This is a general call to action post for all job board software vendors. As the job board space gets more crowded it’s important for them to keep iterating on their platforms and keep adding features to streamline the user experience while helping boards attract more traffic.
So here are some things I would like to see them add to their platforms in order to stay relevant. Its free advice, take it.
- Text Job Alerts – start to offer job alerts by text message in addition to email. Employers are beginning to adopt text to engage candidates and so should job boards. I would love to see the ability to get job alerts by email or text. Text will greatly increase open rates and lead to more traffic/applies.
- Better Social Integration – social media, namely Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, are hugely important to help drive traffic so I’d like to see tighter integration with them. Let job board owners login and connect their sites to the platform to enable auto-posting of content instead of relying on 3rd party social media tools.
- More Content Feeds – job boards need more content but some of it is still out of reach. They all provide job feeds and blog feeds but they could easily add other RSS feeds for employer profiles, public job seeker profiles and even things like new signups. For example, it would be great to be able to auto-publish messages to social media like “John just posted a resume on XYZjobboard.com” or “[company name] just created a profile“.
- Push Alerts – desktop browser notifications are another marketing channel that boards can use to drive traffic. Either build it into your product or offer integration with more 3rd party tools.
- Visual job pages – allow employers to upload an image/video to their postings to make them more visual. Plain text pages are BORING. Design them in a more visual way to attract more seekers. These days most job postings still look too much like each other. I think an image or video should be the first thing a job seeker sees when viewing a job.
- Resume Refresh – the technology exists today to update resumes via social profiles (see crowded.com) and by prompting registered seekers to update their resume more often. We need to end the stale resume syndrome that exists in most job boards.
