5 ms·

Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings?

• mischanix 12y ago
  There's really nothing wrong with just offering paid slots and letting the buyers decide if they're worth it.
  • moksha256 12y ago
    Agreed, but it's time-expensive and $$-expensive to build a site without a viable financial model. I'm firmly against ads, and I'm not a fan of VC until that viable financial model is figured out.
• MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Have a look at which cities craigslist charges for, how much it charges, and for which specific kinds of jobs. For example, http://portland.craigslist.org/ http://portland.craigslist.org/ charges $25.00 to run a "software / qa / dba" ad for a month, but nothing at all to run such an ad at http://spokane.craigslist.org/ http://spokane.craigslist.org/ It's not really the traffic that counts, but conversions. How much money do _you_ really need? Are you working full-time on this? If not you might be better off to charge little or nothing, so as to build market share. Most job boards don't do much to market themselves, other than maybe send some spam. There's a lot you could do yourself. Suppose you have a local job board, you could show up to MeetUp groups and the like to promote your board, pass out handbills in public places, send flyers around to student employment offices at universities. You won't need much traffic at all, if the people doing the hiring are able to find lots of qualified candidates through your board. This is a highly competitive area. There are bazillions of job boards, however most of them totally suck, so you have the opportunity to do well by doing good.
  • m52go 12y ago
    I appreciate your thoughts. The market I'm targeting is college students. The site functions as the missing guidance/career counselor to guide them through school in the area of their choosing. The edge is that it's a somewhat scaleable form of mentorship because mentors don't have to repeatedly spend time to have influence once they're on the site. Example: students looking to major and work in software engineering follow the software engineering 'channel' where they see all the top books, videos, resources, etc. that top software engineers found critical to their own formal + informal education. The goal is to be a powerhouse for this type of content, and the job board is an ancillary benefit that might help visitors. Traditional ads aren't an option. Hence my curiosity in other options. Anyway, I imagine the people on this site would be highly qualified. Great point about charging little to nothing and then building from there. Kind of obvious, in hindsight, but in never occurred to me!
    • MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      Never underestimate the power of junk mail. Er... direct mail. Send paper posters around to the departmental offices at as many schools as you can. It would not be hard to compile the postal addresses yourself, however you can rent such mailing lists quite cheaply. A "tested" list, which is regarded as high-value, rents for ten cents per name or so, but a "compiled" list, as this would be, is much cheaper, like one cent per name. However if you have specific contacts at a school, and can address a cover letter to the contact by name, they're more likely to actually help you out by putting your poster up in a visible location. Also consider advertising in student newspapers, student radio stations, as well as radio stations that while not run by students, are in the communities where schools are located. Sometimes you can get free advertising just by sending around a thoughtfully-worded press release.
      • m52go 12y ago
        Hehe, true about direct mail. A scrappy approach is clever. I've reached out to my alma mater and they're generally not too difficult about posting items around campus. Thanks a bunch for the tips!
• mattgibson 12y ago
  Not easy to answer without more detail. Monetisation depends on the type of people you have visiting. StackOverflow had a lot of difficulty monetising with adverts for books from Amazon, which they concluded was because people come there looking for free stuff, rather than to buy things (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising-experiment/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising...). Other sites find this works well. Who are your main users and why would they come to the site? Teachers? If so, what level - school, college, postgrad? Managers who purchase stuff for the teachers, maybe? I would imagine you will also have to take into account the skills being demonstrated on the site and the value they have to employers. If your site will attract the best and brightest (e.g. top coders on StackOverflow) whom employers want to recruit, then I think the job listings would be more valuable than if it's mostly made up of people looking for free stuff to save themselves the hassle of making it themselves.
• jblesage 12y ago
  Depends on your niche. If you are catering to a very select, focused audience then you don't need volume, because the specificity is your selling point. There is a lot more than traffic that companies look for in a job board. Since your site is based around educational content, try to find profitable, untapped markets related to this and focus on only those markets at the beginning. You can be creative with this: for example, hedge funds routinely pay top dollar to find the best PhD students in math-related subjects, so maybe there is a way to bring both together.
  • m52go 12y ago
    Interesting. As it turns out, the site will be structured to show users content based on the particular tag combination they select. So if they've selected #math #machine-learning #chaos #san-francisco #startup #phd, they'll be in a very focused group.
    • ulisesrmzroche 12y ago
      That's not really going to take off. You need to be THE math/machine-learning job board. You need to be top-of-mind with job boards.
• awwstn 12y ago
  I work at Assembly and have paid pretty close attention to Coderwall, which might have some lessons for you. Coderwall has around 500,000 unique user sessions per month, and it's all software developers. They monetize in a few different ways. (all the revenue is listed transparently at https://assembly.com/coderwall/financials https://assembly.com/coderwall/financials and more detailed breakdown for October is here: https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-s-october-finances https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-s-october-fin...) 1. Job postings: companies pay to list jobs to the community. ($99 for a 30 day posting) 2. Ad partnerships. One is a retargeting partnership with Perfect Audience that pays about $15,000/month – and another is partnership with New Relic where users can deploy New Relic and get a coderwall t-shirt (and NR pays Coderwall per deploy) I actually think Coderwall could be a much larger business than it is given the strong, active userbase, and the community is working on that. If you have questions about this, ping me at austin@assembly.com
  • m52go 12y ago
    I see. Thanks for the numbers. Ugh I hate ads so much, but clearly they're pretty lucrative in the right situations. BTW Assembly is a very interesting concept, and your pinned tweet is hilarious. Might have to investigate it more once I get further.
• marketingadvice 12y ago
  Minimum traffic, maybe 1 hit/month. Honestly I've seen people go to paid listings off the bat and then they aggregate from other places to get the ball rolling. It works but you have to put in effort, it's a massively saturated market.
• redmattred 12y ago
  You can create an out of the box job board with SimplyHired if you want to test without building anything: http://www.simplyhired.com/partners-overview http://www.simplyhired.com/partners-overview
  • m52go 12y ago
    Very cool, didn't know this existed. I'll have to check out out. Thanks!
• petercooper 12y ago
  It's not really about traffic, it's more about the quality of the audience. People posting job listings (really just a special type of ad, BTW..) at a premium cost are very keen to know demographic information about who's looking at those listings. Are they in the right regions/locations? Are they the right level? Are they a group that even engages with job ads? That audience could be as small as 1000 or as large as a million to be worthwhile paying for. Your best bet if you don't have a strong feel for things is to allow free listings initially and then offer upsells (for example, a fee to have the listing mentioned on the site's Twitter account or in a single, tasteful link on the homepage).
• cmalpeli 12y ago
  Founder of JobBoard.io here. Job boards can be a great way to supplement monetization of a niche audience. Expect it to take a while to build traction, but when you do it can be quite valuable. I agree you should start by not charging for posting. Once the audience is built up, by specializing and being in a niche you should be able to charge MORE for postings than a more generic job board. We put together a pretty comprehensive blog post a while back on the topic of job board marketing and promotion, you may find it useful: http://blog.jobboard.io/post/44541289000/how-to-promote-your-job-board http://blog.jobboard.io/post/44541289000/how-to-promote-your... It covers things like email marketing, social and using backfill to beef up your inventory....hope this helps!
  • m52go 12y ago
    Thank you! That article is great.