4 Ways to Improve the User Experience of Your Job Board

The job market is facing nearly unprecedented levels of turnover. In fact, more than 4.5 million workers in the United States quit their jobs this past November. This impacts job boards in two primary ways. One, it increases the number of available jobs, which means more listings. Two, it means more job seekers are visiting job boards.

That means now is the time to revisit and optimize your user experience. Here are four ways to do that.

1. Do a Checkup of Your Job Board

A clunky interface can deter candidates. To assess your site’s overall UX, try to see it through the eyes of an applicant. Consider the experience of visiting your job board for the first time:

• Is the layout simple and easy to navigate?
• Can you efficiently search for jobs?
• Are the fields in postings populating correctly?
• If filters are in place, do they work?

Make sure to test both mobile and desktop. Candidates search for jobs on their computers, smartphones, and tablets; you need a seamless UI across devices.

If you’re able, find testers outside your company – even friends or family members. What’s important is that they can review your site as a job seeker would – without knowing the layout.

This checkup will highlight what is and isn’t working on your site so you know where to focus UI update efforts (if any).

If you’d like a professional opinion, reach out; we can point you in the right direction.

2. Create Fields for the Information Job Seekers Want

What entices someone to click into a listing, click “apply,” and ultimately finish an app? Clear, complete information. Your listings should have fields for all of the following (to start):

• Salary: More than 70 percent of professionals want to hear about salary first in meetings with recruiters. Translation: It’s important. If you need help extracting pay rates from listings, consider using a salary parser.
• Remote, hybrid, or on-site work requirements: Hybrid work isn’t going away, and workplace flexibility is a growing demand for job seekers.
• Job status: Clearly present information about whether a job is part-time, full-time, contract, or temporary.
• Sign-on bonus: Listings offering a sign-on bonus increased by more than 450 percent between 2020 and 2021. This incentive is likely to persist as resignations continue to climb.

Must-have fields aren’t set in stone, though. As of this writing, the Supreme Court just struck down Biden’s vaccine mandate for large companies – but Covid vaccines may still be required for healthcare jobs. Either way, job boards should have a field to display vaccine requirements.

Career pages themselves change frequently, too. Are you regularly monitoring your job scrapes? If not, the associated listings could disappear from your site or lose essential information and formatting.

If you present your jobs via an XML feed, another useful feature to organize your listings is job tagging. Once implemented, this allows applicants to quickly filter jobs with keywords like “remote work” or “full-time.”

3. Provide Enough Compelling Jobs Content

Job boards must provide employers with what they’re paying for – traffic and applications. They must also provide enough relevant content to job seekers, so they find your site, have a quality visitor experience, bookmark your site, and come back again. But what happens when job seekers don’t find any interesting listings on your site?

One way to prevent that is to populate your job board with organic listings. These jobs come from companies that aren’t contracting your services but can draw traffic to your board (think: Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft).

For example, the monthly search volume for the term “jobs at Amazon” exceeds 1.8 million. To make use of it, scrape Amazon’s career pages and add those jobs to your site.

This helps attract users to your job board. Once they’re there, you can serve up your customers’ listings to these job seekers.

If you’re looking for additional ways to supplement the listings on your site, consider using our JobsIndex tool. It provides millions of updated, organic job listings that you can use to improve the user experience of your job board.

4. Make the Application Process Seamless

In our experience, employers and candidates typically prefer that applications occur on the employer’s / company’s site. Keep this in mind as you review your site’s application process. Do job seekers need to register to apply for jobs? Does the “apply” link take them directly to the hiring company’s site?

An intuitive application helps improve conversion rates once candidates identify the right jobs. In this case, you’ve likely done the work of leading users to your customers’ listings. Don’t let a clunky interface undo that work.

Here are some ways to streamline your application process:

• Optimize for mobile users.
• Offer an “easy apply” option.
• Link to the employer’s site. This shortens the time candidates need to research the company and available job(s).
• If users create an account, add features that store resumes they’ve previously uploaded. This speeds up the application process by providing them with the right documents across their devices.

Today’s Job Seekers Need More Information in a Better Format

While it’s still possible to land a job through referrals, networking events, or the occasional job fair, many job searches start online. And because today’s job seekers spend more of their lives online than ever, they have high expectations for the experience of searching and applying for jobs.

A well-built, intuitive website is now the baseline for any brand – but it’s a lot of work. If you’re looking for a faster, more cost-effective way to maintain your listings and build more comprehensive job scrapes, get in touch. We’d love to help.