The job market is big business, with global companies making big money by listings vacancies, providing recruitment tools and connecting employers and employees.
If you’ve got an interest in recruitment then it’s only natural to want to grab a piece of that pie – but it can be difficult to know where to start.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, though. There are several income streams that you can easily develop if you want to create your own job board. We’ve explained them here, and shown you exactly how to start your own lucrative job search site.
If you want job board inspiration, here’s our pick of the best white label job board software providers – and here are the biggest and best job boards around for 2022.
How to create your own job search site
The first step to making big money with your own job search site is to build the site itself. The first part of that should be figuring out your market and your niche – spend some time doing the research to figure out what industries or locations you’d like to serve. When so many job sites cover the entire market, you’ll often find more success if you concentrate on specialist areas.
Once you’ve figured out your niche, you should come up with a name and register the domain. Make sure it’s a great host that can handle the high levels of traffic you’ll hopefully experience.
When that’s done, it’s time to build the site. If you’ve got a high level of technical knowledge, then you can use a platform like WordPress to build your own site almost from the ground up. That’s difficult and time-consuming, though.
Happily, there are plenty of WordPress plugins, like JobHive, that can help you create and populate a job site with no coding knowledge. You could also use a white-label provider, like ZipRecruiter or MatchWork, which combine their own huge job databases with your own design, branding and features – albeit at a cost.
How to make money from companies
Now you’ve got your site up and running, it’s time to start making money. If you run a job board, your biggest source of revenue will be the companies that want to use your site and list their jobs on your board.
The key method for monetizing a job board is to charge companies to post their job listings. This is the most common option, and it’s a great choice if you get loads of traffic or operate in a niche market. You can typically charge more if you have a large audience or if you run a specialist site, as businesses will pay to reach loads of candidates or industry specialists.
You don’t just have to rely on companies paying to post individual job listings, either. You can easily create bulk packages that allow companies to pay a monthly fee to post a certain number of vacancies or to ensure that their listings stay online for greater periods of time. That’s a key option if you want to attract large companies that are always recruiting.
Plenty of businesses will also pay extra to boost their job vacancies in your search results and listings – so that’s another obvious revenue stream. Others will pay to have vacancies automatically posted to social media.
Companies often want to be proactive in recruitment, too, so job boards also charge them for access to their resume databases. This allows businesses to find and approach likely candidates, and it’s another way that a job board can make money from firms eager to find new staff.
How to make money from job seekers
Most of any job board’s revenue comes from the businesses that are listing vacancies on your site – but you can make cash from job seekers, too.
There are some situations where you’ll be able to charge job seekers for viewing vacancies. If you operate in a niche market then specialists will often be willing to pay to access those unique listings, and having this paywall can help your site gain a reputation for applicants who are serious about their careers. You can also charge if you host exclusive job listings that you people won’t be able to see anywhere else.
In specialist or executive-level markets, you can also charge job seekers to feature their resumes in prominent positions – a good way to make cash from particularly ambitious clients.
It’s also possible to make extra cash from resumes by offering a resume-writing service for job-seekers. Unless you can provide this service yourself, you’ll have to split the income between your own site and a third-party company that provides the service, but it’s important to have multiple income streams and this is another that can be added to any decent job board.
People will also pay for cover-letting writing and resume evaluations, and you’ll enhance your website’s reputation if you add these extra features – people will see your site as a destination for career help rather than just a list of vacancies.
Extra income streams
Most job revenue comes from companies paying to post vacancies, but there are a host of other options for generating some extra cash.
You can sell advertising space to companies if you generate the sort of traffic that will attract their attention, and you can also use Google AdSense if you’d like an easier way to earn money from advertising. Bear in mind, though, that you need loads of traffic to earn money from ads, and that having too much advertising can harm your site’s design and reputation.
Job boards can also make some extra cash if they’re willing to backfill their listings with vacancies that are available elsewhere. If you backfill with vacancies from third-party job boards like ZipRecruiter and Indeed, the adverts won’t actually appear natively on your site – but if a job-hunter clicks through to the advert on the native site, you’ll get paid some commission.
The final extra income stream to consider should be courses and events. You can make plenty of cash if you charge users for educational resources if you work with professional instructors, and online and in-person seminars and conferences can be a money-spinner with recruiters and job seekers if you’ve got a large enough audience that trusts your brand.
