MembershipWorks is proud to announce our new Job Board plugin for WordPress. While job board plugins sometimes operate on a stand-alone basis, our plugin offers an integrated membership system along with the plugin. The integration with a membership platform allows our WP job board to help you further monetize job listings with memberships.
What Online Job Boards Are (and Why You Might Need One)
An online job board is a place where employers can post job openings from various companies. Site visitors can review these openings and apply for jobs they are interested in. Adding a job board to your WordPress site can help a membership-based organization become a career hub as job seekers scan listings for job offers. Some reasons you might want a job board include:
- If you’ve been manually posting job listings to your website, this method allows you to empower employers to add, edit and remove listings themselves. This frees you up to do more important tasks.
- Membership organizations know that members are becoming more selective about which associations and groups they join. An organization with a job board is more likely to retain members. Job opportunities directly impact members’ pocketbooks.
Why Do You Need a Job Board Plugin?
A job board plugin can be a source of income for organizations that charge employers for listings. Another way to make money through the job board is to only allow members to post and/or view listings. Having a job board that is tied to a membership plugin enables these additional revenue opportunities.
Job Boards are also a powerful retention tool. Members who find a job through your website are more likely to renew their membership so that they can stay on top of career opportunities. If you make the Job Board only available to current members, prospective members are also incentivized to join.
Create Your Jobsite Instantly
It’s simple to add a job board to your WordPress site. If you already have the MembershipWorks plugin installed, all you’ll need to do is to go to Jobs/Other Boards and create a new Job Board. (Note you’ll need to be on a paid version of the plugin to access this feature.) From the board’s Dashboard > Embed section, you can copy and paste shortcodes from the back end to embed on three new pages you build for:
- Viewing listings
- Posting listings
- Managing listings
The job listing form is pre-populated with the fields that are useful to most organizations, but you can add, edit and remove fields to suit your needs. You can also create tags so that employers can categorize the job industry and/or type of job they are posting. You can set things up so that job seekers can use these tags to quickly find the listings that would most appeal to them.
Some inventive organizations like to also offer help with jobs & resumes by creating a resume review service along with their job bank. This program can be limited to current members and can run by volunteers or staff who have skills in resume writing. If you want to charge for the service, you can create a shopping cart to sell it under MembershipWorks’ Forms Carts Donations feature.
What Functionality Do You Need to Create a Stellar WordPress Job Board?
Beyond the basics of having a listings page and a way for employers post listings, great job-board functionality includes:
- Listings Management – Employers may want to go back to edit or remove their listings without asking an administrator with the organization to take care of it.
- Job Categorization – Job hunters appreciate categorized job listings so that they don’t have to wade through all of the listings to find the ones that interest them. For example, you could categorize jobs by: industry, location, job title, or other factors.
- Monetization -The organization hosting the job bank can make money either by charging employers a listing fee and/or by restricting the ability to see listings to only paid members. Of course there are downsides with both choices in that you may have less job postings or fewer eyeballs on the job listings.
- Field Customization – While it’s nice to have a job bank that’s ready to go “out of the box,” some trade associations or professional groups will want to be able to add fields that pertain to their industry.
- Admin screening and moderation – To maintain high quality listings on your board, you can enable an approval process where admins review all listings before posting them. Admins can add, edit and remove listings.
- Support – Oftentimes plugins do not come with support, or when support is available it can take an extended period of time to get an answer. MembershipWorks Job Board plugin comes with unlimited free support by phone, email and live screen share training.
- Stability – Most WordPress plugins will simply host job board functionality on your WordPress site. However, WordPress can be the target of hackers and spammers, so that’s not the safest place for this kind of information. When you use a SaaS (software as a service) plugin like MembershipWorks, your job bank data is safely stored and managed for you. This can give you more peace of mind, especially if the job bank is a mission-critical source of revenue or an important member benefit.
See the full list of features.
What to Expect From an Ideal WordPress Job Board Plugin?
WordPress job board plugins are not all built alike, so it’s important to create a list of features that are “must have” versus “nice to have”. This list may look different for every organization. When researching plugins, refer back to your feature list often and add additional features as you learn more about what is possible. Some features that may be on your “nice to have” or “must have” list include:
- Member exclusivity – Some organizations may want the job bank to only be available to members as an additional method to offer member value.
- Card on file payment – Employers who are frequent job bank posters will save time with the ability to charge their card on file for each job listing (only available for organizations using Stripe or Authorize.net as their payment gateway). This ease of use may cause them to post jobs more often and increase your revenue.
- Stats for Employers – Recruiters love being able to see how many views and clicks their listings have.
- Automatic expiration – Job applicants can feel discouraged from applying when they see old listings. To avoid this, administrators can set job posts to automatically expire after a certain number of days.
- Accounting system integration – With MembershipWorks you can export transactions related to the job bank to Quickbooks or Xero.
