Job Boards For Your Blog Site: Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread, JobCoin Reviewed
Classified ads for jobs offer bloggers a new way to monetize their websites. Job boards like Personforce, JobThread, SimplyHired, and JobCoin offer independent web publishers an interesting new revenue making opportunity - an opportunity with the potential to add anything from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per month to your bottom line. Today I will be comparing four job boards (Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread and JobCoin) so that you can choose the best job board for your site.
Photo credit: Elnur edited by Andre Deutmeyer
The economy today sucks. As search ad revenue drops and recently even once invincible Google sees its share prices rocked, web publishers who depend on Google AdSense for income may begin to see rough times ahead. So the need for new sources of income have never been greater. Job boards offer web publishers a viable way to make revenue as well as add useful content to your site. It will not supplant your Google AdSense revenue, but it will supplement it in these trying times. And even if you aren't hurting, you have to admit... the promise of extra money is attractive. According to the Financial Times, VentureBeat charges $200 to post a 30-day ad directly on its site through SimplyHired. So the potential to make money here is real.
So how do these job boards work?
The idea is fairly straightforward actually.
- Companies who want to hire new people place ads with one or all of the job boards (either through your site or through the job board directly)
- These job boards then distribute the jobs to blogs and other publishers who have signed up for their service
- Publishers get paid for having these job ads on their site
How much do you get paid?
Well that depends on the job board, but there are three ways that you get paid:
- Employers can take out a job ad directly on your blog via the job board, whereby you get a cut of the listing fee. Employers find blogs attractive because blogs tend to attract readers focused on a specific industry niche, and this means that their job ads are better targeted.
- If you don't have enough direct buys for job ads on your site, then some of the job boards autopopulate your board from their own list of job postings in their job directory. For these jobs, you get paid per click, meaning that anytime a jobseeker clicks on one of the job postings you will get a small percentage of the revenue, similar to Google Adsense.
- You get paid every time someone applies for a job through your job board.
Although Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread, and JobCoin are all very similar services, each does have its own unique advantages and disadvantages. The full review is below.
Job Board Comparison
- Personforce
Personforce is a job board solution serving a bunch of large web publishers including college newspaper sites like the Harvard Crimson and blogs like Techcrunch. Personforce is a hosted solution, so there is no installation required on your end. And like the other job board solutions, Personforce handles all the dirty work. Personforce handles all the credit card and payment processing when someone posts a job to your job board, so the only thing you have to worry about is getting paid.
Unlike SimplyHired, Personforce only works on a direct sell model, meaning that Personforce does not autopopulate your job board with job listings from their database. The only jobs that they list on your site are those that have been specifically targeted to your site. If an employer posts a job listings directly to your site, you receive 80% of the revenue. For these job posts, you decide how much and how long the job ads will be up for. If Personforce brokers the job listing for you, the revenue is split 50/50.
Even though in both instances, Personforce powers the job board, the difference is where the employer creates the job listing. If the employer goes to the Personforce site directly and creates the job their and selects to have it displayed on your website, then in that case Personforce is responsible for brokering the deal and so you would split the revenue 50/50. If however, the employer creates the job listing from your site, then you brokered the deal so you get 80% of the revenue.
Like the other job board solutions, Personforce offers fully customizable widgets for your site so that the job board blends in seamlessly with your content, as well as a branded URL.
Personforce does have some unique advantages over other job board solutions though. First of all, Personforce offers the largest revenue share of any of the job board solutions (80%) which means more mullah for you. Furthermore, Personforce goes beyond a traditional job board and offers you your own "yellow pages" to connect your community with services, jobs, websites, research, events, and more. As with the job board, Personforce works with you to setup your own-branded URL for your business directory page and a website widget. Advertisers than go to the publishers directory, upload and pay for a listing, and reach their target audience. Unfortunately the "yellow pages" solution is only available to publishers with over 250,000 visitors a month and who are working a niche. Hopefully, we will see this service expanded soon.
