How well is the job market?

How can I grow a new job board website focused on a hyper local market?

  • I am a partner in a web development company that recently finished a job board website for a client. The company's goal was to compete with the local paper, which charges an average of about $500 dollars per week per listing in its job's section. One of the strong points of the site would have been that the company owned the .com name of the city in which it was competing. Also, it could have priced its listings significantly lower than the newspaper. The city has a population of about 200,000 people and 15,000 established companies. Only one paper. Any jobs online are usually posted on CareerBuilder or Monster. So, without getting into the details, the client abandoned the project, and now we own the city domain name, a 100% functionally complete website. Rather than hit the delete button, we'd like to try to monetize it. The domain name gets about 500 unique visitors every day simply because people think it's the city government's website. Also, we own the twitter account now of the city name as well. It has about 150 followers (but no activity yet). Couple issues - none of us who worked on it live in the city for which it was built. Secondly none of us no anything about the industry (not sure how important that is). However, we do have some funds to market it (not much, this is grass roots. We probably wouldn't be comfortable putting more than $5,000 or $10,000 USD into it). Are there any suggestions as to how this can be developed out? Anyone who's built a local job board website? What worked and what did not? We thought the idea was pretty sound just on a price comparison basis with the local paper as well as career and monster (we were thinking of job posts 30 days for 15 bucks).

  • Answer:

    We are also fighting to make our job board grow and it is not easy. You have to first give extra value to both companies and candidates. This is a lot of Product thinking work. You also have to develop your ideas to try them out. Maybe this would be the biggest bottle neck since you don't have that much money to invest. You can't develop a normal job board, that offers basically the same than the rest and expect that companies prefer your board over others. The same goes for candidates. You will have to find a niche that is not taken, and focus the product on this niche. The promotion is a big issue too. You have to fight again to get companies and candidates. Most of your companies would be already posting jobs in other places like the ones you mentioned where they probably get many applicants. If you are not providing more candidates, they won't spend the time posting the job with you. Another key point is to know how the business works for this city. What I have learned is that in each cit, the job hunting works different. I can tell you by experience, it is not easy. What about selling the domain to someone with experience that is already in the business? I would be interested in that!

Patricia Garcia at Quora Visit the source

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