I have spoken to a number of people over the years who have made a certain big mistake when they launched their site. They paid a web design firm with no experience building job boards to do it.
Needless to say, these firms tend to build sites that are not quite optimized for job board usage. They miss certain things like the proper way to create job posting workflows or they make the e-commerce checkout process too long. Sadly, they contact me after the fact when the damage has already been done.
In many of these cases I wish they had contacted me first because there is a certain way to design a job board to appeal to both seekers and employers. For instance, the ability to post a job and clearly identify where/how to do that is often buried in many of the custom built sites I see. A job board design, especially its homepage callout to employers needs to be front and center.
Posting and paying for a job is the most important thing when it comes to user experience. Second is your job seeker onboarding. Design it poorly and you lose out on money. You have to make it dead-simple-easy for employers/seekers to do business with you. These little design best practices add up to big problems if you ignore them.
So before you go and pay a web design firm to build your job board, think long and hard before you write a check. There are plenty of job board software vendors who can build your site faster and more cheaply than a firm who has never done it before. Job board software vendors are experts at what they do. Not all are created equal but some of my favorites like Webscribble, Madgex, Jobiqo can get you launched quickly right out of the box.
Even the off the shelf services like Jobboard.io and Smart Job Board do a great job. As long as you are willing to live with a more “templated” design, they will serve you well. They do everything you need a job board to do.
If you are about to launch a job board you need to first prove that a market exists for whichever niche you are targeting. Unless you need something totally unique out of the box prove your concept first with an existing vendor. If you every outgrow it you can always build your own later after gaining some experience in the online recruiting world.
I’m not saying you should never hire a design firm to build, just be careful about that selection and make them show you how they will optimize it for your potential users.
