Monday 4 May 2009

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 .