You want to make your job board bet­ter, right? Even if you don’t call it a job board? Even if you’re an old-timer? Even if you start­ed your job board yes­ter­day?

Well, sure. Of course.

But the rub is, how? How do you make your job board bet­ter? Where do you start? Fun­ny you should ask, because the Doc­tor has some sug­ges­tions!

1. Build it into your month­ly, quar­ter­ly, and year­ly plans. Hav­ing the desire to make your job board bet­ter is essen­tial, of course – the burn­ing need to improve what you offer your can­di­dates and employ­ers. But want­i­ng to do some­thing is dif­fer­ent from actu­al­ly doing it. So the first step is to artic­u­late what you will ana­lyze or what you will change – and build it into your dai­ly, week­ly, and month­ly work. Make those analy­ses and changes as much a part of your rou­tine as prospect­ing for new sales, acquir­ing more traf­fic, and think­ing about new ser­vices. Remem­ber, too, that data is your friend – if you take a data-dri­ven approach to iden­ti­fy­ing what you should change or add, your chances for suc­cess increase.
2. Invest in tech. As a per­son that looks at hun­dreds of job boards and recruit­ing plat­forms in almost every major mar­ket across the globe, I can tell you that once the typ­i­cal job board becomes estab­lished, they tend to lose inter­est in their tech. Instead, they focus on sales and rev­enue and mar­gin. The result? Most job boards look like they’re rely­ing on tech from the 2000s – or worse. New tech is not the only answer – but it is usu­al­ly part of the solu­tion. Take a hard look at your site from a can­di­date’s view­point. Are you mak­ing their life bet­ter – or worse? Are you think­ing like a boomer – or Gen Z? Does your mobile inter­face feel like you’re moored on a desk­top? These are all just UI issues, of course. Dig deep­er and don’t be scared when you find that your data is not that secure – or that your search tech­nol­o­gy brings back mem­o­ries of Netscape. In order to make your job board bet­ter, you have to always keep in mind that the land­scape is always chang­ing in sub­tle ways, and that invest­ing in your tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture will help you han­dle these changes. Don’t wake up in 2024 with a 2001 plat­form!
3. Keep your focus on the can­di­date: Time can be your ene­my when run­ning a busi­ness. When you start, you know exact­ly what you want to do, and you fight hard to achieve your goals. But once you reach those goals…you set­tle into rou­tine. You lose focus. And the one thing that a job board or recruit­ing plat­form can nev­er do is lose focus of the can­di­date. Your can­di­date audi­ence is why employ­ers want to use your ser­vices. Nev­er for­get that! With­out can­di­dates, your busi­ness is…nothing. Whether you’re a tra­di­tion­al job board, a pro­gram­mat­ic net­work, an aggre­ga­tor, a career hub, or some oth­er hybrid mod­el, the key to your suc­cess is the can­di­date. So dig deep into the way your can­di­dates think, act, and look for their next job. If your can­di­dates move to Tik­Tok – then get ready to catch their atten­tion there. If your can­di­dates jet­ti­son their resumes – help them out with a pro­file sys­tem. In order to make your job board bet­ter, your can­di­dates can nev­er be abstract – they should be tan­gi­ble and real, clear and care­ful­ly detailed.

So there you go – a com­plete­ly non-exhaus­tive list of some ways to make your job board bet­ter. What are yours?

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