Starting a niche job site or a networking community in the medical and healthcare industry can be extremely rewarding. Likewise, this holds true for building a job board or networking community beyond the niche industry of medical and healthcare.
Developing and running a job board requires an enormous commitment of time and discipline.
Aside from the technical know-how to get a job board up and running, you will need to plan on investing a lot of time. At the same time, the ability to delegate managing everything from developing the site to customer service will be needed. Therefore, starting with the company’s image and vision is a key element to starting a niche job site. Subsequently, setting pricing for employers and job seekers will be an important decision. Additionally, designing forms for posting jobs and job seeker forms will be needed.
Building a job board is an ongoing effort with a large upfront commitment. There are a lot of underlying details initially needed when starting a niche job site. In other words, be prepared to develop the details such as job categories and job industries. Recognize, customer service needs your job site will have. Additionally, content development along with ongoing marketing of your job site will be critical to your success.
Partner and Network with MedCepts for a jump start
We will help you to get started. MedCepts has been building and assisting others to build job sites and networking communities for nearly two decades. We know this space like
no other company in the medical and healthcare industry. MedCepts has been involved long enough to see some of the major job and career sites develop from infancy. Moreover, we were actually involved with several of them in various ways.
We are available to assist with building your job site, from the development stage to launch and ongoing marketing. Additionally, we can assist from providing reviews to analyzing software. This includes, whether open source or private software to UAT and stress testing the process of your platform.
Finally, we will help you build your entire network, resume bank, profiles, sales reps, employers, healthcare providers. Plus, content and more.
Our healthcare marketing directories are extensive to assist you in any specialty niche in the medical and healthcare industry. Additionally, we have also ventured beyond to multiple industry sectors.
In the event you simply seek additional information on building a job board, we have chosen to share a few of our successes with you to help get you started.
Starting, Building and Creating a Job Site
Simply stated, if you think you will build a job site and “they will come” – think again. Notwithstanding, chances of enjoying high levels of traffic as the result of building a job board are good. However, this holds true as long as you’re truly investing thought and time into starting a niche job site. When considering taking on the challenge, there are a myriad of tasks required for maintaining any sort of business website. Firstly, and most obvious, you must have a domain obtained through a website hosting service.
MedCepts has worked with companies building a job board utilizing their own coding. Additionally, we have assisted companies with building a job board through utilizing an array of already developed software. We have tested, challenged and deployed many job boards.
One of the most challenging tasks with starting a niche job site is the UAT or User Acceptance Testing process.
UAT is where there is aggressive testing done prior to launch. Testing the process as you are building a job board enables you to make sure the visitors of your niche job site have a positive experience. Prior knowledge of building a job board is powerful and this is an area MedCepts will help. First Impressions Matter when starting a niche job site.
There are numerous other challenges to overcome. However, we do not see these as challenges but it can be challenging and overwhelming to some. When initially building a job board, it is critically important to develop unique and relevant content when launching or starting a niche job site. Content development will help with both, Push and Pull Marketing as you are building a job board. Developing content will be an ongoing effort to obtain and keep visitors on your niche job site.
After starting a niche job site, there will be additional ongoing efforts needed. As a quick overview, these include blogging, tracking results, updating listings and maintaining servers. Certainly, you will need to provide a dedicated marketing effort to promote your job board. Furthermore, to be successful, you will need to be able to address and be prepared to challenge the competitive nature across the globe in the job board market space.
Stand alone job board or add-on value to a company website
When developing your website, a niche job board is great as the entire focus of your web site. On the other hand, the job site could be utilized as an add-on for content for your site. Add on content will help you draw additional traffic. Inclusion of a job board to your website is a great way to offer resources. This will add additional benefits to your website visitors.
In addition, as you develop the traffic (website visitors) to your site you can charge fees for posting jobs, which often range between $100 to $300 a month. Medical and healthcare job sites do best if they focus on serving specific niches and a niche job site can be additionally beneficial if you also target in on jobs requiring more advanced or specialized skills. A niche job board could also focus on a specific location. Niche job boards tend to charge higher job posting fees.
Competing with large and established job boards
Much too often, job site builders turn to their own experience on large job boards like CareerBuilder, Monster, Indeed or SimplyHired in an attempt to mimic but you should not expect your job site to compare to these sites for your niche site. However, you certainly could utilize other large job boards as resources for developing different ideas for your own job board. Niche job sites often increase the job seeker’s chances for finding a job specific to the niche they’re looking for, but also landing that job. Niche job sites are also beneficial to employers and recruiters for targeting specialty niche job seekers. Smaller companies tend to utilize niche boards because they often result in responses from higher quality candidates. They may receive less responses, but they are typically higher quality!
