The niche job board market is booming and it’s time for job board operators to step up their game. Job seekers and employers alike want to work with talented, like-minded, industry leaders. Job board trends are growing away from quantity-driven strategies to quality-driven strategies—both the job seeker and employer are intentionally niching down to find that perfect employment match.

We’re going to walk you through three ways you can optimize your unique job board. The key essential building blocks to grow your job board are branding, content, and community. Let’s dive in.

Branding

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has slowly become a common (and expected) workforce perk. This means job board operators have a larger pool of candidates and employers to court than ever before. Overnight, your job board competitors sprinted to develop diluted boards in a cluttered market.

The benefit of building a job board for a unique audience is that there are fewer variables, across the board. Instead of creating a brand that has to attract a wide net of people, you have the advantage of building a brand for just a narrow audience. Research what your niche audience cares about—their pain points, desires, and goals. Then apply those few, yet essential insights to your branding strategy and ta-da, you’re ready to execute.

Branding is the most efficient and quickest way to ensure your job board differentiates itself and attracts the right audience. Revisit your branding elements (visuals and copy) to ensure they pull at the heartstrings right out the gate. Do your color palette and logo inspire positive emotions? Are they featured consistently across your channels? Does your brand language invite people in and make them feel like they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be? Your branding should represent your organization’s personality and the type of person you want to attract.

Give the overwhelmed job seeker a reason to remember you through compelling visuals, a clear tagline, and concise, human messaging. Built In SF, “an online community for San Francisco startups and tech companies,” does a great job at this. Their brand imagery, color palette, and language are consistent across all channels.

When launching a job board, it’s a lot of experimentation. If your branding is tight and memorable, you minimize the risk of failing.

Content

When you were searching for your last job, did you just update your resume, submit applications, and hope for the best? No. You were reading articles about industry trends. You were watching panel discussions featuring admirable thought-leaders. Bottom line: you were imagining your future beyond a one-way application portal.

People absorb content to understand the world around them. Content curation is a creative way to engage people and invite them onto your job board to stay awhile. Position yourself as the go-to resource when it comes to your niche. Brainstorm with your team how to produce quality content that guides job seekers to their next step while they job hunt.

The Muse is a “go-to destination for the next gen workforce to research companies and careers.” They have an excellent Advice section on their job board website to offer job seekers added-value beyond job postings and bonus: a chance to feature their paid employers. Engaging Q&As, trend reports, and company news are helpful for job seekers and employers to keep a pulse on what’s going on in a niche industry. It helps your audience feel educated, assured, and most importantly—connected to your job board.

A good niche job board helps job seekers whittle down the choices so that when they are ready to discover their next opportunity they feel confident and prepared to pull the trigger. Make sure your job board software has a turnkey content feature so you can post blogs (and more) with a pre-built platform. Keep your content relevant and fresh so your audience stays engaged and feels connected to you.

Community

Sometimes it’s not the job posting, but the conversation that unlocks your next job move.

If you have a niche audience hanging out on your job board, facilitate two-way communication between people. It’s through relationships that your audience will feel connected, seen, and empowered. A niche audience is by default an open-minded and passionate group of people. They’ve decided to go against the mainstream grind to do something different. They want to share, help, and learn from like-minded people because it’s such an exclusive community.

Trade Hounds is “the digital home for skilled tradesmen” and they’re on their way to becoming “the LinkedIn of the construction industry.” According to Crunchbase, Trade Hounds recently received a $3.2M dollar investment to grow their business and their next step is to build a job board platform. With more than 150,000 mobile app users, they built their community first. They developed a platform that facilitates a safe and open space to develop strong and authentic connections between “hard-hat-wearing workers.”

If you haven’t built your community yet, no sweat. Utilize your resources to build a new space where people can build their networks and land that next gig.

In order to make your job board relevant to a unique audience, aim small, and put your resources into exceptional branding, content, and community building execution. There’s no point in diluting your job board growth strategy by competing with the Monster.com’s of the world. Your audience will appreciate a tight, compelling, and highly targeted job board experience. We promise—they’ll continue coming back for more.

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