Whats a private job board you ask? Well Railyo is. According to their site:

Railyo is a global network of Ruby On Rails Developers. It’s a private network, all the members are handpicked (based on their portfolio/projects/skills/..) to ensure the quality of the network.

From a design perspective there are almost no graphics on this site. And thats ok because they use colors and text very well. Its amazing what you can do with a well planned page layout using CSS and Railyo offers a glimpse of that. The homepage tells you exactly what they do and I like the 2 column layout that explains why they are different than other tech job boards and freelance sites. Stating why you are different is important so you can set expectations. And it helps set you apart from the competition.

Now for the “private” aspect. Railyo is a new type of service that is cropping up. Others include InterviewJet.com. Their main premise is to curate the best candidates based around a certain niche. In this case they are targeting Ruby on Rails developers.

I like this business model because it helps recruiters save time and in theory see the best candidates. (and as you know time = money) But that is also the challenge for Railyo. How will they get enough candidates to fill the pipeline? They need to be laser focused on building their candidate database with enough top ruby developers to make it work over the long term.

TIP: think of products that help recruiters/employers save time. If you can help make their job more efficient with a certain part of the recruiting cycle you can charge for it!

This infographic provides a good look at how SEO has changed after Google’s Panda update a few years ago.

So this is my last post for the year. My next will be on Jan 3rd or 4th.

In the meantime think about 2013 and how you can make your job board better. Recently 2 very different job boards were acquired: Jobcircle and Behance. Jobcircle is a more traditional job board company. Behance is not.

I was recently alerted to a new wordpress theme for a job board. Its called JobEngine. According to its creator, “JobEngine – a Jobboard wordpress theme which is designed based on the needs of Job recruiter, and job hunter.” It does have a mobile friendly version which is essential for job boards today.

http://enginethemes.com/

Getting free press for a job board can be a great traffic boost. But you need to give the press a reason to write about you. Whether its an online blog or a newspaper, all roads lead to more traffic.

For example, my former company, AllCountyJobs.com, puts out a monthly jobs report from its flagship site. The newspapers around here eat it up and it gets their name in the news.

Journalists and bloggers love lists of things or trends in the job market. If you put together a worthy press release, report, white paper or anything with a list its more likely to get traction with them.

Think of things like “Top 10 Lists”. Recently I published my 2nd annual Top 10 States for Hidden Jobs in order to promote my new Hidden Jobs App. Last year it was featured on AOL and this year several news outlets picked it up.

It works for new job sites also. I launched AmericanMFGjobs.com this year and put out this release. It was also picked up by news orgs and I even did a phone interview with one reporter about the data.

Part of my success at running job boards over the years has been good customer service. Even though the business is mostly an online-transactional one, a personal touch goes a long way towards getting/keeping a client.

The first thing I will tell is respond quickly to your emails. Employers and recruiters are BUSY people and if you value their time, they will appreciate it. So make a habit of constantly checking your inbox and respond right away.

The second thing I did was talk to my customers on the phone and bend over backwards to get the sale and assist them.

Last week I faced the following scenario;

1. Potential customer from Chicago emailed me saying she was having problems paying for a posting with a credit card on Jobs in Social Media. The page wasnt responding and she did not know if transaction went through.

2. I was on a train coming back from NYC when I got the email. So I responded by saying I could’nt help her at the moment and that I would get back to her in the morning.

3. The next morning she emailed asking if the posting went thru (it did not) so I told her to email me the job description and I would call her to get her credit card info.

4. She sent the job description and I called her as I began to post the job online. I got to the payment page, asked her for the credit card details, and it went through.

Now I’ve established a relationship with the client and I helped her out in the process.

Then I went even further and I wrote up a quick blog post to highlight her posting. She replied with this response…

These are the kinds of things you need to do when running any kind of recruitment site/technology. Make it a rule to live by and your clients will continue to buy what you are selling!

This is the first of two posts about the facebook job board launch. Look for #2 on Wednesday for members only with what it should have been.

Last week Facebook rolled out its much hyped job board. As soon as I saw it, I dismissed it as a half-hearted attempt at job search.

