How to start a job board website: seven steps for a niche board, with the arithmetic and Google's rules

How to start a job board website: the seven steps

• Step 1, pick one niche: a profession, a place or a community you can reach. A board needs two audiences, employers who hire in that niche and job seekers who read it, so pick one where you can name both.
• Step 2, choose the build route: hosted software such as Job Boardly, Niceboard or JBoard, or a WordPress plugin such as WP Job Manager. The shortlist compares them.
• Step 3, decide how listings arrive: employers post, the platform backfills from a database, you import from sources you choose, or you load CSV and XML feeds.
• Step 4, set how the board earns: paid postings, featured upgrades, packages, employer subscriptions, a job seeker paywall or paid backfill feeds.
• Step 5, make postings eligible for Google's job results by following its structured data rules.
• Step 6, test a paid posting end to end: buy one as an employer would, then check the receipt, the expiry date and the live page.
• Step 7, launch with the legal pages and any disclosures in place.

Hosted software or a plugin: what changes

• Hosted software runs on the vendor's servers and bills a subscription. Job Boardly's pricing FAQ says you can launch in about an hour and Niceboard says initial setup takes five to ten minutes on average. Both are the vendors' own estimates.
• A plugin runs on your own WordPress hosting. WP Job Manager's listing says its core is free and always will be, requires WordPress 6.4 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher, and sells paid listings through a WooCommerce extension that needs the WooCommerce plugin.
• A hosted board can sit on a subdomain linked from an existing site. Niceboard's FAQ suggests exactly that for WordPress owners, and Job Boardly says custom domains work alongside WordPress.

How a board earns: the arithmetic

Use letters and fill them from the live pages. Let P be the platform fee for a month, F the payment processing fees on that month's sales and N the amount you keep from one paid posting after fees. The board covers its platform cost when the number of paid postings times N reaches P plus F.

An illustration, not a forecast: suppose P plus F equals what three postings net. Three paid postings a month break even, two leave you one posting short and five leave two postings of margin. Add each subscription tier the same way, subscribers times what each nets. Job Boardly's monetization post says backfill partners pay publishers a share of what employers pay per click, so model on the share a partner quotes you, not the employer-side rate.

Make postings eligible for Google's job results

• Google's job posting page says JobPosting markup belongs only on a page that holds a single posting. The required properties are the title, description, date posted, hiring organization and job location.
• Validate with the Rich Results Test, then check a few live pages with the URL Inspection tool. Google recommends the Indexing API over sitemaps for job posting URLs, plus a sitemap for the whole site.
• Expired postings must go: set validThrough to a past date, return a 404 or 410, or remove the markup. Google warns that acting late may bring a manual action.
• Its policies do not allow postings that need a login to see the description, or that require payment from applicants. A paywall like the one on Job Boardly needs a check: which listings stay open and carry markup?
• Hosted tools list Google Jobs support on their pricing pages, with some features tied to a higher plan, so check the plan before you rely on one.

Before you launch: rights, disclosure and the first listings

Check where listings come from. Job Boardly's terms say backfilled listings are licensed for publication on its hosted board only and may not be resold, and that you are responsible for the right to import from each source you add. Remove a listing when an employer or source objects.

If your board links to tools or services that pay you, label those links. The FTC's endorsement guides, 16 CFR Part 255, call for disclosure of material connections that readers would not expect. Then look at the Job Boardly pricing guide to turn the plan limits into a yearly cost before you pick a platform.