webJobs

Employers who post jobs through your site are not techies, but at the same time they want to make their job ad attractive to prospective job seekers. Most of the things that make a job ad attractive (such as bolding, colors, fonts, etc) require HTML knowledge, this can be difficult. That’s why our job board software will now have a built in WYSIWYG editor to allow employers to easily make their job postings stand out.

Employers can add font types/colors, a background, bold/italics, bullets, numbered lists, and much more. This is a feature that your members are sure to love.

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

We’re wrapping up development of webJobs 3.2 with a few more exciting features that we’ll announce shortly. In the meantime, we’re happy to announce a couple great new features for the next version.

A Portuguese translation has been added to webJobs. It’s the sixth most popular language in the world, and for those of you running international sites, is a great addition.

Other improvements

We’ve also added the ability to set the number of featured employers that show up on the front page. Previously, you could only have one. Now you can choose to have as many as you’d like simply by changing a setting in the administrative area.

Stay tuned for more updates on the new release!

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

{ 0 comments }

Leaving it to the Google, Yahoo, or Bing search bots to crawl all of your pages is a risky proposition. That’s why we’re including a new sitemap feature in the next version of our job board software. This will ensure that all of your pages are indexed by search engines, and give you greater exposure in search engine results.

Sitemaps are a list of all pages accessible within a particular site. webJobs 3.2 will automatically build an XML file readable by all major search engines. All you will need to do is tell the search engines to look at this file, and you’ll be doing all the heavy lifting for the search bots, instead of hoping that they crawl all your links correctly. Even more importantly, this will help get your pages crawled more quickly and start ranking in the search results.

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

{ 2 comments }

We’re excited to announce another great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) feature in our job board software: SEO friendly titles!

How SEO friendly titles work

Site titles will now be dynamically generated for each page on the site. For example, let’s saying you site name is MyJobBoard, and you’re visiting the advanced search page. The title of that page will not become: Advanced Search | MyJobBoard.

More importantly, this comes in handy when viewing jobs. Titles for the view job format will be in the format – | site name. So, for example, let’s saying you’re viewing a job for a PHP programmer in Albany, NY. The title would not look like this: PHP Programmer – Albany, NY | MyJobBoard.

What does this mean for my site?

Simply put, this will help you rank better and increase traffic to your site. By having more diverse titles for your pages, search engine will index your pages more accurately.

The most important aspect of this feature, however, is the SEO friendly titles on the view job page. By having optimized view job pages, search engines are more likely to pick up your site for local searches. For example, let’s say that someone does a search for “php programmer albany ny” on Google. Because your site will have those keywords both in the title and the body of the page, you are much more likely to show up at the top of the search results!

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

{ 2 comments }

Building a job board site from scratch is hard. We’ve been releasing several features that make getting your first members easier, and in webJobs 3.2 we’ll be adding yet another one: social bookmarking support.

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a method of sharing and organizing your bookmarks. It’s similar to bookmarking through your browser, only your bookmarks are public to others. This allows you to see other people’s bookmarks that have similar interests, and find new sites that you may have not known about before. This also allows other people to find your bookmarks which people can view and follow.

Why is it good?

There’s three main reasons social bookmarking is a great feature.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Social bookmarking is a great (and free) way to get some extra traffic to your site, with almost no effort to you. By having your members bookmark jobs, it is a fast and viral way to promote your site.

Search engine optimization

Although not fully proven, social bookmarks have been linked to helping in your search engine rankings. The more people that bookmark your site, the more backlinks you build. And backlinks are the most important thing in building your rankings.

Engagement

Let your users share a job they found interest with a friend. They can post it in Facebook, or Twitter, or email, and easily show their friends a job that they found was a great fit.

What does it look like?

Here’s a screenshot of how this button will look. There are over 40 social bookmarking sites your members can share your site with!

Imagine if just a few of them post it to their Facebook or Twitter accounts. If a person has 50 friends of followers, 50 more people will see your site from that person’s news feed, and be more likely to click and view the site!

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

{ 2 comments }

Is your job board getting a lot of emails or submissions from those pesky spammers? Well that’s all going to stop! CAPTCHA support has been added to webJobs 3.2 to all forms that automated bots may attack.

