Note: The Doc­tor is now in week 3 (!) of no inter­net or phone due to the dere­cho. Trust me, the Mid­west is hurt­ing – thou­sands still with­out pow­er. You can help by donat­ing here. Here is a post from last year that is always rel­e­vant – enjoy!

Call­ing your­self the Job­Board­Doc­tor means that peo­ple with prob­lems are going to call you. And that’s great – I love prob­lems and prob­lem-solv­ing! But about once a month, I get a call from some­one who has decid­ed to start a job board or recruit­ing site, and they have a very sad sto­ry indeed.

“Hey Doc,” they say. “I just spent $50,000 with a devel­op­er who promised to build me a great job site.”

I wince, because I know what’s com­ing.

“The site sucks. It does­n’t work. I need help!”

I think – but don’t usu­al­ly say – ‘You should have called me before you spent the mon­ey’.

Why?

Because: a) that $50,000 isn’t com­ing back; b) most devel­op­ers think they can build a job board – but can’t; and c) there was almost cer­tain­ly a bet­ter, cheap­er option.

There are lit­er­al­ly dozens of job board soft­ware ven­dors, pro­vid­ing options at a range of price points, and they all have an advan­tage that the $50K devel­op­er does­n’t have: they’ve built many iter­a­tions of job boards. They’ve strug­gled with the typ­i­cal issues that affect job boards. They know what fea­tures to offer – or not. Their busi­ness is tied up in the cre­ation and sup­port of job boards – unlike the $50K devel­op­er, who is prob­a­bly now work­ing on a jan­i­to­r­i­al sup­ply site.

And…they will prob­a­bly be cheap­er than $50K.

Now, to be clear, job board soft­ware ven­dors aren’t the per­fect solu­tion for every­one. Maybe you have a spe­cial fea­ture that is new and unre­lat­ed to any­thing that came before it. Maybe you have a crack tech team that’s built job boards before (in which case, the above sad con­ver­sa­tion would not have occurred!). And – as always – buy­er beware. As I tell my clients, ‘All soft­ware is flawed – you just have to find the plat­form with flaws you don’t care about.’

But for most star­tups, there is a job board soft­ware plat­form that will fit their needs. It won’t be per­fect, and it prob­a­bly won’t be for­ev­er – but it will get your busi­ness start­ed. And that’s what mat­ters.

So do your­self a favor. Check out some of the many soft­ware ven­dors out there before you fork out $50K (or $100K or more!) to a devel­op­er.

You can still call me. But let’s talk about how you can make more mon­ey with your func­tion­ing job board site!

PS: Yes, there are ads for job board soft­ware on this site. Yes, they send me mon­ey. But no, that does­n’t have any bear­ing on the above – I have been mak­ing the rec­om­men­da­tion on star­tups using job board soft­ware since day 1 of this con­sul­tan­cy – long before I had ads. It just makes sense!

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