Ryan, a reader sent me this question the other day;
I have a niche sector that I’m going to target, though it’ll be global ideally and have jobs anywhere within the industry. My question though, in your experience, how do you get people to visit a website without lots of jobs and how do you get companies to list jobs without lots of people going and applying?
I thought initially I could offer job postings for free in order to get traffic, would you suggest that? Or rather than trying to get them to OK that one by one, would you recommend crawling their websites and listing the jobs without that conversation initially?
I guess this which one comes first scenario is what’s taken me so long to bite the bullet and move forward. Anyway, any advice you could offer would be such a great help.
Reader Question
Dear Ryan,
First let me say that is is quite easy today to get jobs on your site. You can backfill, get a feed or scrape jobs manually or otherwise. What’s harder is getting job seekers to come and apply. I tell all my clients to focus on first building a job seeker audience. You need to build a foundation before you build the house.
Your mission in the first year is to have enough job seekers to generate enough applies (approx 5-10) to a job to make it worthwhile for an employer to post. Once you have done that you can be more aggressive in your employer outreach.
Offering free job postings is a good lead gen tactic but beware that it may not always work. Recruiters hate having to spend time posting manually. If your niche is targeting more SMB owners they are more likely to take advantage of free.
There are a myriad of backfill options to fill your board with jobs. Two of my Favorite are Jobg8 and Talent.com. (and you actually get paid to list them). One of my advertisers WebSpiderMount is also a good paid service that will get you a feed for almost any company or type of job.