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!
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