CAPTCHA forces a user to type in a verification code based on an image. Since these images are difficult for bots to decode, it serves as a great way to ensure that the person submitting the form is actually a human being.

The CAPTCHA support will be added to the following forms:

• Employer registration
• Job seeker registration
• Apply for job
• Contact us

You’ll be able to easily toggle which forms you’d like to have CAPTCHA support enabled for. Want to have it on the apply for job, but not employer/job seeker registration? You can do that with the click of a button in the administrative area.

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

{ 2 comments }

Some boring job boards show you just the basic information on a particular job. The title, description, location, and other standard data is shown on almost every single job board. What separates your view job page from the rest? Not much. Until now, of course.

Add maps to your job board

The next release of our job script will have a new feature to add Google Maps support to the view employer and view job pages. When site visitors view a job or an employer, they can easily see the job location on a map. This integrates directly with Google Maps, so it’s possible to see how far they’ll need to travel to a potential job, and a quick view of the surrounding area.

This feature is unique to our job script and will really set you apart! Here’s an example of what it looks like:

webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.

{ 2 comments }

Just two months after webJobs 3.0 was released, we’re excited to announce the released of webJobs 3.1.

To upgrade webJobs follow the instructions in our documentation.

New Features

• iPhone compatibility
  When a user logs on to your webJobs site using an iPhone he will see a iPhone-compatible version of the site. The site and navigation have been tailored specifically for the iPhone screen size.
• New theme system
  You can now make new looks for webJobs without overwriting any existing templates. New themes make it easy for you to try out a new look or change between existing looks. It also allows you to share themes with others in the community.
  • New theme: Modern (available in: blue, brown, green, orange)
  • New theme: Minty (available in: blue, green, orange, red)
• Ability to charge for featured jobs
  The featured job on the front page can now be charged for. If you choose to use this feature, only those who pay for the featured job will be shown there. Instead of rotating between random employers, webJobs will rotate between those who have paid for the upgrade.
• Backfill jobs from Indeed
  Don’t ever worry about having an empty database ever again! webJobs will feed in jobs from Indeed to fill in your search results wherever yours are lacking, making your job board look more complete.
• Ability for job seekers to apply for a job without signing in

{ 2 comments }

One of the most common questions we get from pre-sales and post-sales customers is how to get jobs posted on their site. It’s a chick-or-the-egg problem: no job posters want to shell out the big bucks for a site with no job seekers and no job seekers want to join a job site with no jobs.

So what’s the solution to this Catch-22? Backfilling your job board from a source like Indeed.

What is backfilling?

“Backfilling” means essentially taking jobs from a third party source (in this case Indeed) and importing them into your job site. That way, when you first start and have no jobs posted, your users see the jobs posted from Indeed.

How does it work?

First of all, this feature is optional. It can be turned on/off in the administrative area. If enabled, it works to supplement your existing database. This means that if you do have some jobs posted, but don’t have too many, your database will be filled out by jobs from Indeed.

Let’s look at an example: you have two jobs posted each with the title “PHP Programmer.” When someone searches for the keywords “PHP Programmer” your jobs show up first. However, that still leaves room for more search results. The backfill feature takes the jobs from Indeed and supplements them here. Instead of showing just 2 jobs, your search results will look complete. Remember, your jobs always show first.

Let’s extend the example further: you have the same two jobs listed above, but one of your users searches for “Sales Associate.” Now, you don’t have any jobs listed for this position. In this case, webJobs pulls jobs from Indeed that match those keywords, making your search results appear complete.

Specific Results

Indeed has an API which is quite powerful. With their API, we can actually be very specific with the type of jobs that should be backfilled. For example, if you are looking for a PHP Programming position in New York, the search feature in webJobs will send those parameters to Indeed and will get back only jobs relevant to that region.

Conclusion

This new feature being released in webJobs 3.1 will be a great addition to those of you who want to fill out your database with extra results. By giving your users the appearance that you have many jobs, you will get more job seekers to sign up and as a result get more employers to post jobs, finally solving the chicken-or-the-egg problem!

{ 10 comments }