Planning for development of Job Portal is an enormous undertaking. Planning and execution can take several months to more than a year to complete and it can cost hundreds of thousands, even millions and span dozens of modules and features and thousands of pages and a handful of resources to complete the development on time and budget.
Generally there are key 9 steps for developing and launching a job portal or any kind of software or application
1. Define the goals.
2. Develop a budget and timeline.
3. Conduct discovery research.
4. Plan the site structure/sitemap.
5. Optimize the user experience.
6. Craft a brand-focused visual design.
7. Create and license your content.
8. Develop and test the site.
9. Launch a beta and iterate.
Apart from these above key steps, the most important aspect of any portal is to define the purpose of the portal/software and key achievement for the targeted audience of your platform.
When it comes to the requirement of a job portal, there are much more than register and apply for any job posting. We are going to discuss in deep about the requirement for any online job portals.
Need for Job Portal:
There is always a need for a unified platform for job seekers and employers for the obtrusive business tasks of job placement. 94% of recruiting professionals say that recruitment software has positively impacted their hiring process. Typical every job portal and recruitment software should have features included with intelligent job search, resume parsing functionality, Application Management, finding best match candidate, hiring workflow,collaboration tool, Integration with Other Platforms, Customization and Branding for the recruiting company and last but not the least is Accessibility.
The job portal should satisfy or fulfill all of these requirements and needs for the job seekers and recruiting companies.
The key features for any job portals to enhance the hiring process and solve a common job boards business challenges such as
- Centralized access : All the involved stakeholders should be able to access the system as per their roles and permission set from anywhere to the central system dasboard.
- AI Capabilities : Support of Artificial intelligence should be incorporated to create algoritham and help in find the suitable match against any search request and display the matching records/datasets/report. Automate most of the features with AI capability.
- Seamless workflow: For a seamless and easy workflow assimilation with recruitment process.
- Agile back-end content management system : A simple UI and workflow for content publishing and marketing of the open positions, marketing blogs or featured content.
The Target Audience or stack-holders specifically for Online Job Portal startup are mainly grouped into three categories.
a. Job-seekers as Candidate
b. Hiring Companies as Employer
c. Job Board Business Owner as Portal Admin
a. Job-seekers
For a job seeker the most important requirements is to make the job portal find the great job opportunities. They visit the job portal to learn more about the different vacancies open across the job market and apply for it.
1. Search Job: The Job seekers appreciate for being able to search job listings and find the desired and best match of openings. A Job portal help keep your job board audiences with maximum commitment. A job portal keep the job seekers to search by desired posts, keyword, salary prospects, locations and facilitate with such personalize options to give them the best chances of finding job listings that meet their needs. The Job portal should also give them the options to subscribe for relevant job feeds, save their search criteria to help them find their desired job just by click of their saved seach criteria. It should also recommend them with similar or related jobs feeds and listing.
A job portal should provide with the options of advance searches such as search by location, Search by Pay scale, search by position, search by role, and other filters like keywords, tags, categories.
2. Apply for the Job:
Once the job seekers find his relevant and matching job listing, the job portal should provide them with options for quick apply, save and apply later, To ease the task for job poster, the job portal, should provide, Pre-assessment features, which can help in screening out relevant candidate , who fulfill the job criteria and requirements.
3. Job Alert:
A job portal should also periodically post relevant job listing to its subscribed users based on their preference and choices.
b. Employers Portal
A job board software should comprise all job posting companies to create their profile as an Employer, add their branding to their profile page, as this branding is a vital component for any job board to promote for the best talent pool and to create the large pool of job seekers community.
For the employer, a job portal should enable all the significant employer tools with the following functionalities to manage and save time and help companies to find and select the right person for the right place with ease.
1. Resume Search:
Employer can easily search the desired candidate match by advanced filters and can have quick review on the candidate score card based on their posted pre-assessment questionnaire for the job post.The search features should include Search By Skill, role, Experience, locations, Expected Salaries or custom parameters
Addional search like Boolean Search, Smart Talent Search, Candidate Matching, Resume Alert
2. Job Posting
The more successful job portal is the more comfort for employers to add a new Job Post, with the essential meta data he can add on the go, keywords, tags and more comprehensive information making the job listing more precise and relevant to the viewers. With the pre-ordained Questionnaire mechanism, the system can bring the perfect match and more qualified applicants. Things such as Assessment Questions, Job Publishing, Job Approval and Social Media Job Posting can prove to be much helpful for the employer.
The portal shall provide an easy and customizable software interface to maintain the list of all the jobs that they created, can easily edit the metadata with ease and can make the job post in a more responsive way including closing, cloning, re-posting existing job posts and also enable tool to promote the job post on social platform to increase the reach and attract pools of job seekers.
3. Application Tracking System
ATS is an all-inclusive system for keeping all the job applications in one place, helping recruiters to manage, analyses, and track applications without any hassle. Employers can also view the answers provided by the applicants before applying for the job. The recruiters can narrow down their application pool, without slipping top candidates from the list. The ATS help with the following aspects Candidate Pre-Screening, Candidate Shortlisting, Applicant Pool and Workflow Automation.
4. Job Seeker Interactions
A smart messaging system allows candidates and recruiter with personalized experience makes it easy for all ends to manage, communicate, and track the conversations. The recruiter can quickly connect with their desired candidate with the direct contact features and help them to reach out across the channels of phone calls, email, and instant messages and thus eliminate the burden for recruiters.
Some of the useful tools would be Advance Communication Tool, Contact Box, Direct Interaction – such as chat bot or support team assisted chat and Email Notification
5. Advance features
AI based search , AI based self-learning algorithms into your job portal that can run on millions of searches from your users focus to continuously improve the experience. This uses A Machine Learning models to enable search engine to deliver the responsive and relevant searching text that match with what the user expresses his intent.
AI based search matches with Jobs specifications at amazing pace and with stunning accuracy. AI algorithm needs to apply on all basic data like user journey, recent searches and job history attributes to recognize the best match qualified for.
6 Video Integration features
Video resume, video interview are the latest trend in the recruitment industry, such state of the art features gives a candidate a user-friendly experience and hiring agency to explain detailed information on skills, qualification and status of their applicants in the most explicit manner.
A job portal should facilitate virtual interviews between the job seekers and the recruiters. A visual communication channel that encourages to take virtual meeting without attending them in person. The recruiters should be able to arrange a video conference with each candidate. It should should have features such as
Video Resume Uploading, Live Streaming Interviews, Video Cover Letter and Pre-recorded interviews
7 Additional good to have features from user usability perspectives
Seamless User Experience: Seamless user experience is the key to factor to retain users on your job portal. Easy navigation, a user-friendly interface, and content readability are vital elements for a better user engaging.
Mobility Support or App: Mobile users are 1/3rd of the Internet and you must need your career portal to be mobile-friendly and search engines now giving priority on mobile-friendly websites.
Social Media integrations : Social media integrations help you to get maximum visibility on internet. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are influencing social channels your portal users easily share job post through.
Content Management System: The friendly content management system enables the users to easily add, edit and maintain all job related content without any technical know-how.
Multilingual : Multi-Language Support feature on recruiting portal always increase the brand reach towards the global job market and on world-wide placement community forum. By quickly translating any content on your job board you can enhance your user experience form indigenous and local spectators.
SEO compliance: It is necessary to integrate SEO features that make your job portal search engine friendly.
Reports & Analytics : The Google Analytics or such real-time insights are a required tool that allows admin to calculate portal traffic to measure its ROI.
3. Admin Dashboard
The Job Board Admin dashboard brings everything to one spot. Its is central management console for the portal owner. This dashboard is designed to expedite the bird view on your Job Board business activities, benchmark indications, notifications, and user’s activities on Job Portal Administrative Panel. However, the below business vital functionalities are must to have to make your Job Board with easy of doing business:
The important tools for the admin are:-
Document Management- Resume extraction is a way or process that allows analyses and store extracted useful information from uploaded CV automatically and converts an unstructured form of resume data into a structured way. This parsing automation provides an efficient way to identify keywords on candidate’s skills, qualifications and work experience data, in order to sort through the heap of huge applications pile to identify the best applicants.
Advanced Recruitment Tools- The advanced recruitment feature provides all the essential tools from the single page to list, view and manage jobs; view applications, and access the analytic insights. This tool helps job seekers and employers to streamline through the hiring process.An ideal job portal must have a ubiquitous and user-specific recruitment tool, with step-by-step user guide, indications and responsive wizard in order to provide the meaningful hiring process.
Revenue/Business Models- Any job board earn or make money mainly through two sources, premium service such as personlized job search, feeds and auto apply for job seekers and secondly by offering the employers or the recuiters a fee based on either tenure-based subscription or limit with number of job posting on purchased package to meet their job seekers search. Some job portals also charge small amount for registration, which helps them to get a qualified candidate. The mostly commonly revenue models are
Monthly Subscription
Premium Job Listing
Featured Jobs
Resume Access Limits
Banner Advertisement
Quick and Easy Registration – The portal should facilitate the job seekers and employers to build a strong profile attracting their leads. The profile page holds all the basic information related to the company and the professional background of the job seekers. Thus, an easy and quick registration is widely preferred by all user groups of Job Board.
You must facilitate your users with login and signup through social accounts including Linked-In, Facebook and Google that can also fetch their basic profile information from.
Candidate Registration
User Profile
Quick Job Application
Social Sign-Up / Sign-In
Vinod Ram has been in Software Industry since 2006 and has experience of over 16 years in Software Development & Project Management domain specialised majorly in LAMP stack & Open Source Technology, building enterprise level Web based Application, Large Database driven and huge traffic Websites and Project Management.
He loves to write information articles and blog to share his knowledge and experience with the outside world and help people to find solution for their problems.