I gathered together some of my clients and other job board owners for a one hour discussion over zoom.
Here’s a transcript of the discussion;
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hello, Brian Fox.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hello, Chris Russell.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
All right, Brian Ws there. He’s from Ryan Fox,
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Chicago.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Your job board is
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Job board is trusted herd.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Oh, trusted herd. Okay. We talked before haven’t we?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s best conversation. I’ve had.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Excellent. When was
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Chris last
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Year or
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Last year? Yeah, we probably whole team’s kind of been talking probably meet up again shortly. So
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
You have London, Chicago. KA. Where are you? I’m in Michigan. You’re in Detroit. Kelly you’re in you’re oversee in Europe. Madison in Amsterdam. Paul was joining. Yes, I drank Whitelaw sorry. There’s one left in the afraid it good for you. Hey, Don. First turn your mic on. How’s it going, man? Terrific yourself. Long time. No chat. That’s true. Are you down in Florida? Yep. All right. Paul levels here. Hey Paul. Hey,
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Sorry,
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Paul, where are you from? Which job board?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I’ve literally stumbled into the whole job board thing accidentally so we are, I was, I was helping out a client. I’ve been the near affiliate world for quite a while. Helping out a client with some rogue affiliates, we will say so advised ’em on that. And then they put out a call saying they were looking for some people for new new partners. And I said, look, I’ve got a developer. I can run up a job board quite easy enough. And yeah, just sort of stumbled into it and just navigating the minefield of job feeds and stuff like that. But yeah, got job board B jobs quite new. So see how it goes.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
And Don, what’s new with you guys. Jobinlogistics.com. You say what’s going on down there. We lost you done Connie there. So Don’s been in the space probably Lauren than I have actually. I think he started jobs in logistics back in what? Late nineties. Can you hear that? Can you hear me Don?
Speaker 4 (03:09):
You’re very faint actually. So
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Let me try that. Is this better?
Speaker 4 (03:13):
That’s better. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Okay. So when did you start Jo in logistics?
Speaker 4 (03:18):
We’re 22 years ago.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
22 years ago. Okay. It’s 2000. Okay. Is that your oldest site?
Speaker 4 (03:24):
Yeah, jobs in the, just it’s the oldest one and then all retail jobs, then jobs in trucks and then fleet jobs and our latest one is home delivery jobs.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Oh, okay. so I just funny story. I just saw a, on Facebook, heard a friend of mine lives down in Texas, got a home delivery from a drone from a Walgreens.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Mm
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Wow. And in that, in that package was ice cream
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And he showed it as it dropped down a string, you know, a rope, whatever dropped down his little box right into his backyard. And I said, okay, I think red delivery drive recruiters everywhere. Just say, Hmm, what’s gonna happen to my job.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
Well, Amy and Sean are currently at the home delivery jobs conference.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Is there such a conference?
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So how is the ice cream? Was it melted or was it not sure? Yeah, you can show that part of it, but I thought that was the coolest thing ever, right. It’s like, yeah, it’s here. It’s like it’s happening.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
It’s wild.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
You know, I almost started the delivery job board ones, but back in the day, but John, the trucking job, I mean, Don, the trucking job board, you were pretty how long has that been around Don? Don? How long has your trucking job board been around?
Speaker 4 (04:59):
So how long, how long, sorry,
Speaker 1 (05:02):
The trucking job board. How long has that been?
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Probably about 16 years. 17 years? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
You had some foresight there to start that one.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
Yeah. It’s a major shortage of drivers and you
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Know,
Speaker 4 (05:18):
We’re here to help
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Back in oh five. So what’s, what’s on everyone’s mind, you guys have any stuff you wanna talk about? You know, there’s some some news going on in the industry, snag, a jobs laid off, some people there’s talk of recession, but I really haven’t seen it yet on, you know, any kinda wide scale basis. Jobs are up still as far as just listings go, I think. But what’s on your minds.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
I think there’s some good people out there from SNA jump the, I guess, delayed off 80 people,
Speaker 1 (05:57):
80 and there’s some very good people out there. So, you know, you, your male want to kind of check that out. I never, that company, I think was kind of mismanaged a bit over the years. Never mean they had, they had some good traction initially, and then they kind of like squandered it in my opinion. They you know, there, you know why they
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Did it now, Chris,
Speaker 1 (06:18):
What’s that?
Speaker 5 (06:20):
Do you know why they did it now? Like what was the catalyst?
Speaker 1 (06:23):
I think, I think the article said, it talked about just the market conditions and, you know, uncertainty, that kind of stuff, you know like zip crew did that back in, you know, March, 2020 when the pandemic hit. I was think Kathy said that she had the same and you know, I think a zips case, it was just a chance to be profitable and cause they went public right after that, I think right around that time. Yeah. SNS job is kind of SQU its any kind of hold they had in the hourly space. Now you got like job case and there a whole bunch of other hourly platforms out
Speaker 5 (07:03):
There was job. Get that raised kind of 50 million. I dunno if you saw that one. But that was, I don’t, I don’t know if that was linked cuz obviously it’s kind of both playing in the Audi space.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah. The SN job, they changed their name to snag at one point they changed it back snagging job. So I’m like, it’s, you know, it’s weird, but yeah,
Speaker 2 (07:28):
My mom is always sending me articles and giving them to me in person cuz she watches our kids couple days a week. And so actually I think it was Monday this week, she brought over from a, a R P this and
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Good by internet job boards. Ugh.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah. And for, for seniors and top job sites, unique visitors to each site, April 20, 22 in millions and SNA a jobs actually number nine, I think here 10 at 2 million unique visitors each in April, 2022,
Speaker 1 (08:10):
2 million. Yeah. That’s I mean that’s like, you know, I mean zip recruiter has 30 million, something like that.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah. Zip zip
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Has like hundred million
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Linkedin’s biggest. I mean that was 81 million indeed 64.2 second Glassdoor, 18.9, zip recruiter, 15.8 and then significant drop, like number five is USA jobs.gov at 3.4.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
That’s like the federal website I think.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, monster simply hired career builder, snag a job in Robert half.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah. I used snag a job once when I was a recruiter like seven or eight years ago. It’s some decent traffic, you know, it’s all about traffic with those, those big sites and just put a, a link in the chat there to an article that Peter ASCU had retweeted and it’s about it’s about is running a job board really worth it. It says you, if I can read some quotes from it she’s quoting Peter ask you who runs ranch work.com. He’s been on my, my show before, but she said I was quite interested for a few reasons. First job wars are boring. It’s not a sexy, shiny startup idea. Second building such thing is not mad science third. It does not seem very time consuming. She goes into the revenues of job boards, talks about the pricing. That’s what I want. Get just pricing as well. And that’s a question I have for, for the book. Check it out an engineering article on breaks down how it works, how much it costs to run, things like that.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah. His thread is really long too. I mean it’s like, it’s like 20 some tweets in a row.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yep. Yeah. He’s one, one of more interest guys to follow in the job board space, Peter he’s really good at domain stuff and you know, monetizing a good domain like that. Yeah. Did I did a question recently about pricing a job board in generally speaking, you know, I talk to a new respective job board owner. I say, you know, look whatever niche you’re going into, like under Cutcher competition, number one to get started because you always raise them later on. And I generally would raise rates, you know, 10% every year as the job board goes on in it lifespan. But tell me how you guys price your, if price, your listings and just kind of break down your, your revenue models for as quickly, if you could maybe cause you wanna go first.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
Sure. I, I’m still a relatively new job board. I started my company four years ago, but the job boards about two years old, just last year I, or this year I increased my pricing to a 30 day package for 1 99 a month. And I keep hearing the job board doctors say that I have to keep increasing my pricing. So next year I’m gonna work on that as well. But so far it’s, it’s working out well. I used to have other packages, but they got like three month, two week. I tried, I experimented with a bunch of durations, but for me in my niche industry, I’m focusing on 30 day where the employers just post it themselves.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah. I’ve often found that keeping it simple is the best way. And you just have like, yeah, have a single, have a three bag or a 10 bag, you know, something like that.
Speaker 6 (11:42):
Yeah, definitely simple is the best way to go. And technically too, with the job board functions, it just makes it so much easier.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yep. Is your site home built or is it on a software?
Speaker 6 (11:55):
I use a WordPress theme.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
The WordPress theme. Okay. Do you find that it’s hard to manage on an ongoing basis?
Speaker 6 (12:04):
You know, I, this is a question I was actually gonna ask later too, but I love working on my job board. So I’m learning a lot. This was brand new to me when I started. And I’m finding that the theme I’m using, it’s called KA by this gentleman in Greece, I believe. And he’s, it’s really good, simple, easy to use. I have no issues if I have questions he replies almost immediately. So that’s good for even a beginner. I think it’s a really good WordPress theme to have
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Good deal. And anybody else wanna chime in on pricing or WordPress?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Well, I can, it’s kind of been my so tr it’s been like my world last week. Trusted her is the largest live event job site and the us and Canada. We went from 2019, we had 3,200 jobs, 2020, we had 11,000 and now in the last 12 months we’ve had 52,000 all posted by companies and brands direct. It is a custom made site. So we have a team of three full-time developers and a principal engineer, and then we have an iOS and Android app. But typically these are like brand ambassador and event jobs, right? The people you see at bars handing out drink samples or grocery store demos, convention centers, like literally everything under the live event. Son and it’s the industry I came from, I’ve been in event marketing for 17 years. And so when we started it, we started it as a marketplace for jobs and reviews.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
So it allows gig workers to take their reputation and bring it with them to the next place that they go similar to like using a LinkedIn profile, but it’s more valuable because they get these jobs more frequently and it’s been, it is been such a grind and we were starting to get some traction and then COVID hit and you know, live events like disappeared. And the site just came roaring back beyond what we were doing pre COVID, but the thing is we never charged for job posting, right. So free to post and it would be sent out to all workers within 35 miles that day or that night I should say. And so we got some really good traction and that’s when we met with Chris maybe about a, almost about a year ago at this point.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And Chris suggested, Hey, you might wanna plug in Google ads for some ad dollars. And we did that and it’s been amazing. So it covered like server costs and all of that every month. And you know, like being a free marketplace, we offered pre we offered premium memberships for companies that would give them more enhanced tools. One of those being, you could search any address in the us or Canada and then a search radius and all the workers would come up, you could instantly DM them. So it was good for like cherry picking staff or last second needs. But the, the untouchable piece was always like, how are we gonna turn on more revenue for trusted hurt? And so seven days ago we backed out the feature of sending jobs to workers within 35 miles. And that’s only good now for premium companies or if you pay $7 per post. So we originally thought like, Hey, let’s just start charging for jobs across the board, but I didn’t wanna do that cuz I didn’t wanna stop our own growth. Right. just in the name of revenue we’re growing really well right now. And yeah, seven days in,
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I mean an upsell there, then the $7 posting.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Absolutely. But you know, like everything was organic. So two months ago our growth, we have 56,000 members now amongst companies and workers and everything was organic Lee growin. And then about two months ago I started using Craigslist postings every week to draw new people back to our job board to become a member of trusted herd. I tried snag a job last week, actually. I think it did pretty well.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
So try and explain that. How do you do that? Break that down for me.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I just go into Craigslist. Why do
Speaker 1 (16:51):
You do it too?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I go into Craigslist and type about how cool live event jobs are and it is the most fun gig work out there. Like it is so much more fun than getting in your car and driving Uber for 10 hours a day or Instacart and you could do cool events, awesome brands, good money, you pick your jobs. And so I just make like this little post, I mean maybe it’s a paragraph and a half and at the end it’s very clear call to action. Like average jobs are between 20 and 40 bucks an hour join on trusted herd. It is a big sign up. I know some signups are just like, you know, link your Facebook and then add in three fields. And now you’re in, like for us it’s a lot bigger. But companies rely on that information. And so we actually saw really good success on Craigslist doing that.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
And so now it’s like what other online communities or marketplaces can we tap into to tell people about these jobs? Right. And so we tried to snag a job last week. I think it went well, but when they send it out, ultimately like they were bringing people back to snag a job. Right. Some people saw the link in there. Cuz I did a space cuz you’re not allowed to do an actual link of your website. Sorry, snag a job. I read it. Maybe that’s the 80 workers right there. But you know, like that’s, that’s kind of how we’ve we’re in just in the stage of how can we get more chicken and egg, right? Like companies are coming in, they’re posting, how can we get more workers in there, more members get ’em to spread the word. And yeah, it was a big step to go from free to $7. And now in the last week we’ve generated a thousand dollars just from these seven buck postings. So we’ve had three companies inquire about becoming premium, which right now is 3,600 annual. But you know, we’re trying to like figure out the monetization game at this point.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting, Tom, what we joined, we haven’t heard from Brian w or Kevin BFK yet. You guys wanna say hello, tell us where you’re from, which yet?
Speaker 7 (19:23):
Yeah, this is Kevin BFL. Ryan, a few different boards, Christian car center.com is our major Skype, but we also have church jobs online.com and Christian job fair.com. So we charge we actually have a free listing, but we ask for that just to be used by smaller churches or smaller organizations. And then we also ask for a link back if they’re using that. So I think in a few cases that that’s been helpful. Then we charge 99 for a 30 day listing 1 99 for a premium 90 day listing and throwing some different benefits jobs also going to our newsletter that goes out to about 30,000 subscribers. And then we have five packs, 10 packs unlimited of different packages as well. So we have not, we’re, we’re lower than some of the other Christian niche sites and some are just free.
Speaker 7 (20:31):
But those that are the charge we’ve kept the free option that seems to still be helpful, but the majority of people do choose a paid option with us. One of my questions that I’m wondering if anybody has experience with this is related to SEO and good rankings, you know, we have good rankings for Christian jobs and people Google that church jobs, some of those areas. But related to SEO, I’m wondering if anyone has done any scraping of jobs that would be appropriate for your site. And if so, if you’ve done that in a way where it’s helped with your SEO
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Well, yeah, and more jobs you have more traffic you get is sort of a general rule of thumb. I go by Kevin. Mm-Hmm so if you you know, Google’s gonna see more content on your site, more pages that Google can crawl. So theoretically it’s more, it’s more traffic, how much traffic is debatable, but that’s basically, it’s a pretty true statement. I think anybody else agree or disagree with that?
Speaker 8 (21:46):
No, I agree. So I did that for the first time, just one and a half weeks ago. And my job board just launched three months ago today. And until a few weeks ago we still didn’t really have any sort of significant organic traffic. But this really made a difference and we just imported around 3000 jobs from another site. And that was such a massive thing. And it wasn’t even done well, I think from, from our side, like the formatting was not perfect at all that. So I’m looking now into solutions as to how we can do this, like in a more proper way. But certainly something I would I would recommend based on the early results that we’ve seen.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
And did you use an organization and outside organization to do that or did you do it in house?
Speaker 8 (22:31):
I found someone on.com for a $50 or so who who after way too much talk back and forth was able to get it done to 80% satisfaction, I would say.
Speaker 7 (22:43):
Okay. That’s
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Great. Kevin, have you called Aspen tech labs? One of my advertisers, they do scraping for, for job boards.
Speaker 7 (22:50):
What’s the name of that one? Chris
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Aspen tech labs and then the website itself is called web spider melt. I’ll put it link in the chat web, spider.com.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
Perfect. I think I have talked to them at one point and there’s another organization that we’ve dealt with. Yeah. Mad, if you don’t mind sharing whoever you use it, appreciate that as well.
Speaker 8 (23:12):
I’ll I’ll find the fiber link to the person that I used and then I posted in the chat.
Speaker 7 (23:17):
Okay. Appreciate that. And have you done that in a way where the jobs display and you have URLs that make sense for that job that are getting traffic?
Speaker 8 (23:33):
Yes. so I think the as I said, the only thing was that we couldn’t really find a setup where the formatting was working perfectly. And I think mm-hmm for, for me, it was still like a test to, to do all of this. So I didn’t buck him more to like really find a solution and it would’ve probably cost me a few hundred more or something like that. Yeah. so what I’m doing now is that I’m figuring out a, a way with an actual API from another site here in, in, in Denmark where I’m doing the scraping from where I can do it in a little bit more of a proper way. The other thing here, as I say was, was just a test, but I’ll find the link for the, for the guy. And you’ll probably have to a little bit as, as always on these sides.
Speaker 7 (24:15):
Excellent. Appreciate
Speaker 9 (24:16):
It. Chris, this is Kevin Kevin as well. We’ve using Aspen that Chris mentioned. I’ve got a long history with, with boards. I’m in a, in a healthcare field, but we’ve used asthma technologies really successfully. I’m just relaunching my site again, going in a different direction, but cuz they do our our job wrapping. So we wrap sites like veterans affairs Amazon, not, not Amazon, we did Amazon, but university of Louisville watch express scripts Cigna in the states. So we’ve been using Aspen’s job wrapping for several years and then we also backfill with their jobs and we’ve had as many as 50,000 jobs on the site and it runs fall. We use their technology for the website and job board too, but it’s job rx.com. If you wanna take a look at the formatting. OK. But very good. We’ve got no, no trouble at all. They use a team outta Ukraine, but they’re based out of Aspen, Colorado with offices in Ukraine now Poland because of Ukraine and also in Ireland, but very good group work with.
Speaker 7 (25:32):
Appreciate that. How do you spell the, the site
Speaker 9 (25:35):
Name? Oh, my site. It’s job RX. So just J chat Kevin. Yeah. Okay. RX do com great. Thanks
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Kevin. I’m I’m a little which ISN, not very familiar with like the scraping part and mad. You said it brought in a ton of organic traffic for you. So how exactly does that work? Do you scrape the, the jobs off of some other site and then you plug ’em on your own and like where do people apply to and ultimately how do the original companies that wanted applicants? How do they get those applicants?
Speaker 9 (26:13):
Go
Speaker 8 (26:13):
Ahead, Matt. Yeah, really good. Question. So the way we did it was that we in, in the, and not super technical. So I had the guy who did the scraping make sure that once you click apply from the, let’s say competing sites that we used, you would obviously go to the to the URL of the company who actually had the job post to redirect. So exactly. So that, that was the link that we grabbed to send the applications from when people click on our side. And I, I don’t consider it maybe necessarily like the smartest way that we did it. But but again, it was, it was a good and fast way to test it. And and yeah, like the results that we saw in terms of, of Google overnight in terms of impressions and and traffic was just like quite good.
Speaker 8 (26:57):
And, and I’ve been working with with SEO for a long, long time. And, and I was very impressed that it was really that simple. So I went from having, let’s say 300 and something jobs to having three and a half thousand jobs. And I think we could easily get to 30,000 jobs even in a small country like Denmark, where we will do this a little bit more properly. And my, my feeling right now is that this will be like a massive thing for us in terms of getting organic traffic.
Speaker 7 (27:23):
Brian, whenever you,
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Whenever you scrape, it’s all about redirect so that you have to redirect that traffic back to where the job lives. Okay. And but you get the content, but the apply you lose, you lose a secret when they click apply. Is it a, is it a revenue stream at all? Or is it just strictly, it can be, if you partner with companies like app cast or talent.com and get the, you know, get the backfill as an affiliate partner of them, you know, I’ve got a whole ebook on, like you, there’s 20 different affiliates partners. You could join basically, so you can make money off those clicks. And I definitely encourage people to do that because that’s that’s, if you’re gonna scrape might as well get paid for the clicks you generate. Cause you’re losing the anyway might as well get paid for that click. Right. Mm-hmm
Speaker 7 (28:07):
Chris, are you familiar with people who required that the individual register? So they, they do grab their contact information before being able to apply to those scrape jobs.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah. I’ve done that with a, with the job board client in the past where we basically, you know, we put a little field or form on the bottom of job list thing where it said you’re about to get redirected, but please start to re application by giving us your email address. Okay. And so the job board kept that email address and then, then redirected them at that point. That’s how they, they got around it.
Speaker 8 (28:44):
You have any data as to how, like, as to how many people you lose in that flow. Cuz I was wondering about this today. I, I really don’t wanna risk the few click outs that we have at this point by getting them to sort of sign up for our site.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
It’s however many data on this, however many apply clicks. You generate that’s that’s how many people leave your site. So, you know, you know that number if you’re tracking it, but you know, that’s, whatever that number is, is a number. So like on smart job board, you can track supply clicks and those are basically all redirects that leave the site at
Speaker 8 (29:18):
That point. Yeah. It’s just, it’s super hard with, with a site that is like you know, bouncing a lot in performance like week or a week or so, because like you don’t have a steady baseline to compare to and makes sense
Speaker 1 (29:29):
The jobs you have, the more your bounce rate goes up because those people leave the site faster.
Speaker 8 (29:34):
Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (29:35):
So
Speaker 1 (29:37):
It’s a trade off. Right. But they’re gonna do all that stuff might as well get paid for it. Yeah. Is my thinking.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Yeah. That’s, that’s how I’ve grown my board. I’ve got a database with 40 million jobs live in over 16 different countries and I’ve beat the hell out of the Google API as well as Bing as well. Because they’ve opened up index now that’s unlimit made I was doing the index and then obviously Ukraine happened. So I pulled back on that one. But yeah, that’s, that’s what I do. I’m other
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Whole job boards that live off just CPC. I mean, Steven Rothberg, recruiter.com the same as for that. No, no paid posting. It’s all just, he’s an affiliate basically of all the different companies that provide backfill and that’s how he makes money. I think, I think Don is the same similar way as well. I think some of his sites are, are CPC.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Yeah, that’s it. I, I’m gonna be moving over to the, the, the pay hardware people can post directly. But I’m gonna wait until I hit about 3 million users per month.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
It only makes sense if you have a ton of traffic with CPC. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
Yeah. Oh yeah, no, we get a ton of traffic, you know, I mean, I’ve got like a massive API quote from Google, so that’s, that’s, that’s fine. And that that’s, that’s the bit that I think everyone here should really be taken advantage of would be the, the Google jobs API. And that’s a little bit complicated to use, but certainly does work.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah. Do you tap into the API itself? So it’s all your time listing things.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah. So as soon as the feed’s update from say Aduna it then goes straight into the feed. And then I limit per feed. So I don’t burn through my quota because I don’t limit any number of number of jobs that come from under feed. Like when I spoke to ad Zuna initially they were like most people that want us to stop at a hundred thousand. I’m like, no, just give me everything. So that’s why I like for the us, I think we’ve got like 11 million jobs. And it is just more of a case of Google giving us more API to, to be able to push it all through to them when the feed’s update.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Yeah. Interesting. All right. I got some questions here from a reader. He didn’t show up though, but I’ll, I’ll ask I’ll answer ’em anyway. He asks CP is for you. So what’s the best piece of advice you can give to someone starting a niche job board today, short answer is learn internet marketing. If you can’t drive traffic, then you’re not gonna succeed. Next question, larger job boards have lots of bells and whistles. How can a small niche job board compete with the Indeeds and zoo recruiters? Or is it, we just don’t and hope people see the value in less is more and supporting the small guy. So yeah, I say, you know, play the underdog, play up the underdog role. It’s quality versus quantity when you’re looking at niche job boards versus the big guys and that’s it’s, it’s been true for many years and I think it’s never gonna change. Overall, in your opinion, what are the most important social media platforms to use with your niche job board? I like to hit a group’s thoughts on this too. Generally speaking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the basic ones, but and you guys have any, any, do you use like TikTok at all or snap or anything else to, to leverage your job board? Social media stuff, anybody
Speaker 5 (33:04):
We’ve been trying to, I’ve seen a few job boards kind of link into the LinkedIn feed that used to happen more. I think they’ve kind of cut down on it, but I dunno if anyone Spanish to do that, but that to me looks like a as good as the Google for jobs, to be honest, cuz it’s kind of, it kind of push goes back to LinkedIn and I think managed to do that one point. I don’t know if they still do, but yeah,
Speaker 1 (33:38):
His other question is that was a good question actually. So was there ever a time you wanted to call it quits with your job board and what was the issue and how did you get back in the cell? So I have an answer to this and I want to hear the group’s answers too, if they have any, any stories. But so yes, there was a time when I wanted to call it quits with a job board I had. This is recently too. So I’ll tell you guys a story. So right before the pandemic in January, 2020, I launched a site called HR lancers and I wanted to create a community around freelance HR work for dance recruiting work. To me, every industry is gonna have a, a gig based marketplace for employment. And I think recruiting and HR, no exceptions to that, like it’s happening.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
