Job board software

Webcraft
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Recent developments has brought my attention to job board software, you know, those sites where HR people or whoever posts jobs, and then visitors apply, either through the site or some other way. I figured that this is a simple enough set of functions that there was probable some great open source software out there.

Not really.

The two contenders that I can see are Joobsbox and jobberBase.

Despite the name not being fun to say aloud, Joobsbox looked interesting. The features included themes and plugins, and an easy installation. Those things work well for WordPress, so I thought I would give it a try.

Fortunately they have a demo up, and I was able to get over it immediately. First of all, the backend sucks, I couldn’t imagine it being very fun to administer a popular site from there. Not sure if the demo is just dying or what, but many of the elements that I thought would work, weren’t.

As it stands, Joobsbox appears to have been abandoned. The comments on their blog are from years ago, and the last commit to their git repo is from two years ago. That in itself isn’t a deterrent for me, since I wouldn’t mind breathing life back into it. Then I saw the license. Not interested.

So, there is jobberBase. They also have a demo, but I couldn’t get into the admin panel to see how it works. And while it is released under the MIT license, you have to register with them to get a link to the download. I don’t play stupid games like that.

What now?

I don’t really have time to learn a new framework just to get a job board up and running, so I suppose the thing to do is make do with something I know, and build a job board from that. I could easily make it in Drupal, though the overhead would drive me crazy. Maybe a plugin for WordPress would be suitable.

The other half of this is, I’ve never successfully used a job board, so I don’t have a sense of what works, and what is useless cruft left in because “everyone is doing this”. I am a freelancer, so I don’t know what other considerations someone in Human Resources may have when using a job board.

Some things to think about.

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hmm. this seems like a wheel that doesn’t need reinventing – especially since jobs boards have a network effect – a little board run by one company doesn’t get the same traffic that a large board hosting a wide variety of jobs does.

could you use an existing system to host jobs, and then syndicate the jobs posted there into the client site to display them locally? i’m ignorant, but it seems like the big players must have some kind of API you could write to.

by regularly importing your own jobs, you have some built-in protection from the failure of an external service…

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I get the sense that folks want to leverage that “hyper-local” feel. I am not really sure how big an area has to be before it starts making sense. For instance, Berkeley seems too small, and Bay Area too large, so the sweet spot is probably between something like Oakland and East bay.

The other thing is, I am not sure how these things are paid for. I haven’t looked into what the big sites charge, or if it is ad-based.

At any rate, the request came for something on the local-level, so that is where my mind is. Perhaps it isn’t my cup of tea, this time around. :slight_smile: