There are global job board catering to each and every niche that you can imagine out there. While monetizing a website isn’t necessarily a hard nut to crack, the difficulty of making a sustainable revenue from your website totally depends on many factors including your niche, target geography, popularity and organic traffic among many others. Unlike some informational websites such as blogs, job boards have a great potential to turn into a huge money making asset for its owners if they leverage the right monetization models.
It’s crucial to establish your job sites from scratch with a solid revenue model in mind as it helps a lot in building a worthy job board website. As a job board website, the customers you serve would be employers and job seekers. Most of the revenue opportunities revolve around these two groups of target customers. Let’s look at the different ways you can monetize your job board website.
We will split the revenue streams into 3 different categories:
- Revenue from Employers
- Revenue from Job seekers
- Advertising revenue
Monetizing Global Job Board – Revenue from Employers
Charging employers is the most popular monetization method for job board websites. Companies are always on the lookout for the best quality talent and they’re willing to shell out money if they can find valuable candidates on your job board. Here are the ways you can generate revenue from employers.
1. Job Posting
Job posting fees is a monetization method followed by most of the job board providers. Companies typically have to pay for a job listing which is displayed on the job board for a fixed period of time such as 30 days. The job posting fees can be fixed by considering your niche and the type of the companies you are targeting.
Another way to improve this revenue is to have multiple options for job listings like standard job listings and featured job listings. Since companies opting for featured job listings get more exposure, you can charge them higher. Finally, you can create packages containing a certain number of privileges and offer them at a slightly discounted price to achieve a steady revenue flow. Since job posting would be the best source of revenue for job boards, it’s always a good idea to explore further and come up with innovative ideas.
2. Access to resumes
Employers collect resumes to shortlist the relevant candidates while they are on a hiring spree. By providing them exclusive access to your job seeker resumes, you can generate some additional revenue apart from job postings.
However, make sure you only use this strategy once your job board is well established as the companies opting for this premium access feature would expect hundreds of thousands of resumes to be available. Once you have acquired a sufficient number of candidate profiles, you can generally make several hundred dollars from every employer subscribed to this service.
3. Featured employer listings
As the competition between companies to acquire the best talent is on the rise, you can offer them the opportunity to be featured on your job board homepage, blog or email newsletter. This helps the companies get more exposure from relevant candidates thus increasing their chances of attracting quality talent.
By helping them stand out from the crowd, you can generate a decent amount of additional income from your job board. A great way to sell this service is to club it with one of your premium job posting packages.
Monetizing Global Job Board –Revenue from Job Seekers
While employers have been the most popular revenue source for job boards, many job board websites have been successful in creating a revenue stream from job seekers as well.
With millions of job seekers looking to find their dream job, connecting quality talent with the relevant companies is a crucial function that can be a great source of income too. Unlike employers, most job seekers aren’t going to be interested in your paid offering. However, a carefully executed strategy can fetch you some boost in the bottom line.
1. View jobs
If you are in a high competition market, charging job seekers a weekly or monthly fee for viewing the job posting can actually work well for you. This approach also has an additional benefit of improving the quality of your candidate pool as only the people who are serious about their job search would choose to pay. This can in turn improve the reputation of your job board and create room for better opportunities.
Keep in mind that you should first have job postings that are exclusively available on your site in order to implement this model. If the job listings on your site are also available on the free job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn, it will not only work but also affect your brand reputation. On an average, you can charge anywhere between $15 to $60 for providing access to your exclusive pool of job listings.
2. Featured profiles
Highly talented job seekers don’t mind paying for the opportunity to stand out from the crowd in order to improve their chances of landing the best available job. You can easily capitalize on this by providing them just that, while adding an additional revenue model in the process.
You can offer a featured resume option where the candidate profile is displayed on top of the search results and highlighted, which is sure to gain the attention of potential employers.
Another great way to work this out is to provide them with the options to showcase cover letters or video resumes which will also help them stand out. A reasonable price for featured profile option on a niche job board is usually somewhere around $120 per month.
3. Resume writing service
Job boards with a large user base of job seekers can offer resume writing services to them and thus generate some additional revenue. You can partner with professional resume writing services to make this available or build a team for the same in-house. This will not only help the job seekers land better jobs, but also improve the overall value provided by your global job board. Add-on services like these will help boost the brand recognition of your global job board website.
Monetizing Global Job Board – Advertising options
In addition to the above mentioned direct service offerings, you could also consider monetizing the traffic coming into your global job board website using advertising options. There are a multitude of options available when it comes to advertising.’
1. Google Adsense
Google Adsense is a trusted ad-network owned and operated by the search engine giant Google. It is also a great way to monetize the visitors to your website who may not actually subscribe to any of your services. The earnings will entirely depend on your traffic and the number of people clicking on the ads. While using ads, it’s essential to ensure that the ad placements aren’t affecting the user experience provided by your site. Placing too many ads can have a negative impact on your brand image as well.
2. Job backfill
While you’re getting started with a new global job board website, you can’t expect a large supply of job listings immediately. Until you gain the necessary traction and start getting job listings naturally, you can populate your job board with listings from popular global job board such as Ziprecruiter, Indeed, Job2Careers and the like.
This model is called job backfill and you can earn affiliate commissions while job seekers click through your listings. Many global job board websites make thousands of dollars every month from job backfill alone.
3. Banner advertisements
Banner ads are a very common model of website monetization and can be a great fit for job boards too. You can sell banner ad spaces on your job boards to companies providing services or products closely related to your niche and charge a monthly fee for the same. The user experience aspect is still relevant here and you shouldn’t over populate your site with banner ads.
Global Job Board – In Summary
If your job board isn’t generating the amount of revenue you initially thought it would, it’s probably because you are putting all your eggs in one basket. It helps to diversify your revenue channels and explore new monetization options as long as it is in line with the brand image you are looking to project. You can consider implementing two or more of these monetization options to start making more revenue from your job board website.