And that was the idea behind it. I think it was a good idea and I launched it in January, 2020. I launched it on smart job board actually. And the first month it was awesome. I mean I had like 5,000 visitors in the first month. We had close to a thousand signups, I think as far as just like people putting their resume up there and stuff, pretty profiles. I was getting tons of you know, congratulations, Hey, this is a great idea. Why didn’t this exist already? Long story short, then the pandemic hit. And that basically halted the momentum the site had. And I, you know, I ran it for two years until March of this year when I was about to shut it down. Actually I was like, this isn’t really going anywhere. I’m not getting, you know, any kind of, I was looking for a project based postings, you know, things like that.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Write your host, a project to write an employee handbook, you know, things like that. Right. Had some of that stuff, but it just wasn’t enough to keep the site going. And you know, at the time, you know, the pandemic had caused such a hiring challenge that companies were just focused on full-time hiring pretty much and overall, and they were only thinking about how to leverage freelance HR recruiters overall. So I only shut it down then I had, then I had a little idea. So I I said, okay, what if I could partner with somebody who’s kind of well known in the HR space to to work with me on it. And there’s a woman called Suzanne Lucas. She’s the evil HR lead. And she has this massive following on social media, particularly on Facebook. She she’s a writer, basically. She writes for I dunno some magazines but her group has like 20,000 people on it. And it’s one of the most interesting Facebook groups she’ll ever read as far as just cuz it’s all, it’s all HR, people just basically bitching about their jobs and their employees. So it’s fascinating and it’s extremely loyal to her. Like she has a huge following. So I approached her, I said, okay, okay, Suzanne let’s team up, let’s make a job board based on your brand.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
And she, she loved the idea. So I basically took the smart job board platform. I rebranded it to evil HR jobs.com. I still own it. I leverage her brand. I pay her a monthly royalty for that based on how, how we do in sales. But it’s, it’s, it’s working through an extent. It’s not a huge site. Someone just joined. It’s working to an extent, meaning it’s getting kind of drive by postings, which I was looking for. And it’s making some money. It’s not making a ton of money. Yeah. I don’t spend a lot of time on it. Cuz I’m so busy, but it’s doing better than it was as HR lancers. And I think over time it could grow into somewhat of a significant income for, for both of us. But that, that was the idea I had and that was a pivot I did with it. Partly Patian hello?
Speaker 10 (37:51):
Hello. How are you? How’s it going?
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Good. How’s it going? Thank you. Where are you calling from? And what’s your job board?
Speaker 10 (37:57):
I’m from Canada.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Canada. Okay. So anybody else have any stories around like if they ever quit, quit a job board or changed their job board? Anybody, are
Speaker 10 (38:13):
You asking me?
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Actually, no, I’m actually the group actually. We’re we’re on a topic here. I’ll get back to you in a second, but okay.
Speaker 10 (38:19):
Take,
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Go. Anybody else got any stories around that?
Speaker 2 (38:22):
I do Chris. I gosh, when I started trusted her, I left a well known marketing agency here in Chicago. We had started my own, came up with the idea put our first house fund, me and my wife into starting trusted herd. And looking back on it, I wish I knew Chris cuz I wish I probably would built on a existing platform and not our own. But you know, like for trusted herd, it’s all about the community, right? I mean we with all of the workers, we also about two and a half years ago. I took over as super admin for a 220 plus Facebook group community. That has about 800,000 users in all the cities across the us and Canada. So like brand ambassadors of Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, anywhere you could imagine ’em and the pandemic was tough, you know, wasn’t raking in revenue.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
I still never paid myself. I finally will after six years like this upcoming month, which is so exciting. And it’s the stories, right? Like it’s the stories of workers emailing you or someone who found a job on your job board or a company that found a worker that’s now their go to in a certain place. And like, to me that keeps me going. Like, I, I feel like we’re doing something good here. And as long as the site keeps growing and getting healthy, like more of those stories keep happening. And so the pandemic was super hard for a lot of job boards. But for me it’s, it was those stories in the dark days that like pushed me through and, and continue to so yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Okay. Fat or FA I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but you wanna say hello? Tell us where your job is.
Speaker 10 (40:32):
Yeah, so I’m just running a, a job board called dot com’s niche job board for experts working in the international field
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Expert job board. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 10 (40:54):
And I’m doing connection between organizations that meets to hire the best candidates to fill their vacancies. This job bot has around eight and is 8, 9, 10 years old. And we’re just increasing our community. For example, we have group page around the 15,000 members. But the market is hard. You know, the competition is very hard. We should find a way to and this is the reason I I’m glad to participate in this meeting to share and to learn from other colleagues. How is
Speaker 1 (41:44):
There, is there a burning question on your mind that we can answer for you as far as a challenge you’re having or something?
