How to fill a new job board with jobs

An empty job board neither ranks on Google nor convinces an employer to pay. Employers pay for visitors, and visitors come for jobs, so the jobs have to come first, before anyone has paid you. This post covers where those first jobs come from, how to keep only the ones your niche wants, and how to do it on JobClay.

Start with a list of employers, not a list of jobs

Before you touch any software, write down the employers who hire the people your board is for. A board for nurses in Boston starts with the hospitals, clinics and care homes in and around Boston. A board for Rust developers starts with the companies known for using Rust.

Good places to find them:

the companies your audience already works for, and the ones they talk about wanting to join;
the sponsors and exhibitors at your niche's conferences and meetups;
the employers posting on the general job sites and on any niche boards in your field;
member lists of the professional bodies in your niche.

This list does two jobs. It tells you where to import jobs from, and it is the list of employers you will later ask to pay.

Find out where each employer publishes its jobs

Open each company's careers page and click a job. The address it opens tells you how the company publishes jobs, and so how your board can read them. For a company called Acme:

Greenhouse: boards.greenhouse.io/acme or job-boards.greenhouse.io/acme
Lever: jobs.lever.co/acme, or jobs.eu.lever.co/acme in the EU
Ashby: jobs.ashbyhq.com/acme
Workable: apply.workable.com/acme or acme.workable.com
SmartRecruiters: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/acme

JobClay reads a company's job board on any of these five hiring systems. You paste the address, or just the board name (acme), and choose how often to read it. For Lever you also choose the US or EU host, and for Lever and Ashby you type the company's name, because their jobs do not carry it. Greenhouse's EU boards are not supported.

If the jobs stay on the company's own site, its pages may carry job markup, the same JobPosting data Google reads, and JobClay can read them as a careers page (below). If the company uses none of the five systems and its pages carry no job markup, ask it for an XML feed, or post its best openings by hand.

The library: companies ready to add

JobClay keeps a library of companies whose job boards on those five systems it can read, with how many jobs each has open. On Job sources, press Add from library, narrow the list by country, field or company name, and press Add. The source runs daily, and if your board has a country set when you add the company, it keeps only jobs in that country.

Each company you add from the library uses one of your plan's job sources, and every plan sets how many sources a board can have; the pricing page shows the number for each. So choose for fit, not size. A large company with hundreds of openings and three in your niche fills a source slot with jobs you will mostly filter out. A smaller one that hires only your kind of people may be the better use of it.

XML feeds: many employers in one source

An XML feed is a file of jobs at a web address. Some staffing agencies, job distributors and employers already send one to other job sites, so it is worth asking anyone who posts a lot of jobs whether they have one.

On JobClay, a feed is one job source however many companies its jobs come from, because the company can be taken from each job. That makes feeds the most efficient use of a plan's sources when they carry jobs in your niche.

A feed in Indeed's format needs no setup: you enter the address.
For any other format, you name the element that holds each job, then the element for each field: title, description, company, place and so on.
Preview shows the feed's first job as JobClay reads it, with the elements it found, before you add the source.

Feeds are read as plain data and never run anything.

Careers pages

Some companies publish jobs only on their own site. JobClay can read such a careers page, and the pages on the same site it links to, looking for JobPosting markup. It obeys the site's robots.txt and reads up to 100 pages a run. A careers page is read daily or weekly, never hourly.

If a careers page has no job markup but links to a board on one of the five hiring systems, the run's errors say so and name that board, so you can add it as a hiring system source instead. That source is usually the better one, because it reads the company's jobs directly.

How often each source is read

Each source is read hourly, daily or weekly; a careers page daily or weekly. New sources start on daily. Read a busy source hourly when fresh jobs matter, and a slow one weekly.

Every read keeps the board current: new jobs are added, changed ones updated, and jobs the company has taken down are closed. If a read fails, or comes back with nothing it should have found, JobClay closes nothing, so a company's brief outage does not empty your board. A closed job comes back if the source lists it again.

Keep only the jobs your niche wants

A niche board that shows every job from every source stops being a niche board. Three tools keep it on topic.

Source settings. Each source has its own filters:

Only jobs with these words and Skip jobs with these words, checked in the title, and in the description too if you tick Look for the words in the description too. They match whole words in any case, so rust finds "Senior Rust Engineer" but not "Trust and Safety Lead".
Only jobs in your board's country.
Most live jobs from this source, so one large source cannot crowd out the others.
Hide from search engines, for jobs you want on the board but not in search: their pages say noindex and leave the job sitemap.
Keep my edits, so a job you corrected by hand is not rewritten by the next run.

Rules. On Rules, a rule changes imported jobs that match its conditions on the title, description, company, location or a field of the source. It takes one action: give a term, tag from a list, set the work mode, set a place, or skip the job. Test runs it over your 200 newest imported jobs and shows up to 50 it would change, without saving anything. Rules run on each new or changed imported job, and Re-apply to existing jobs runs them over the ones already live.

Approval. With New jobs wait for my approval ticked on a source, its new jobs wait on Approvals until you approve them, one by one or all from that source at once. Turn it on for a new source until you trust what it brings in.

A worked example, for a board for Rust developers that adds a large company's Greenhouse board:

Set Only jobs with these words to rust and tick Look for the words in the description too.
Set Skip jobs with these words to intern, internship if your board is for experienced developers. Matching is by whole word, so list both.
Add a rule: when the title contains remote, set the work mode to remote.
Tick New jobs wait for my approval for the first week, then untick it once the filters are right.

One opening, one job

The same opening can reach a board twice: a company's own hiring system and an agency's feed, or an import and the employer posting it themselves. JobClay compares each new listing with the jobs already on the board, first by the posting's own identifier or address, then by company, title and city. When it is the same opening, it adds the listing to the existing job rather than making a second one. The job's page in the console lists every source under Listed by, and Not the same job splits a wrong match, which then stays apart.

Room on the board

An imported job goes live when there is room for it: within your plan's live jobs, and the source's own cap if you set one. A job with no room waits as "Waiting for room" and goes live when room frees up, which every run checks. Imports never push out a job an employer or you posted; when a posted job needs room, the oldest live import goes back to waiting.

If the board moves to a plan with fewer job sources, the newest sources pause and show "Paused by your plan". None is deleted, and their waiting jobs stay waiting.

Jobs you post, and the employers behind imports

Imports are the floor, not the whole board. You can post jobs yourself from Jobs, or from Companies for a company with no employer account. Employers post their own in the employer area.

A company that reaches your board through a job source, and that no employer account runs, can be claimed: an employer asks, and you decide in the console. That is the bridge from free imported jobs to paying employers: "your jobs are already on our board" is an easy first email. Our post on making money from a job board picks up from there.

A first week, as an example

Write the list of employers in your niche, and note which hiring system each one uses.
Add the best of them from the library, then the hiring system boards, feeds and careers pages, within your plan's sources.
Tick approval on each new source, and check Approvals each day.
After the first runs, add word filters and rules, and Test each rule before you save it.
Open each source's Runs for errors, and fix any source shown as "Failing since".
Write to the companies whose jobs are on the board, and invite them to claim their page.

The job sources feature page gives the overview, the Job sources guide covers every setting step by step, and the guide to creating a job board covers the rest of the setup.