In the past year a number of my initial consulting phone calls have centered around the entrepreneur building a job board built around content. And to me, this is a tried and true way of making money in online recruiting.
There are a number of successful so-called “job boards” that built their business off the back of content. Examples include;
The Muse – became a clearing house of millennial job search content with millions of users that eventually added jobs. They focused on company profiles as the main offering. Profiles on The Muse cost upwards of $10k per year.
Builtin – this site which caters to tech/startup life in the major tech cities across the U.S., creates content around the companies it seeks to attract.
VentureFizz – this tech job board similar to Builtin but focuses on Boston/New York also creates vast amounts of content, is basically a giant tech directory with profile pages that contain jobs.
KeyValues – this site focuses on building profiles for engineering teams to help sell life at the company. This is a one person business that is already making six figure in revenue according to a podcast I recently heard.
Builtin and The Muse are multi-million dollar business while VentureFizz and KeyValues fall into the six figure category.
When I say ‘content first‘ I think that becomes clear when you look at their homepages. They lead with articles. VentureFizz also displays jobs alongside the content.
So to me content first is a proven business model. Pick a niche and become the go to news resource for that industry. Its actually quite simple.
The challenge of course is being good at creating that content. If you aren’t that comfortable with making content, take a look at the KeyValues site. It is essentially a browsable company directory. They have a blog but the main lure is the deep content profiles on each engineering teams.
BeforeYouApply is another site just like KeyValues which recently launched. They interview companies to get the content that goes onto the team profiles. There are no hosted jobs on KV/BYA…they simply link to the company jobs on their own career site. They just sell the actual profile.
These sites should not be thought of as job boards, they are online communities built around an industry through blogs, podcast, events and more. And they have multiple streams of revenues from advertising to profiles to job postings.
You could build an MVP of any of these businesses through a tool like SmartJobBoard. It allows you to blog and creates pages. It has job search and email alerts builtin. You can craft the homepage as you wish to display your latest articles first instead of the search bar. You can even sync signups with Mailchimp to run a newsletter.
KeyValues would be easy to replicate off WordPress. Look for a directory theme that you can buy and mock up. I think KeyValues only revenue is made through selling profiles. Most likely its a flat yearly fee somewhere between $3k-$5k per year (that’s just a guess). Their selling point is basically employer branding for participating companies.
So if you are looking to start a job board today or currently operate one, think about the content first strategy. It’s proven. It works!