- Secondary administrator access – The primary admin can grant or not grant access to the back end of the job board. This allows you to keep access to the board separate from the rest of your website and membership software.
WordPress Job Board Plugin Features
Easily customizable
MembershipWorks’ job board is easily customizable; administrators can add/remove fields and generate tags to align with the needs of their organization. For example, a job board hosted by a medical trade association may need to have tags related to areas of medical specialization and medical credentials. These tags can then be added to the job listings page to allow applicants to quickly filter the listings they are qualified to fill.
Mobile responsive
As most web traffic comes from mobile phones, it’s important that a job bank is easily accessible on smaller devices. MembershipWorks’ job bank plugin scales to the size of the device being used. The listings, employer dashboard, and the administrative settings can be viewed on a range of screen sizes, whether it be mobile, tablet, or desktop.
No coding required
Adding job bank functionality to a website shouldn’t require programming knowledge, and thankfully MembershipWorks provides shortcodes for easy copy-and-paste implementation. Three shortcodes are provided for the job bank to help users view, post and manage their listings.
A separate page should be created for each shortcode. MembershipWorks also provides a shortcode that allows members to manage their account. This should be used to create a page where job bank viewers, members, and/or employers login to renew their membership (if applicable), edit their profile, change their password, and view their transaction history.
Works with most WordPress themes
MembershipWorks has yet to encounter a theme that does not work with our Job Board. If your theme uses Ajax loading, we advise disabling that feature so that MembershipWorks will function properly. You don’t need to change to a job board theme.
How to Choose Your WordPress Job Board Plugin
When choosing a job board plugin, start by making a list of requirements related to your organization’s needs. It’s a good idea to create a comparison matrix on a spreadsheet. You can have columns for each of the features across the top and then run the names of plugins you are considering down the left side. Example column headings could include:
- Pricing features (for selling listings to employers)
- Membership features/exclusivity
- Administrative features
- Listing customization possibilities
- Job categorization possibilities
- Support options/availability/cost
- SaaS-hosted or not
- Employer management features
- Accounting system integration
- Cost
- Ratings/reviews of the plugin on the WordPress repository
Read further tips on evaluating WordPress plugins. It’s also a good idea to request a demo of the plugin if one is available. MembershipWorks offers a free demo.
Final Thoughts on the Job Board WordPress Plugin
While many WordPress job board plugins can do a serviceable job, having one with support that is just a phone call away is a rarity. Website developers and designers who pick MembershipWorks can rest easy knowing that their clients can turn to the plugin developer for both training and support on the product. MembershipWorks offers support by phone, email and live screenshare training. Both developers and their clients can take advantage of this service that’s included in the plugin price.
Job Board WordPress Plugin FAQ’s
How to create a WordPress job board?
Building a WordPress job board with the MembershipWorks plugin is simple. It’s ready to go “out of the box,” but you can customize it to your organization’s needs. The basic steps involved are:
- Set up an account with MembershipWorks.
- Enter your payment gateway information in Organization Settings so that you can collect funds online (needed if you are collecting memberships or payments for job listings).
- Optionally create membership levels (set prices, set billing options, system emails, etc.) in Labels & Membership and add the membership sign-up shortcode to a page on your site.
- Create a job board under Jobs/Other Boards.
- Add the job bank shortcodes to the three pages on your site (shortcodes can be found under your job board’s Dashboard within the Embed tab).
- Add a member manage shortcode to a page. This will allow employers to log in to see their job board stats and other things. If you require membership to access the job board listing, members will also be able to use this page to manage their membership and edit their profile.
- Optionally customize the job board plugin by adding/editing/removing fields and editing the system emails related to the plugin.
How can I customize the job application process?
With MembershipWorks, you’ll keep things simple by allowing the employers to process job applications. Applicants will see an “Apply” button that will connect to the URL that employers enter. Most employers find this useful as they typically have their own applicant tracking system or portal and don’t want a separate system. Alternatively, applicants can be prompted to submit an application by email.
Is WordPress good for a job board?
WordPress is a great platform to host a job board. WordPress is built to allow you to easily add on plugins. It’s an even better platform when you are using a SaaS plugin like MembershipWorks. With a SaaS-based job board plugin, your job board data is actually being hosted separately from your site. This adds an extra layer of security, so even if your site is compromised, your job board information is stored elsewhere.
How do I use an online plugin in WordPress?
You install a SaaS-based online plugin the same way you install any other WordPress plugin. Should you run into any issues or questions, MembershipWorks support is just a phone call or email away. The steps are as follows:
- Set up an account with MembershipWorks.
- Download the plugin from the WordPress repository or from your WordPress Dashboard. Simply go to Plugins, click on “Add New” and search for “MembershipWorks”.
- Once installed on WordPress, add your Organization ID under MembershipWorks > Plugin Settings. You can find your Organization ID listed in red on the first page of Organization Settings.
- You can then create your board in Jobs/Other Boards.
Comments are closed.