How To Develop And Grow Your Niche Job Board Aggregator Websites?

Businesses across the globe are on a constant hunt for talent. Often, this search for skilled candidates is full of unwanted bumps, lumps, and protuberance. To eliminate this friction recruitment executives turn towards job and career portals. As per this report, 20% of the total hirings happen through job portals. Also, 20% of the job portals are new entrants i.e., less than 2 years old.

With the rise of SaaS, PaaS, and other ready-to-market pre-packaged software tools, the entry barriers to this section of the recruitment industry have significantly reduced. But there has also been a spike in the number of job boards that fail within 3 years.

So, how to build a successful job board website? In this article, we explain how you can create a successful, profitable and sustainable “niche job board website”.

Table of Contents

What Are Niche Job Boards?

Niche job boards are industry and/or location-specific job aggregator websites. They target a specific domain or industry vertical. In short, it’s a segmented matchmaking platform for jobs & jobseekers, employees & employers, talent & opportunities from a particular industry or geography. As per research, more than 40% of job boards are functioning with only 1-5 employees. It’s easy and affordable to start a niche job board.

What Are The Secrets Of Building Successful Niche Job Boards?

Healthcarejobsite, efinancialcareers, allretailjobs are some of the successful niche-focused websites for healthcare, finance, and retail industries respectively. There are thousands of specialized job boards tailored to specific industries and domains. But only a few are popular. We list some of the strategies that have worked for successful Niche Job Boards –

Automated Job Aggregation using web scraping
Extensive Database of job postings & candidates
Focused Industrial Domain
Focused Demography, Region
Collaboration & Relationship Building with companies
Multi-channel Monetization Models, Affiliate, Membership, Pay per click, Pay per post, Promotional posts
Resume Building Templates For Candidates
Efficient & Robust Matchmaking Algorithm
Online Video Interviews & skill validation
Review & Testimonials Feature For Funneling Right Candidates & Companies
Salary Calculators & Career Growth Resources

How To Build A Niche Job Board Website?

Step 1: Finding Your Niche For The Job Aggregator

Step 2: Decide On The Technological Stack Esp., Job Scraping Mechanism

Step 3: Build Your Job board In-House or Outsource

Step 4: Marketing & Launch

Step 5: Continuously Aggregate Job postings, Collaborate With Companies, Engage Candidates and Iterative Improve Your Platform

How To Find The Right Niche For Your Job Board?

This is one of the critical decision-making steps for starting a job board. Factor in the following to choose the best-suited niche for your job board:

Your Expertise & Exposure To The Industry

It can be very beneficial for an entrepreneur to start in the domain they have experience and expertise. You can cash in on your existing industrial contacts and associations.

For example, ReactJs is a highly popular front-end web development technology with 170k+ stars on GitHub. More and more companies are hunting for employees adept in ReactJs. Starting a React-focused niche job board could be rewarding. Who knows?

Industry, Demand & Market Trends

You’ve to take into consideration future growth aspects of the industry in which you decide to startup your niche job board.

For example, Covid forced companies to go remote temporarily. This boosted the trend to go permanently remote. Companies will be looking to hire remote workers. This rising trend translates into higher demand for niche remote job sites.

Competitive Landscape

Some of the industrial niches in the recruitment field are already very saturated. So, you as an entrepreneur evaluating niches for job boards must contemplate the competition. Based on the analysis, you may bring in attractive services, features, and business models to beat the competition.

Niche job boards can be segmented based on the hierarchy, seniority level, specialization, demography, etc.

Domain Specialization: Every day several new startups are launched. Founders might not be always “jack of all trades”. Even if they are, businesses need specialized skills & experience in marketing, sales, tech, legal, etc., to propel on the growth roadmap. So, job boards can be specifically built to serve CMOs, CTOs, Directors, Legal advisors & Promoters.

LucasGroup.com, datajobs.com, jobsfordevops.com are some of the high niche-focused dedicated tech job boards.

Level of skill: The right mix of experience & skill is always necessary to balance the growth, cultural and financial wheels of any enterprise. You may consider focusing on junior-level executives, intermediate-level workers, or senior-level, high-caliber, high-performing employees.

AllExecutiveJobs is a niche website for senior-level professionals in Europe.

Demography & Region: What suits Asians, may or may not suit Europeans or say Australians and Americans. The world changes every two KMs. We are different and so are our expectations from work. Niche Job boards can be specifically personalized for particular demography or say people in a city, country, continent.

