job boards to attract more job seekers and employers. However, searching multiple employer websites to gather every available job vacancy can be a tedious task. Also, recruiter websites update their vacancies frequently based on their requirements. And, manually collecting job data from various sources can be time-consuming and error-prone. Hence, leading job boards use the best job board software UK has to offer. Job wrapping tools like Propellum offer the most effective solutions for job data aggregation. These solutions include:

Job scraping: Job scraping tools crawl the web to find jobs on various recruiter websites and other job sites using advanced algorithms. These tools obtain relevant job data and the URLs for original job vacancies. All of the collected job data is stored in a centralized database. In this manner, job scraping tools help you aggregate all available jobs and develop a diverse job database.
Job data optimization: After collecting large volumes of available jobs, you may observe that several employers use different formats for storing critical job information. Therefore, the collected job data needs to be stored in a standardized format to ensure that job searching and job posting can be effortless. For this purpose, the UK’s leading job boards utilize job data optimization. With job data optimization, you can categorize and format job data according to job title, job ID, job description, geographical location, and many more.

Job wrapping tools like Propellum automate job scraping and job data optimization procedures. Hence, leading job boards use some of the best job board software UK has to offer.

How successful job boards offer a user-friendly experience

The UK’s leading job boards consistently offer a user-friendly experience for job seekers as well as employers. To offer an engaging and user-friendly experience, job board giants incorporate the following features:

Job feed categorization: Since the UK’s leading job boards have a large volume of job vacancies, they utilize job feed categorization to create a convenient job searching experience. Job feed categorization organizes various jobs into specific categories such as job title, job description, and location. To automate this process, you can use premium job wrapping solutions such as Propellum.
Resume builder: Resume builder can help freshers as well as experienced candidates in creating their resume. You can include multiple templates in the resume builder to help job seekers develop visually appealing and well-structured resumes for different types of professions.
Multiple resumes: Some candidates may be looking for professional opportunities in different industries. For instance, a medical graduate may be interested in journalism. And hence, they may look for jobs in medicine as well as journalism. Such job seekers can create multiple resumes for different job roles and apply for opportunities that they prefer the most.
Job alerts: The UK’s leading job boards offer job alerts for job seekers. Similarly, you can allow candidates to create custom job alerts. Such job alerts can notify candidates about available job vacancies via email.
Resume scanner: Resume scanning can help employers select the right talent for their organization. For this purpose, resume scanners can analyze resumes of all candidates, who have applied for a specific position and pick out the most suitable resumes for the employers. With the help of a resume scanner, recruiters can avoid the tedious task of going through multiple irrelevant resumes.

Incorporating these features will help your job board become more functional and hence more valuable by offering a great user experience.

How your job board can be one of the big players

To create a spot for yourself among the UK’s leading job boards, only following their footsteps won’t be enough. You’ll need to offer something more and differentiate your brand from your competitors. For this purpose, you can focus on developing a personalized job board for candidates and offer them other core functionalities. To develop a personalized job board, you can utilize modern technologies such as machine learning. Machine learning models can be trained using each candidate’s preferences such as the job description, location, and expected CTC. Based on the collected data, machine learning models can recommend relevant jobs to job seekers. Due to machine learning, candidates can avoid spending hours looking for irrelevant job vacancies. Also, machine learning models constantly learn by collecting new data to deliver even more fine-tuned recommendations.

Along with the above core functionalities and additional features, the UK’s leading job boards take additional measures for attracting traffic and gaining a competitive advantage. One of the most effective ways to attract more traffic is by creating an online forum. Several niche job boards create an online forum, where users can discuss various intricacies of a specific industry. You can create a similar forum for your selected niche or create multiple online forums in case you run a generic job board. Such online forums can enable you to develop a loyal community of users. An online forum can help you gain popularity among users, establish authority in the job board market, and become a standalone platform for job seekers and recruiters. However, this is just one of the many ways to do so. The UK’s leading job boards also use marketing strategies such as content marketing and social media marketing. By utilizing the best job board technology and marketing strategy, you can earn a spot among the UK’s leading job boards.