🔎 How Do Job Board Businesses Grow?

A job board traffic analysis plus a job board database you can use for research.

👋 Hey, I’m Casandra. I share research-backed business ideas to help you start and grow a business. This is a 🔒 Premium Edition 🔒 of Really Good Business Ideas.

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Job boards are an amazing business opportunity:

• With today’s no-code tools, they’re easy to set up, backfill with job postings, and monetize, so you don’t need any technical skills.

• They’re genuinely helpful for job searchers and hiring managers—especially when they are focused on a specific niche—so you can feel good about your work.

• In July 2024, there were 7.7 million job openings in the US alone, so it’s a big market.¹

• They’re totally online, so anyone can start one from anywhere.

But, like any online business, job boards need traffic to work. So, if you’re considering starting a job board business, you may be wondering how to get traffic and grow!

I built a database of hundreds of job boards—from category leaders like Indeed to super niche job boards like .Net Remotely—and analyzed them to extract insights about how job boards grow.

In addition to the analysis I’ve done, this database can also be used as a foundation for your own competitive research, enabling you to explore specific segments that are relevant to you much more deeply.

Key Insights

As always, I’ve started by summarizing the key insights before elaborating on them, and then I provide the method, assumptions, and limitations of the analysis at the end.

• 🔎 Most job boards focus on a specific niche, with industry, discipline, or skill as the leading niche category.

• 🔎 Monthly job board monthly traffic ranges from 0 to 1.8 billion visitors, but many sit close to 0.

• 🔎 Most job boards get between 1K and 100K monthly visitors, with major outliers at the top end.

• 🔎 Organic traffic from search engines is the leading traffic source for job boards.

• 🔎 Traffic to job boards is split between desktop and mobile but skews towards mobile.