The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Own Job Portal

Your employees are said to be the most expensive and crucial asset of your business. You need to make sure that you hire the right person for the right job that can provide you results and help your business improve.

Creating Your Own Job Portal

However, with the pounding stress of growing your business, you need to find optimal solutions to ease your company’s process.

Taking job recruitment as a prospect, major businesses nowadays are employing a dedicated jobs portal to their website, which helps them manage new applicants and find the best candidate for their job vacancies.

What is a job portal?

Helping job seekers apply for posts that they are suitable for, job portals are online platforms that provide efficient job boarding solutions. Most popular job board solutions, for example, Monster.com and Naukri.com, offer an open-ended job board solution where companies can post their job vacancies and job seekers can choose from a wide range of options. However, various top-tier companies are incorporating a comprehensive job portal to conduct their recruitment process and directly connect with viable candidates.

Job portals have proven to be an excellent model to locate ideal candidates for multiple job vacancies efficiently. They help you consolidate resumes from all your candidates and screen them for the most promising ones. Additionally, it also allows a company to expand its reach and look for the ideal candidate beyond its physical reach.

Benefits of having a job portal

Expands your scope

Creating your own job portal can exponentially expand your scope. With the help of an online platform, you aren’t bound by physical limitations and easily interact with candidates from across the world. You can scout through candidates from different states and continents and look at their resumes. This way, you can broaden your prospects and pick the perfect candidate for every job vacancy.

Serves as a major boon for your human resource department

Having a job portal can prove to be a major help for your human resource department. It can make their work much easier and more efficient. The physical man labor of consolidating the resumes and portfolios of each candidate can be replaced by a digital log that can perform the same task effortlessly. That’s why they are also called human resource portals.

Very affordable and cost-efficient

Creating your own job portal doesn’t really cost a lot. All you require is to buy a domain and employ a Content Management Software (CMS) that can help you create and manage your portal. In contrast, if you choose to hire a human resource team to conduct your recruitment, it would account for some huge expenses. You will have to arrange for food, transportation, make your staff and office look presentable, and many more such expenses that you cannot ignore.

Improves your productivity

For every minute that your employees work on a specific task, there is a certain opportunity cost that you are forgiving. While you appoint a huge team to conduct your recruitment process, you can’t allot them other projects that are equally necessary to the business. With a significant load off of your human resource team, you can appoint them to some more pressing and important tasks that need immediate attention. 

Promotes your brand

With a job portal, the first thing that an interested candidate will have to do is visit your website. This way, as more and more candidates will try to reach your job portal, they will have to go through your website. And this can increase your brand’s visibility in the market.

How to create a job portal

Job portal development is not a very hard task but you need to make sure that you choose the right partners that can increase your efficiency. Here are the steps you need to follow to make sure that your recruitment portal works seamlessly:

1.   Identify your niche and conduct market research

The first and foremost thing that you need to do is identify your niche. Determine what kind of job position you want to recruit for and jot down what will be the requirements for a person to be eligible. This will also guide you in making future decisions.

Each industry works in a different manner and has different approaches to recruiting. Therefore, you need to understand the mentality of people in your industry and create a job portal that will communicate with them. 

Look for other job portals that cater to the same demography. This way, you will get a closer look at what strategies your competitors are adopting to attract new talent. In addition, by analyzing which job portals are doing well, you can understand what your target audience is looking for in a good job portal.  

2.   Pick a domain name

While companies that already have a website can create a job portal as an extension of their website’s domain name, however, if you don’t have a website, you need to purchase a domain name that will host the server space of your job portal.

Ideally, the job portal should have a name that is closely related to the business and easy to remember. You should create lots of options as it is quite likely that someone has already purchased the name you came up with. There are online domain name checkers that can help you out.

Once you have decided on a name, get it registered on GoDaddy or any other domain registrar. Now you are ready to get your site hosted

3.   Find quality hosting for your job portal

While we say that the internet is filled with websites, there is no said entity as ‘Internet’ where you can just put up your website. Instead, there are companies that specialize in creating hardware that can provide you a platform on the internet. And this is called hosting.