- SimplyHired (aka Job-a-matic)
Job-a-matic is SimplyHired's solution for distributed customizable job boards for individual publishers. Like the other solutions reviewed, Job-a-matic is a hosted solution. As a hosted solution, Job-a-matic takes care of all the grunt work. They handle all credit card and payment processing, and they also email receipts and reminders to you when necessary. The job board is customizable so you can modify the header and footer, as well as pull in your own CSS file, so that it has the same look and feel as your website. You can also create customize the URL so that it look as if it is part of your site.
Like each of the other job board solutions reviewed here, Job-a-matic provides you with widgets that you can easily place anywhere on your site. If you have a Blogger, Typepad or Wordpress powered blogs, Job-a-matic lets you install these widgets with a single click. And, if you use FeedBurner's FeedFlare product on your blog, you can add a "flare" that links to your job board, and advertises the number of new posts. SimplyHired also provides some code snippets that insert simple text links or button graphics onto your main website, promoting and linking to your job board.
With Job-a-matic you have two ways of making money:
- For jobs posted directly to your job board, you receive fifty percent of the revenue. For these types of job ads, you decide the price to charge for each postings to your site, as well as how long the job postings will run.
- Addtionally you will also receive thirty percent of the revenue when a visitor clicks one of the sponsored job posts that Job-a-matic automatically provides to you through their database. This option to have your job board autopopulated with job posts from the SimplyHired database is one of the greatest advantages that Job-a-matic offers over its competitors. These sponsored job posts ensure that your job board is never empty. And although these job listings are not as profitable as those that your bring in yourself, you do get paid each time a visitor clicks on one of these jobs.
Finally Job-a-matic provides a convenient dashboard feature that allows you to monitor the performance of your job board, so you can see how many job listings you have, who's posting them, when they're expiring, and how much money you've earned.
- JobThread
JobThread is the job board solution behind multiple Read/Write Web. JobThread is a fast and easy way to setup a job board for your group, organization or site. Like the other job board solutions reviewed here, JobThread is a free hosted solution. There are no setup fees, hosting fees or maintenance fees of any kind. You choose how much you'd like to charge people to post jobs on your site and JobThread shares the revenue 50 - 50. JobThread also offers large sites a special pricing option, which means that if you bring a lot of traffic to your site, you could potentially get a bigger cut of the revenue share that JobThread offers.
Like other job board solutions, JobThread handles all payment processing for you, so that your site can accept credit card payments and payments via PayPal for employers who wish to post jobs on your board.
Although JobThread is a hosted solution - JobThread does all the grunt work - you can create a custom URL for your job board on your domain, as well as customize that job board to match the design of your site. And you can also place a customizable widget anywhere on your website to advertise the fact that you have a job board and display your job classified ads to your visitors.
One of the advantages of JobThread over its competitors is that the JobThread widget displays local classified jobs that are located close to the specific location of the person visiting your page, rather than just displaying the most recently added job ads.
- JobCoin
JobCoin, like the other job board solutions reviewed, is a hosted solution. JobCoin lets you style your job board so it uses your site's CSS template and lets you set up a custom domain (i.e. jobs.yourdomain.com). You can also embed a widget anywhere on your site that displays job posts and links to your job board.
Unlike the other job board solutions, however, you do not get control over how much it costs to display a job ad on your job board. Employers pay a set amount of $99 to post a job to your site or to any other site in the network for that matter.
Like Job-a-matic, the jobs on posted on your job board do not all have to be jobs that were specifically targeted by employers to your site. JobCoin pulls jobs in from its database and posts jobs on your job board that your visitors will find interesting, based on your site's niche as well as JobCoin's own ranking algorithm.
With JobCoin you get paid in two ways:
- First off if an employer creates a job post through your board, then JobCoin will pay you on average about $20 per post.
- Additionally if someone applies for a job through your job board, regardless of whether or not that job post was actually created through your job board, you will be paid between on average $2 and $10 per application.
The last payment option is what makes JobCoin unique. The other solutions (minus Job-a-matic) only pay you when the job is posted. So even through JobCoin pays you substantially less per post than the other solutions, the additional income from people applying for jobs may be more than adequate to offset that loss of revenue.
Do you see any mistakes? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of these job board solutions? Please leave a comment below.
Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 11th 2008 as Website Monetization: Job Board Solutions Compared - Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread, And JobCoin.
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