How can I monetize a job board website?

I have a job board website listing local jobs in my country. There are two kind of customers: the job seekers and the employer.

I have some ideas but I want your advice about monetizing the website and the best business model.

In most cases you would charge the employers a fee for listing their job openings, or for searching resumes and CVs. (See Monster.com, HotJobs, careers.stackoverflow.com, etc.) Most companies who place job listings are used to having to pay for them, especially in cases where the job seeker has special skills or is hard to find.

You might also consider charging the job seeker. This model is more rare and is actually prohibited in some countries (including Australia and the United Kingdom... check before doing this). One example is TheLadders.com in the US. This might work better in circumstances where the job is more valuable than the employee.

A more sophisticated approach might be to try to reach a widespread scale first. Don't charge anyone until you are the de facto place where EVERYONE finds jobs in your country. Then you will be in a good position to charge the best employers for better service, banner ads, large images, featured job listings, and more. You may also be able to monetize the data you have, for example, many employers would pay you for access to market salary data, unemployment and employment statistics, data on commute times, or employee's ranking and rating of workplaces and benefits.

Good luck!

Hi in my opinion first expand your company and make sure that you have enough CV's in your database and then go for premium accounts for employers.

I am against to the other model where job seekers should pay. If you offer free service for job seekers there will be lots and lots of people who will be interested in your site and you get clicks for that where you can go for ads and other things and in addition to that by seeing the number of customers you have employers will pay you for job postings

where as employers will only click when they are in need of services and because of that you don get much money through that through ads ............so i personally feel you will be earning through ads for job seekers and you can charge employers for CV. Through this you are earning through both of them :)

If it is vice-versa you are loosing job seekers clicks and also loosing money from employers .

Hope this helps you.

Thanks

Reading the other examples, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest something radical...

Do something showing results for connecting job seekers with employers I have experience with looking for jobs in a difficult economy. I don't know what employers will pay, as a job seeker I would pay,

• to have a good job with a stable income,
• to have a great job with growth potential,
• to build my skills through work experience for continued employment success,
• to have a conduit to employers,
• to know in advance my boss will not be awful,
• to save money on other services I pay for right now,

Good luck. Don't be evil!

Following models can also be considered to monetize job boards:

1. Use Google Adsense or similar services to generate revenue based on clicks. This, however, requires substantial traffic on the board.
2. Instead of building a job board, try an aggregator to pull jobs from various sites (Indeed, Jobrapido etc)

In my opinion you ought to go for a freemium model. That means that you provide a free service, a community. Then you charge for something with better perks, highlighted job listings, and/or better exposure.

There are a lot of companies that use this model successfully, including many classified ad web sites, such as our local ksl.com, which is a local news service.

If an employee wants their CV/resume 'featured', they can pay a fee. Same with an employer.

The important part is coming up with the differentiating factors between the free and premium content. A lot of companies do this wrong.

There are two ways to do this wrong:

-Either by making the premium content so weak that people will rarely pay for it, because they are getting plenty with the free content.

OR

-Making the free content so weak that people won't even sign up for the free service, therefore you have few users, which for a community-based site, is no good at all.

I'd encourage you to analyze other freemium models to decide what would work for you. Many hosting websites do this, as well as web-design sites. Bloggers and companies similar to yours also use it very effectively.

There are many different revenue models that you can pursue to monetize your job board website.

There is the more traditional route of charging employers to post jobs, for access to resumes, sponsored job listings, cross posting on other job boards, posting their jobs on social media, or advertising their company on the site.

An alternative route you could take is charging job seekers a membership fee for access to the listings or other third-party services that you can partner with (and make a commission from).

As a third option, you can charge employers to post jobs and allow job seekers to use the site completely free. This approach can help you attract more job seekers, since many won't be willing to pay. Due to this, you will attract more employers to post jobs on your site. This will likely give you more revenue than charging job seekers because you can charge employers more than you would job seekers since most have a dedicated budget for hiring.

One example of how this model can be successful is Granted. It's free for job seekers but charges employers to post there. Good luck on monetizing your website.

Disclosure: I'm affiliated with Granted.