JobsInMilan.com is a geographical niche job website catering to employees in Milan city of Italy.

How To Choose The Right Tech Stack For Your Job Board?

Web Scraping Job Postings From Other Job Portals, Career Sites, and enterprise ATSs

You can either use automated data extraction website crawlers like Octoparse or you may do manual scraping to collect job postings from websites. Using automated solutions, you can scrape millions of postings daily and the solution is very scalable. It’s not possible to manually scrape that huge number iteratively daily.

Website Development – Frontend, Backend, Database, Cloud Service

There are a plethora of options to choose from. You can consider javascript frameworks like Bootstrap, React, Angular, Vue, etc., for coding the frontend of your website. For backend, you may evaluate nodeJs, Django-python, java, python, PHP, etc.,

If you choose to go with a framework, you may consider WordPress, Drupal, Joomla for developing the website. But using these platforms can introduce several bottlenecks and lock-ins which are not good for building a scalable website.

For Cloud services i.e., hosting your website application, you may go with any of AWS, GCP, or Azure. Cloud delivers agility and cost-effectiveness.

Use Octoparse for Web Scraping Job Postings At Scale

You can scrape millions of jobs from thousands of career websites in no time using an automated job scraping solution like Octoparse. One of the major factors that distinguish a successful job aggregator business from the other 80% which close in the first five years is the quantity and quality of aggregated job postings on your platform.

You can even integrate the Octoparse web scraping tool with all the major applicant tracking systems (ATS) enterprises use to post jobs.

Using visual scraper tools availed by Octoparse, web scraping job postings become a breeze. Besides, it’s robust, ridiculously fast, time-efficient, and cost-effective. You can run the crawler locally or in the cloud-based on your requirements.

Here we demonstrate how to scrape Amazon career sites using Octoparse. Do read the insight.

Now, we shall demonstrate scraping one of the popular hospital job aggregator portals, CareerVitals. We shall scrape Surgeon Jobs Using Octoparse. We’ll use the following link – http://www.careervitals.com/search.php?strKeyword=Cardiothoracic+Surgeon to scrape Cardiothoracic surgeon job postings from the website.

Step 1 – Fire Up & log into the Octoparse application.

Step 2 – Click on +Task under “Advanced Mode”

Step 3 – Copy the above URL and paste it into the new task area. You may add as many source URLs as you wish but for demonstration, we have added only one. Save the URL.

Step 4 – Create the workflow :

First Go To The Website. This step is by default created.
Next, click a loop click element on the Job Titles. This is to iteratively visit each job posting.
Create an extracted element workflow item on the job description page. Select all the fields you would want to extract.
The screen after selecting all the data fields would look similar to –

The workflow screen would look like this after you select a job title, location, area, and description

Step 5 – Save and run the workflow. It would ask you to choose where you wish to scrape the job postings. For demonstrating job scraping we have chosen a local extraction.

Lastly, job data scraping initiates and you can see the scraped data yielded on screen. Once the scraping is over, you may save the extracted data in JSON, CSV, or your preferred format.

Here is a sample JSON format scraped Job Data from CareerVitals-

{
“Title”: “Wound Care Surgeon”,
“Address”: “Lima, OH”,
“details”: “General Surgeons Needed for Full-Time Careers with Fast-Growing Post-Acute Care Practice\nGet Your Life Back! No Call, No Nights, No Weekends!\nJoin Vohra Wound Physicians, the largest and most trusted wound care physician group in the U.S., and work with the highest quality providers in wound care.\nVisit here to learn more and apply!…,
“company”: “Employer: Vohra Wound Physicians Reviews”,
“seniority”: “Career Level: Experienced”,
“skill”: “Profession: Physician/Surgeon”,
“field”: “Pay: $225000-$333000 Per Year”,
“area”: “Location: Lima, OH”,
“Field8”: “Experience: 3-5 Years”,
“benefits”: “Education Level: Professional”,
“jobName”: “Job Title: Wound Care Surgeon”,
“Field11”: “Job Type: Full-Time”
},

Alternatively, you may also scrape using ready-made job scraping templates using Octoparse automated web scraping solution.

Octoparse enables you to smoothly automate your job data extraction requirements and allows you to stay ahead of competitors in collecting and posting new job posts. We provide you a free version to try out and experiment with data extraction. Good luck with your job Board Launch. Happy Octoparsing!