What is a community job board?

Just recently we've been doing a bit of thinking about Jobshout and its potential for niche market recruitment and business generation.

We've come to the conclusion that, given the formidable array of tools available in JS, its application is even wider than it was when we launched it a couple of years ago. WE came up with the idea of "community job boards". I don't know whether anyone has used this phrase to describe the sort of service we are talking about, but coincidentally a couple of recent signups were thinking along the same lines. We think we are onto a great idea here.

On the web, as in real life, people form communities. In other words they share interests. Community job boards provide a great, often badly needed, service to these niche areas.

A community job board might publish ads for your own town or city. Or it could be that you decide to set up a job board for ads relating to a business sector in which you already work. This is actually a great way to enhance your core business.

Let’s suppose (to give a silly example) that you provide admin services to apple pie manufacturers. You have website attracting hits from people interested in apple pies. You want to get more customers, more traffic to your site, and more income.

You decide to set up a job board for the apple pie manufacturing community and offer it to your clients. They now have a specialist place to advertise for suitably qualified staff and are suitably impressed that you have had the initiative to do this. You, on the other hand, are getting lots of apple-pie-related content going on your site. So it performs better in apple-pie-specific searches and gets more apple-pie-interested visitors as a result. Your business now has greater prominence in the apple pie sector, you get more enquiries and so win additional clients in the apple pie sector. They too advertise positions on your site and you get even more apple-pie-relevant content on your site for Google and other search engines to index. There’s no reason why it can't go on getting better and better.

Your clients are delighted. Jobseekers spread the word. Search engines love your site. You are getting more business. And, if you want to charge for this service, you have an additional income stream.

And it's quick and easy to do.

That’s what we call a Community Job Board. Jobshout enables you to get one online using your own domain name with minimum hassle and expense.

We'd like to know what you think about this in the comments.

If you don't yet use Jobshout and would like further information, email info@jobshout.co.uk, call us on +44 (0)20 7736 8220, view our demo site , just sign up for a trial .

Twitter Job search XML feed URL

Twitter Job search XML feed URL

If you run Job board using Jobshout, and you wish to upload all current jobs onto http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/ using XML feed then read on.

Jobshout server automatically creates the necessary XML feed of current jobs ready to be fed into Twitter job search system. XML output is compliant with Twitter API mentioned here: http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/static/add-jobs

Please checkout links below to see Jobshout XML feed output.

http://jobs2.workstation.co.uk/twitterjobsearch.xml

http://yourcv.jobshout.co.uk/twitterjobsearch.xml

If your Job board runs using jobshout.co.uk domain XML feed link is for Twitter Job Search is simply:

http://{Your Jobshout Account Code}.jobshout.co.uk/twitterjobsearch.xml

If your Job board runs using your business domain XML feed link for Twitter Job Search is simply:

http://{Your domain name}/twitterjobsearch.xml

example:

http://jobs2.workstation.co.uk/twitterjobsearch.xml

Enjoy!

Job Application Confirmation Email to Applicants

Overview
Each recruitment business is different and has different business process, requirements and goals. Jobshout was designed with exactly this in mind so Jobshout has built-in macro language ( or scripting tools ) which can customise Jobshout functionality for each unique customer requirments. Sciprts can be added quickly and many times without making a change in the system.

For example:
A client wants to send an automated Job Application acknowledgement email to applicants who applied for one or more jobs from their Job board using Jobshout.

Example of Email setup by non-technical person:

Hi <*--JobApplicantName--*> → ( At the time of sending email <*--JobApplicantName--*> will be replaced by the actual applicant name )

This is an automated response to thank you for sending us your latest CV and for applying for the following job(s).

Jobs your applied for:
<*--LoopForJobsInApp--*> ( Jobshout loops through no. of jobs in the job application )
Thank you for applying for our job ref: <*--JobRef--*>, <*--JobLink--*> → ( At the time of sending email <*--JobRef--*> will be replaced by the actual job reference and <*--JobLink--*> will be replaced by the actual job details web page )
<*--EndLoop--*> ( Jobshout ends the loop )

We will contact you if we need further information or to discuss your applicationin in greater detail. If you don't hear from us within the next two weeks then unfortunately, on this occassion, your application has been unsuccessful.

