I bet we all joined a job board at least once in our life dreaming of finding a great position in an awesome company. Job boards are a vital asset to everyone who’s looking to develop a career because it not only gives you access to employers but it also helps you see what are the market demands, what is popular and what is obsolete, what others know and who is your competition.

In the past, job hunting was made using newspapers or public boards which had classifieds sections but thanks to the Internet, increasingly more companies started to use the virtual environment in order to find new employees. In the beginning, creating an online job board required a big team and the project itself was pretty complex due to the large number of customisations. That being said, if you wanted to launch a job board you needed a big budget. Happily this is not the case today thanks to the newest technologies.

Actually it is so easy that you can do it in three steps: buying web hosting, buying a domain and installing wordpress along with just one plugin, WPJobBoard.

Buying web hosting is extremely easy and I recommend you to use a popular solution and to avoid any shady hosting provider. Also, make sure that you can easily upgrade host hosting account when needed because migrating to another provider means a lot of hassle. As for buying your domain, go with something secure such as Namecheap.com. In both cases I would avoid GoDaddy.

Now after you have everything set, install WordPress either by using Fantastico ( a typical script found in every Cpanel account) either my manually downloading it from wordpress.org. If everything went smooth and your blog is up and running, all you need to do in order to change it into a state of the art job board is to install WPJobBoard plugin from http://wpjobboard.net.

Now let’s talk a little about this neat plugin. First off all it’s one of the easiest and quickest way to create a job board because you don’t need any development skills. You just simply install it and that’s it.

Suddenly your website will change its look from this:

…into something like this:

Now that you have installed this job board plugin, you need to optimise it a little. The first thing that I recommend is to install another plugin that will make your website go faster by caching all the files. For this you should go with W3 Total Cache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/). W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. In a nutshell your website will load a lot more faster.

Now you’ll need to make it more friendly for search engines in order to get better positions in Google or Yahoo. This means SEO optimisation and the best way to do it is installing Yoast SEO (https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/). This plugin automatically optimize your WordPress blog for search engines such as Google which will help you attract more visitors.

This is a minimal installation but it gives you a powerful platform for your job board. From now on you must think on how to make your website efficient and useful both for the companies that will publish jobs and with the visitors which are looking to get hired. For this you should do the following:

1. Create a flexible and intuitive job browsing. WPJobBoard allows searching by location, keyword, job type, category and the time of posting. This makes your job board more valuable to both job seekers and employers, plus job seekers can even set up email alerts and RSS feeds.

2. Monitor all the job listings. I know that you want as many jobs listed as possible but one word of advice: don’t be greedy. There’s a high probability that your job board will be targeted by spammers or not so legal employers who will post hundreds of jobs such as “earn $10.000 from working at home”. These jobs will decrease the quality of your website so you need to be careful and to remove any suspicious entry. Using WpJobBoard plugin, you have full control, adding, editing and deleting jobs with ease. As admin you can approve new jobs and also modify job properties that job posters cannot.

3. Monetize your website. WPJobBoard can charge companies for access to full resume details. This is automated for you; they pay via Paypal and after payment they receive access for a set number of days. Furthermore, get your job board off to a flying start, encouraging new users with easy to use discount codes! It’s also easy and flexible from YOUR end, because you can choose set price or percentage, how often the coupons can be used and expiration date, all from the familiar WP-Admin panel.

4. Make your visitors return. Usually a visitor will signup, scroll through a few pages and leave, so this is not a healthy user base for your website. You need to make them visit your job board regularly. WPJobBoard offers 2 effective ways to keep in touch. The first is RSS feeds (all jobs or by a single category) and the second is email alerts by keyword. This makes your site more valuable to both employers and employees.

That’s it! Now you have a fully functional job board ready to connect the employees to your visitors. As you could see, all you need is web hosting, WordPress, a few optimisation tricks and WPJobBoard plugin. Now get to work and make your website popular.