If you'd like to immediately apply to run a job board, click here.
Pallet offers white-glove service to every creator & community that gets accepted to use the product (one of the reasons we employ a waitlist). We want to make sure that every job board is as useful as possible to its specific community. To that goal, we run all our partners through a three-phase process, giving guidance and support through each step.
This article will showcase that process, and hopefully give you key information you may need when applying to run a job board.
Step One: Setup
Communities and creators come to Pallet with different levels of experience handling recruitment. Some have never connected people with jobs but feel the job board would be a very valuable add on to their existing community offering, others have good experience making connections informally and want a central hub where they can showcase jobs their network is trying to fill— a key component to our service is that it is flexible to the needs of a specific community. Every community that gets accepted on the platform is assigned a dedicated account manager, who walks them through each phase.
Regardless of the community's starting point in their recruitment journey, we'll first provide you with the link to a white-label job board and ask you to plug in your own branding. There's a few elements to this, mostly mimicking the type of branding you'd see on a classic social profile.
Once you've got your branding up, it's time to populate the board with roles. This is also an area with a huge amount of variability. Some communities approach us with roles already in mind, they send us a series of links and we plug them directly. Others have a vague idea of what kinds of roles they'd like to showcase (i.e. I'd like to highlight product management opportunities at series A-C startups). Regardless of the request, your account manager will go through our existing database of hundreds of thousands of live listings and seed the board with jobs we've essentially scraped from the internet. A core tenant of running a job board is ensuring there is a good match between the audience, and the roles that are available. So by the time you'd like to publicly launch, it's imperative there is a decent chunk of roles for your community to look through.
Lastly, in the setup phase, you'll have to decide on a price. Your account manager will have a lot of experience pricing other boards for our existing clients, and will be able to give you realistic recommendations.
** It's important to note that not every community is trying to monetize their board, and some keep posting options entirely free
At this stage, you'll notice that the board has two default "tiers" of posts: "featured" and "standard".
To give an example, one of our partners, Lenny Rachitsky, prices his board as follows:
Not every community will be able to price their board this way. Lenny has a very robust and engaged following, which allows him to charge more. In the featured "tier" you'll also see that the community leader gives context on what kind of social boosting they'll receive. In Lenny's case, the role gets featured in his newsletter for an entire month.
Prices are also subject to change. You'll be tasked with responding to the market for your board. If you get tons of early customers, it may be a sign you can charge a bit more. If you're not seeing enough traction, try moving the other way. There are boundaries to work within, but we
Once you've settled on your brand, the roles you'll be showcasing, and the price of your board, you move into the next phase.
Step Two: Pre-Launch & Launch
Step two is split into two cycles, which are both geared towards making your Job Board announcement as successful as possible. The first thing you'll want to do is alert your network and your community that something big is coming. Here are some teaser examples our partners have run with in the past.
This will allow you to gage the early community response. We've generally found that most of the time there is overwhelming support for the addition of a job board from a community's audience.
Next you'll prospect potential customers. This step is only relevant to those who have possible hiring companies in their network already. If you don't not to worry— we help drive demand from businesses through our own outreach and email list, consisting of thousands of businesses.
In general, the pre-launch cycle is not necessarily mandatory, but we've never found it to hurt.
Launch Day
One of the most important aspects of running a job board is the volume of visitors you receive. Every company that pays to post a job (or even ones that do so for free) want to get a good amount of eyeballs on that post. This is why featured roles are so enticing to businesses, because they promise an exact amount of concentrated eyeballs depending on the community. For someone like Not Boring, that number is over 100k for each feature in his newsletter.
To that effect, you're going to want to make as big of a splash as possible on the day you launch. Momentum is key, and starting off on the right foot puts your job board in the best possible spot for success.
Key Announcement Tips
If you have a large audience somewhere, make sure to post there! Ideally, you post about the job board launch on every channel that makes sense for you, inviting as much traffic as possible.
Why are you starting a job board? What service does it provide that your community can't get elsewhere? These are key questions to respond to in your narrative as you post.
Who are the most relevant stakeholders? If you're community is for designers, make sure the post centers around that.
Wherever you post, make sure to provide a URL for your community so they can be easily redirected
Images make things more inviting, and clarify the purpose of the post.
Here's an example of a partner launching their Job Board on Pallet.
Step Three: Maintenance
Once you've launched, gotten feedback from your community on the types of roles that suit them best, and have gotten into a rhythm, the board's success will depend on how well you maintain it. You need to consistently add featured roles in your content and channels, and keep it top of mind for your community. Remember that there will always be a fluctuating slice of your audience looking for new opportunities, so sharing it will never get stale with your audience.