There was nothing new or unique about it. Its essentially a landing page for a bunch of other job boards including Monster, Branchout and others. The search function is clumsy and unintuitive. The URL for it is long and full of numbers.

https://www.facebook.com/socialjobs/app_417814418282098

As one of only two job board consultants in the world I can testify they did not consult me on this project. Had they reached out, things would have been different. If they were being advised by the likes of Monster, a company who has been on a long downward spiral for years, then they surely were misled.

But whatever, it is what it is. A landing page with some jobs on it.

To be somewhat fair, the release did say it was kind of a ‘next step’ in the social jobs partnership. But if they are going to rely on partners like the ones I mentioned, good luck with that. They’d have been better off asking Indeed or SimplyHired to pay them to power it. (as a shareholder I would have preferred that anyway)

I am not alone in my criticism. As soon as the app rolled out, the critical opinions came fast and furious;

http://talenthq.com/2012/11/the-facebook-job-board-debacle/ - “debacle”

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/14/facebook-social-jobs-app/

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-launches-social-jobs-app-2012-11  - “lame”

http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/14/facebook-social-jobs/ – “barely functional”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/11/14/the-facebook-job-board-is-here-recruiting-will-never-look-the-same/

http://www.ere.net/2012/11/14/new-facebook-section-will-pull-jobs-in-from-5-partners/

http://www.sourcecon.com/news/2012/11/16/cmon-man-facebook-trips-out-of-the-gate-with-social-jobs-platform/ – “underwhelming”

There is a lot still do in the social recruiting space. Unfortunately Facebook’s latest attempt aint it.

If you have exact match domain job sites… Google’s recent EMD changes probably dinged your traffic. Some (not all) of my jobamatic boards took a hit. A few of those have come back a little bit but not like before the update.

From an article about the change:

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam fighting team, announced in a September 28 tweet that “an upcoming Google algo change” (the EMD update) would, “reduce low-quality, ‘exact-match’ domains in search results.” That means websites with keyword-rich domains (e.g., www.mycompanyjobs.com or jobs.mycompany.com) will no longer be ranked higher in search results based on keywords embedded in their domain names.

There are a shitload of job boards that have exact match domains. Now google is penalizing them for being focused. This is unfortunate for job seekers since many of those boards, even if they are just backfill from indeed/simplyhired, are very focused niche sites.

For example I have a site called JobsinRecycling.net that is with Jobamatic. It no longer ranks for ‘recycling jobs‘. But it filters out just recycling jobs for the user which makes their search more efficient. So why the penalty? I’m HELPING the job seeker. I’m not trying to artificially rank for something.

The beneficiary of these algo changes has been Indeed. They now rank even higher in results (as if they needed more traffic). I saw some searches where they had all ten results on page 2 of a search. Thats just crazy. There are plenty more jobs online than just what Indeed displays.

So what now?

You’d better re-double your content strategy efforts and get other job blogs and sites to link to you. And yes you’ll probably have to spend a little dough to do that.

Tech people are hard to find. Whenever you have a strong demand in a certain industry, sites will multiply to try and help employers find that talent. We are now witnessing a new crop of techie job sites that have a fresh approach on recruiting tech talent. Recruiters in the tech industry will try anything at least once if they think it will work. Here’s a look at three of them.

1. Headhuntable

http://www.headhuntable.com/

This is a free job board that makes user profiles open as part of the site. Check them out here. I think more job sites should let seekers create free and open profiles so they can be picked up by search engines and also to help form a sense of community.

2. The Nerdery

http://nerdery.com/

This a “refer a nerd” type service. Refer someone and get $100 if the candidate interviews, and $400 more if they’re hired.

3. Interview jet

http://interviewjet.com/

They curate top tech candidates in the NYC area and pimp them out to companies who need tech talent. They’ve already made 3 placements essentially acting as an ‘agent’ for the candidate.

One of the questions I often get is…how much should I charge employers to post a job?

Well the answer should depend on your existing competition. If you are a new job board entering a market with other sites  I suggest undercutting them in price in order to gain market share.

But at a minimum I would say a job post should be around $100 for 30 days

Anything less will be hard to make money with. You can only charge a lot if you have a lot of traffic, so undercutting your competitors is one of the few ways you can get an employer to try you.