Speaker 10 (41:51):
You know in our case, the biggest service is to populate our job board with a lot of opportunities because we have counter traffic, but we don’t have a lot of customers to, to post and to buy, to purchase our, our services costing a job paper. And but the other way we need to populate is the job board to give more to users and to offer more, you know, just some some thoughts on the, how to populate with the specific job specific back, but in international development, let’s
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Sayt D do you do any scraping or backfill of your job board with other
Speaker 10 (42:45):
The, the, the job board is built on the WordPress. Okay. It’s job team and we used to scrap some jobs from, you know, but they change now their structure and it’s harder for us to, to, with the right jobs. Yeah, this main chat we have, how to populate and the, in your, in your, and in your experience, do you recommend any, any tool to populate the job, this deal with the WordPress?
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Hmm. Can put your link in the chat if you want, take a quick look at it. And what what WordPress theme are you using
Speaker 10 (43:44):
Using it
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Job. Okay. Think we lost Don here we ask some more questions.
Speaker 11 (44:00):
Hello?
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Hey, Brian,
Speaker 11 (44:04):
I don’t have a job, boy. I just had a, a question. Yeah, I’m from New York. Sorry. I introduced myself earlier. That’s good. I was, I was wondering like for anyone in the chat, like when you guys first started, did you start with like a business plan or you just kind of like jumped in?
Speaker 1 (44:23):
No, I mean, business plan is, it’s kind of it’s pretty nineties thinking to me, but if you have an idea and you see a need for an you a fill a niche, I mean, that’s, that’s basically what you, what you wanna look at. Right? So mm-hmm, when I look at a, a new job board, when I get a new a call from a new job board owner, you know, the first thing I basically wanna know is, okay, one niche, are you going into, how well do you know that niche? Are you sure there’s a need for a job or that niche, those kind of questions, right? That’s what you should be asking yourself. And I say to them, you know, you need to prove that there’s a need that your job board idea should exist in that space. Right. and so BA basically to do that is by trial and error, just launching something simple and quick and getting it out there in the market and see if there’s actually a need for this. Right. See if it gets detraction, see if it collects an audience and builds that builds that community around it. That’s basically what you’re looking at here. That’s the challenge. So those are the questions I would ask myself and you know, kind of go from there.
Speaker 11 (45:39):
Okay. Makes sense. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
Yeah, sure. Also look at the competition too, right. Like check and see if any other job boards exist in this space. It’s really hard today to find a industry that doesn’t have a job board in it. Cause it’s such a mature industry.
Speaker 11 (45:58):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
But I’ve seen them, you know, I’ve I, you know, like, like Brian Fox is over there. I mean, that’s the, that’s a niche that there’s almost, there’s very little competition if there isn’t any right. Brian, I mean, there’s so much out there.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Yeah. They’re just like companies that look for these workers, don’t like a general job board, like a zip recruiter because they don’t want everybody, right. I mean, they, they want outgoing people and people who will be friendly and, and all of that. And I think for us having the reputation profiles, like we got full profiles, pictures, and resume and their qualities, and they can capture endorsements from other workers and companies like it’s, it’s a lot. I would not do trusted hurt again if I was starting to say over six years ago knowing what I know today, but it’s I, I think I go back to like the community, right. And, and your connections. And they will take you as far as your passion goes. Right. at least, at least in my case, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Yeah. The other question to answer up Brian is, is can you build a community around a like topic is that’s the essentially what a job board is. And that’s the way I think to think about it. It’s not just job posting things, it’s everything it’s that plus content and resumes and you know, information, resources around that stuff. And, and just building a community. I have a client called venture fi, which is a tech based job or community like a built in.com, you know, based around like cities, tech, cities. And they’ve done a great job at just building community around topic tech jobs by essentially creating content, a lot of content around companies in that space, the people in that space. And if you’re willing to do that and you know, there,
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Chris based on your email, I listened to the, how I built this of TaskRabbit. And I think Brian, oh,
Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, that was great. Wasn’t it?
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yes. Brian, if you haven’t listened to that yet, like that is a really good job marketplace story. It’s
Speaker 1 (48:26):
Great. Yeah.
Speaker 11 (48:27):
Yeah. I just wanna advertise, I didn’t listen to it yet.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Oh, it’s awesome. It really is.
Speaker 11 (48:32):
I’ll check it out. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah. I love how they just, you know, kind of built it locally and it kind of just grew from there. And that was pretty cool to see. Great story. I think zip recruiters, founder been a couple podcasts too. So search for him too. He’s on some, some interesting discussions as well. Ironically, ZipRecruiter was not a job board in the beginning. They, they basically, they, they started out as a kinda a website provider for staffing firms. That’s how they started what I remember. All right. It’s 5 52. What are the questions you guys got? Was it wraps us up?
Speaker 6 (49:24):
I do have a question. If, you know, mind me jumping in it’s about automation. I just recently started using Zier. I also tested out make or formally integr mat. And I wondered if anybody else used any of these automation tools to automate, not just the job ad purchase process, which is basically automated within the job board itself that I use, but the social media postings and the follow up emails. Does anybody use any of those?
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yes, I do. I’ll go first, I guess. So I use two, I use API for some stuff and I use deliver it, deliver it or the other. So
Speaker 6 (50:02):
How do you deliver it?