Marketing Your Job Board and Optimizing SEO for your Job Site
When searching for (and during final selection of) your job board software, you will find many software packages offer optimization for your job listings and job site content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a key factor to attracting job candidates and employers to your job board. SEO is a series of many different marketing strategies to increase your placement in a search engine. As an example, when job seekers search for relevant job opportunities you should want your jobs appearing first.
A niche job board with specialty specific jobs can do this more easily than highly competitive or more generalized jobs. An additional key to attracting those in a niche job market such as employers, recruiters and job seekers is to focus on providing niche specific content. Your SEO focus should also include a marketing strategy for Branding your website with relevant content as this can be a critical element to success. It will be important to be familiar with marketing for search engine results. If you believe you are a great marketer but lack the website marketing capabilities, it’s time to expand your knowledge in the SEO arena or hire a consultant – that’s if you truly want a successful job board.
Utilizing Social Media for Marketing your Job Board
Social Networking when building a job board can play a very important role in developing your job board. There are a multitude of benefits for utilizing social media for your job board and your basic, first level website marketing, equates to Back links to your job site.
Review social media marketing for other job boards for ideas
Let’s face it, if someone see’s something of interest to them, they will follow your link to your website and that is exactly what you want. Linking to your website BUILDS TRAFFIC, pure and simple! Back links to your website also builds power for your job site in search engine results. Links with “Keywords” specific for your website will also be HUGE in building search engine results! Search engines love to see back links. Better yet, strive to have your links shared by others as this will be more powerful. Linking with keywords can be extremely valuable. Be careful not to post just anything while being social. Furthermore, focus on keywords relevant to the keywords for association with your job board.
We’re confident one cannot ever really wonder if social media is a waste of time or a valuable and worthwhile effort. 
However, let’s cover the basics by starting with a quick look at what other job boards do on social networks. Let’s just start with taking a look at a few Twitter accounts for various successful job boards. Searching on Twitter for a domain (anycareerjobsite.com) and choosing the “accounts” tab will provide you a display of choices for that domain. For example, as a result of a job board domain search on Twitter, the image to the right is inclusive of only a few Twitter accounts of a specific job site we did a search for.
One job site establishes 135 twitter accounts – How much is too much
This job site resulted in 135 – yes, ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE, twitter accounts with all accounts posting jobs with numerous links back to their job site. Now, we are definitely not recommending as a small company and a new job board that you need to start 100+ twitter accounts, but we hope this clearly identifies someone else out there (besides us) feels there is value in utilizing a twitter account for your job board!
The image to the above right shows a few “location specific” Twitter accounts, along with Niche specialties, e.g. nursing jobs. You certainly do not need to divide up your job specialties, but you absolutely need to “Tweet” about your jobs with back links to those jobs. In addition, your tweets should include keyword specific targeting with the sharing of links to relevant content such as articles, blog entries, forums, etc.
Let’s take a look at another extremely well branded job site and their presence on Twitter.
To the left is an image of a few of the results when we searched for “Careerbuilder” rather than adding the .com in this sample search due to the international presence and international domain extensions. We simply conducted a search for “CareerBuilder”
Feel free to do your own search for job sites and decide on your own whether you feel Twitter or other social media accounts are worthy of your investment in time to “tweet” a few things about jobs you have, tweets directed to employers for posting jobs or links to relevant content in the job search industry.
We feel Twitter and other social media networks are well worth posting all about your job board. If you have social accounts like Twitter, Facebook, a company page on LinkedIn, why wouldn’t you take a few seconds out of your day to post information about your job board? At the time of writing this article, there is no cost for you to post about your job site on many various social networks! The exposure could be good for you – try it!
Fun Motivational on building a job board.
A job site software company established in 1994 became very successful and its job board continues to operate today. The owner of the software company (NetStart) received $2M from investors. He (Robert McGovern) decided to host his own domain with his software. He started out with building a job board of his own. As a result, he offered those that bought his software to list their jobs on his new job site. Today, we know the job site as CareerBuilder.
####
MedCepts owns and operates an entire community of specialty niche job sites and social networks – all exclusive to the medical and healthcare or sales and marketing industry. In addition, we have partnered or assisted in the development and building of job sites, social networks, Community Websites, niche forums, Social Sites and eCommerce sites across the medical and healthcare industry on an array of unique platforms. We presently have job posting distribution capabilities to 10,000+ job sites! MedCepts has been building and assisting others to build job sites for well over a decade and a half. We feel we know this space like no other company in the medical and healthcare industry.