Designing a Job Board

Once you have completed this type of research and fully understood the requirements of your audience, you can make more informed strategic decisions about the sites design and what functionality you should include.

One of the key things to take into consideration when designing your job board is ensuing that visitors to your site are able to find the information they are looking for easily and via minimal clicks.

By getting the basics right and offering a user friendly layout and navigation, it will help to increase your conversion rates.

This point has been proven by www.jobserve.com where, as a result of the JobServe team’s continual focus on improving the online user experience, they recently reported an impressive 300% conversion rate from unique visitors into applicants (1.2 million applicants from just 400k unique visitors per month).

Once you’re confident that visitors reaching your job board will experience a relevant journey, which in turn will maximise the application conversion rate, it is important that you focus on optimising your site to maximise the overall visitor traffic.

Ensure from the outset that the platform you are investing in covers the basics, such as friendly descriptive URL structures, Meta description customisation and no duplicate content.

Integration of a web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, is paramount if you want to make informed decisions about your site going forward. This point may sound obvious but there are still many businesses out there that don’t track the visitor activity on their site.

So, you now have the fundamental visitor journey working effectively and the right people are finding your site.

Time to look at all of the added value or rich features to give your job board the ‘bells and whistles’ that will make it stand out in what is becoming a fairly competitive market. Two areas that have been continuously growing in recruitment over the past couple of years are social media and mobile.

With the ever growing trend in mobile browsing, it’s important that your jobs are assessable to any candidate, located anywhere, at anytime. There are multiple ways this can be delivered, from an IOS / Android specific app through to a more agnostic, cross platform approach. Looking across the recruitment websites and job boards that HotLizard have developed, the number of visitors accessing the sites via a mobile device has doubled since the beginning of this year, with a big rise recorded over July and August this year in particular.

With 25% of time online spent on social networks (as reported by Internet Advertising Bureau), this is an area that can’t be ignored, both in terms of how it features within your job board and as a means of marketing your site.

There are a number of features that will allow your candidates to use your job board in conjunction with their social media profiles, including social bookmarking (for example Add This) and registration via their Facebook log-in.

Other areas that are also moving further into job board owners ‘must have’ category are video content (for example, video CV’s), more advanced integration with social media sites, (particularly following the new ‘Apply with LinkedIn’ feature) and building on the mobile browsing trend by offering more features to visitors via mobile devices.