Speaker 1 (50:03):
I’ll I’ll
Speaker 6 (50:03):
Put it, oh, deliver it.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Yeah. It’s like D L V R I it something I can, I can never spell the URL here. Its okay. The chat
Speaker 6 (50:14):
Found it.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Yep. Okay. For the others. There’s the chat. So basically we deliver it. That’s my social media posting tool essentially. So ive, I own 30 different social media channels across face, Twitter and LinkedIn mm-hmm and I publish every blog post and almost every job through that chin through that tool to my channels or I even use it for it’s even great for like content curation. So for example, I can go to deliver it. I can do a search of feeds for any topic, could be, you know, about biking or hunting or whatever it’s and it’ll come up with a bunch of like blog feeds, it finds, and you can actually recirculate that into your social media channels. So essentially populate your social media feels like a human would someone just and it’s a great tool for that. I’ve been using it for years.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
It’s like $10 a month. If you add more social media channels, it gets more pricey. I think I pay about 60 bucks for like 25 social media channels. I connected to it. And I’ve gotten another, I use Zier for, what do I use Zier for oh, I have a community. It’s not, it’s not a job work community, but it’s a mighty network site for my EBI hobby. And I use Xavier to do all the republishing of content on there into the social media channels as well. Cause it’s built into the the platform of mighty networks, but there’s buffer app. But anybody else use any kinda automation for their social media stuff?
Speaker 2 (52:01):
No,
Speaker 1 (52:01):
I wish it kinda free it frees up your time. Right. It just helps populate your social media channels automatically. And then I just, you know, I augment it with a human whenever I have time. Right. That’s basically how I use it. So. Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
Mm-Hmm does on that question, Chris, does anybody use like they generate jobs on their site and then send it to a Twitter account right. And hashtag it with
Speaker 1 (52:28):
That’s what I do with delivery. Yeah. So, and deliver also will auto hashtag it, or you can actually do fixed hashtags. So if they’re a hashtags in your industry that are used often, that’s great for the fixed tax fixed hashtag feature, right know, hashtag event jobs, whatever it is. Right. You know, stuff like that, that just makes your jobs more discoverable in the social platforms. That’s the main reason I do it for the search engine. You know, stuff I get from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook is people are searching, you know, for, for content. They’ll see a job on there and we’ll they click it. So that’s the basic reason I do it. Carla Hamlin. You guys, you sent me those questions. Didn’t you? Are you CP?
Speaker 1 (53:16):
Carla, talk to me, Carla, going once going twice. Mike’s off when I, I answered your questions, Carla. So they’ll be in the replay. So stay tuned for that. And yeah, it’s 5 56. I’m gonna go throw some burgers on the grill I guess, but and then let’s see here, anybody go to HR tech in a few weeks out in Vegas. I’ll be there. I’ll be in Philadelphia the week after that for recruit Philly. And I’m also going to Phoenix in October early October. So, but I don’t think any guys are out there too. So Chris, what’s the name of the company deliver it? Yeah, it’s in the chat there. Kevin, there’s a link to it. What it again? Oh, that was just too KA. Okay, hold on. Sorry. I gotta do everyone in the meeting. Here’s the link?
Speaker 1 (54:23):
Kevin that’s deliver.com. Yeah. $10 a month for like three channels, three social media accounts. And then it goes up from there. You can add, it has tier, so I’ll pay like 60 bucks a month, I think right now. Cause I’ve so many channels across my websites, a few clients too. So it’s a really great tool. Yeah, definitely. You know, it frees up your time. It populates your social media channels and it gets, it gets you more clicks overall. It’s a, you know, it’s not a lot of clicks, but it it’s just, again, it helps it’s you know, you have a thousand jobs you’re pushing out there on social media every month. Now you might get 500 clicks on that. I don’t know. I’m just, just guessing here, but something like that. So how’s it compared to buffer or hoot suite? It’s basically the same thing.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
Buffer does the same thing and never use TSU. So, but it’s, they’re all basically the same. They just do things a little bit differently. I, I find, deliver it to be pretty easy, intuitive overall, so, and I think there’s a free version too. If you do like two social media channels, least are used to it anyway. So try it out, try out. And yeah, one of their chip on Twitter too. If, if you have a lot of jobs, they create a separate Twitter, only job account. Just push every job you have into that account, hashtag it and just automate it. It’ll grow automatically just by having content on it. So nice. All right guys. Well, it’s six o’clock and thank you guys for coming. Appreciate it. You can only by half the people showed up who signed up.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
So I think we had a good discussion and hope you guys learn something. So yeah. Thanks for organizing Chris. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Nice, really nice meet. Thank you. I do these quarterly. Thank you, Chris. Later in the fall, probably November, December, and then again in March we’ll have job board con again. So stay tuned for that. And I’ll put this on replay on these job board secrets, YouTube channel, hopefully next day or two. So keep an eye out for that. All right, buddy. Well, again, have a great night and thanks for joining job board secrets. Happy hour later. Thanks. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye.
