Have you ever wondered how life is like for the top 1%? People in the top 1% like Jeff Bezos have lavish mansions, private jets, and successful careers. However, reaching the top is not a cakewalk. Similarly, in nature, there are dominance hierarchies in different species. Dominance hierarchy is a social structure in many species, where some individual species have dominance over others and have greater access to shelter, food, and mates. To be at the top, animals have to battle with others who are trying to claim the top spot.
Similarly, job boards must constantly compete with multiple other job boards to rise above them and maintain their position at the top.
Well-established job boards have spent years building their reputation in the industry and developing a profitable business. These job boards use effective strategies to incorporate high-end features such as job aggregation, job feed categorization, job search engine, and personalization. Along with these features, job boards utilize marketing strategies to attract candidates and recruiters to their platform. Additionally, successful job boards are always aware of the emerging market trends, helping them adapt to industry changes and find opportunities for business growth.
Analyzing the opportunities and challenges
The US job market has shown remarkable potential in the past few years. According to statistics, 196,000 new jobs were added in March 2019. Also, the unemployment rate is steady at 3.8% and the wage growth is substantial at a rate of 3.2%. To sum up, these statistics indicate that the job market in the US is in a good place. Candidates and recruiters have multiple opportunities for professional growth due to the favorable job market. Likewise, job boards also have greater chances of attracting and engaging with candidates and recruiters.
According to a research, global job board revenue has increased by 9% and is estimated to be worth US$12.4 billion. These figures will be affected by the current job market trends in the US. By exploiting the current job market conditions, job boards may be capable of increasing their revenue. Looking at such possibilities, job boards are competing to be the go-to job board for candidates as well as recruiters. For this purpose, job boards are making their platforms smarter and offering various types of services such as resume builders and job vacancy bookmarking to stand out from their competitors. Therefore, every job board, especially the emerging ones, must prepare for the inevitable competitive atmosphere in the job board market.
Identifying the competitors
To establish a competitive business, you first need to identify your competitors. Whether you are running a niche or a generic job board, you will have competitors who may be running a more profitable business. Hence, understanding and analyzing your competitors and how they run their businesses are crucial for running a successful job board. For this purpose, you can consider the steps given below:
- Build a list of competitors using Google search, online resources, and customer surveys. In customer surveys, you can ask your audience questions such as:
- Which job board features do they like?
- Which issues do they face on your platform?
- If they switch to another job board, which job board would they pick? Why?
- Analyze how much traffic your competitors draw to their platform. For this purpose, you can view social media mentions of your competitors using social media monitoring tools. Such tools can help you understand how popular your competitors are on social networks. Also, you can take a look at the website visibility statistics to figure how your competitors are ranked on search engine results pages. There are multiple online SEO tools that can help you view such information along with monthly visitors, traffic share, and audience demographics.
Collecting every job available
Since there are hundreds of thousands of available jobs in the market, collecting all these jobs can be a significant challenge. Recruiter websites regularly update job vacancies based on their availability and job boards need to keep track of such updates. Failing to do so, job boards may be unable to post all available job vacancies or post outdated jobs on their job feed. Such issues make the job seeking experience inconvenient for the candidates. Hence, you must focus on aggregating every available job on your job board.
For acquiring all available jobs, you can integrate a job aggregator API into your job board platform. By integrating a job aggregator API, you can collect job data from multiple employer websites and store them in a single database. After collecting several jobs, you might notice that multiple employers use different standards and formats for their job data. Hence, ensuring that all the collected job data is stored in a standardized format is a necessity. For this purpose, you can use job data optimization. In job data optimization, you can categorize all the collected job data based on job ID, job title, job location, job description, required work experience, and CTC. Using these techniques, you can ensure that your job board offers all types of jobs, which can help in attracting candidates to your platform.
You can carry out job aggregation and job data optimization manually by hiring a dedicated team. However, this approach can be time-consuming, inefficient, expensive, and error-prone. Hence, utilizing a premium job wrapping tool like Propellum is the most feasible solution. Propellum performs job data aggregation, optimization, job feed categorization, and job posting automatically, making it an essential tool for every job board.
Integrating a job search engine
After collecting all available job vacancies using job aggregator API, your job board will be capable of posting multiple jobs on the platform. But, looking for relevant jobs among several job postings can be tedious for job seekers. To address this issue, you can incorporate a job search engine in your job board. With a job search engine, job seekers can find jobs that cater to their preferences. In the job search engine, you can include specific parameters such as location, CTC, work experience, industry preferences, and job roles. By selecting the required parameters, you can ensure that job seekers are always presented with relevant vacancies. For example, a candidate who is looking to work as a database administrator in the finance sector at locations such as San Francisco and New York can select the necessary parameters to view relevant job opportunities.
Including additional features
Along with core functionality, you can offer additional features in your job board to differentiate yourself from the competitors. Such features can also help you enhance the end-user experience for job seekers and employers. You can consider adding the following features to your job board:
- CV search: CV search can help employers find a specific CV using a keyword search system that scans through every candidate’s profile and displays relevant results.
- Intelligent matching: This feature can help recruiters select talented candidates by scanning through multiple resumes and finding the most suitable candidates. In this manner, recruiters can avoid going through numerous irrelevant resumes.
- Job alerts: Job seekers may look for different types of work opportunities based on their skill set and qualification. For instance, a candidate who is graduated in Computer Science and can write blogs may look for jobs as an engineer as well as a content writer. Such candidates can set up job alerts for multiple types of jobs to receive notifications about various professional opportunities.
Leveraging job aggregator API, job optimization, and a job search engine can help you draw more traffic onto your platform. However, measuring the impact of these core functionalities on your job board is equally essential. For this purpose, you can use the analytics offered by premium job wrapping solutions like Propellum. Propellum provides detailed statistics regarding jobs per job slot, average days for which a job was posted, job industry, job title, and many others. Such analytics will help you understand your audience and emerging job trends. With the help of analytics, you can evaluate the performance of your job board in a competitive market and plan for achieving all your business goals.