Please continue to check the available jobs we have using the following link as we review and update the website frequently.

http://jobs.jobshout.co.uk

In addition, we welcome applications from any of your friends / acquaintances with similar skills.

Please keep us up to date with your employment / job seeking status.

Thanks again from the Company name Team,

Tel: XXX or XXX
Web: demo.jobshout.co.uk
Email: jobs@jobshout.co.uk

Registered in City, Country. Company Number XXX.
Registered Office: Company name and address.

Signature and other terms and conditions can be added here.

Just by adding this email template online and setting to automatically send when ever applicant applies for job(s) and or register a CV will engage applicant and also give good impression. This is just an example. Email templates can be setup for almost any event and mostly by the non-technical person.

See more at http://www.jobshout.co.uk/job-application-confirmation-email-to-applicants

Get smarter by staying online

Far from atrophying the grey matter, using the Internet helps boost brain power, research suggests, according to the BBC.

1 network = 30% of ALL spam???

According to this article in the New York Times on the shutting down of a major international spam network probably 90% of all email traffic is spam. That certainly is my experience every morning. And this gang, says the NYT was probably responsible for 30% of all spam, using 35,000 'zombie' computers, whose owners never knew they were being used that way, in an international 'botnet'. Mindboggling!

So will you shortly be seeing a sharp reduction in daily spam? What do you think?

Five reasons every niche site should have a job board

Here's an interesting angle: Julian Stopps on the bornpodcast.com blog says that all niche publications should run a job board. We agree - and it is something that Jobshout can be easily configured to do.

A few of his arguments equally apply to agencies and medium-sized companies upwards. It's cheap to implementm, it gets your site found and so can drive traffic to other parts of the site and it's yet another tool to combat the global talent shortage. And of course there are quite a few additional arguments which apply - the kudos it gives, the sense of professionalism that it imparts and, if your job board is really well search-engine-optimized (which Jobshout does as a matter of course), the tremendous web marketing tool it can be - probably the most cost-effective marketing tool you will ever find.

I will now leave my soapbox.

Finding keywords for your site

Creating keywords for your site is by no means an easy task. Understanding exactly what you think candidates and clients search for is about putting yourself in the mind of the user. There are tools to help you with this but there offer no guarantees. I have put together a short list of ways to go about creating keywords for your website.

Firstly creating keywords is a never ending task and should be reviewed as often as possible, depending on the goals and results you require.

Don’t just use general keywords

It is important that you still use the main keywords that people will search for as search engines will still recognise them. However these keywords are extremely competitive, using phrases of about 2 to 4 words are more useful then say competing for the word “furniture”. By using “art deco furniture” you are aiming to attract more specific users searching for those particular words. The trick is to keep your keywords relevant and popular enough that users will search for them but not too popular that no one searches for them at all(I never said doing this was going to be easy).

Checking on competitors sites

Checking your competitor’s sites and seeing what terms they are using and whether they are getting found in search engines is very important. Maybe you are not using those keywords in your site. This type of research is a long process but it can improve traffic to your site. If you can find keywords that your competitors are not using, you might be able to rank higher with less competition. One way to do this is if you type in Google “allintitle: keyword”. This will bring up all the sites that have chosen to use that keyword/s in the title of their website.

Use the tools that are available on the internet

Google have given webmasters many tools that allow them to refine their SEO to help them improve rankings. All of these tools are free and are very easy to use. Google have a service called Keyword Tool where you can analyse your website and it gives you keywords which are calculated from the content of your site. It will not guarantee if you use these keywords you will get more traffic to your site but it is worth having a go and seeing if there are any words or phrases you have not thought about. There are a couple of others such as Wordtracker and Wordze but these are not free services but it is worth checking out.

We know keywords are important but we must remember it is not the only way in which SEO can be improved. There are many other ways to do this but just remember to keep it ethical because after all this work, the last thing you want is to be banned from search engines altogether.

Jobshout is fully equipped to help with getting your site optimised using keywords and other various ways. To find out more click on Jobshout.