With thousands of hosting options out there, you need to pick the right company that can provide you the best service. Here are a few elements to keep in mind while selecting your host:

  • Excellent performance: Even at the most basic plans, an ideal hosting provider should be able to load pages and maintain a smooth user interface seamlessly.
  • A diverse variety of plans: At each level of a company’s growth, you need to implement different strategies to perform well. Hence, your host should have a diverse range of plans that can help you adjust your domain as per your growth model.
  • Customer support: Websites often get tangled in glitches and other technical problems, which hampers their hosting. In such scenarios, your hosting provider should be easy to get in touch with.

As you are trying to create a job portal, you need to make sure that your hosting provider offers Virtual Private Server (VPS) plan. A VPS plan can provide you a dedicated space and thrusts more resources into your website.

4.   Select a platform to build your job portal

Now that you have successfully secured a spot on the internet, it’s time to actually build your website. There are various Content Management System (CMS) out there that can help you create a complex website that needs to manage a lot of content and traffic.

WordPress is one of the best and simplest CMS available in the market. 41% of websites that are functioning on the internet were created using WordPress. With an exhaustingly vast theme collection to choose from, WordPress can help you create a complex website even if you don’t know how to code. 

However, there are also a few CMS that can give you a better edge than WordPress when it comes to certain aspects. Joomla is a fantastic platform that provides you more website configuration options than WordPress. It is proven to be more efficient when it comes to creating multilingual websites.

Drupal is another contender that can help you, provided that you have little experience in web development. It is much more scalable and lightweight while providing tons of unique features.

List down all your options and pick the CMS that fits the best for your job portal.

5.   Set up a Jobs Board Pluging and start with your first listing

Now is the stage where you actually create your job portal. While most CMS don’t provide specific features to create an online job board, there are various job board plugins that can provide you with the necessary functionality.

Let’s go through how you can make a job portal if you choose your CMS as WordPress:

  • Select your plugin. To start off, you should go with their Simple Job Board plugin, which is extremely easy to use and very user-friendly.
  • After installing and activating that plugin, a new Job Board tab will appear on your dashboard. With this tab, you can see a consolidated list of your current listings.
  • Click on the Add New button, which will be available at the top of the page. This will take you to a WordPress editor page where you can set up a title for the job listing and give a short job description for the post.
  • Below the description section, you will find the Job Features section. All the information that is added here will reflect as an addition to the job description. For example, you can add the salary range and summarize all the job benefits that the candidate will get.
  • You will also find a segment called Application Job Fields where you can add drop boxes for the application. The plugin will automatically add a file upload section here where your applicants can attach resumes and portfolios.
  • At the end of the page, you will find a Job Data section where you can add the specifications about your company. You can add your company name, website, logo, and tagline which will be reflected on the job portal.
  • Once you have completed all these steps, click on publish. Now you have published your first listing. Repeat the same process for any new job listing that you want to post. 

You can check out all your listing at (yourwebsiteurl).com/jobs. If you want to review the applications sent for a particular job title, go to Job Boards > Applicants tab.

6.   Have a strong marketing strategy

Having a job portal is worthless if your potential target audience is unaware of its existence. You need to publicize and let people know where they can apply if they want to join your company.

You can use social media platforms to quickly reach a huge mass of people. Add the link to your job portal on the bio and diligently post content that redirects the reader to the link.

You can also employ SEO strategies to improve your website’s performance. If more people will visit your website, more people will stumble upon your job portal. Add the link on your blogs, emailers, and other content models to attract an even more and niche audience.

Conclusion

Introducing a job portal in your business model can really improve your functionality. It can accelerate your growth and help you increase your workforce efficiently. It can broaden your scope and provide a helping hand to your human resource department.

Adding to this, having a job portal also helps you immensely cut your expenses and make a more beneficial investment of your capital. And the added branding opportunities provide a higher edge.

Owing to some great and easy-to-follow Content Management Systems (CMS), creating your job portal is extremely easy. You can create a complex and beautiful web portal even if you have no experience in web development. So, if you are convinced of starting your own job portal, follow this ultimate guide and lead your way to a more efficient future. It will work as a good recruitment portal development guide.