I've created a Widget Worker Job board where jobs in and around widget related activities can be posted. You can check out jobs, see jobs and submit your own jobs here. Seeing as every single startup and established company in the world is feverishly working on widgets at the moment, it seemed appropriate to create a specialised place for us all to hang out.
Posting jobs on our board costs a paltry $100 for 30 days. But in order to demonstrate how many jobs there are around and what good value it is, I've made it half price for the rest of this month. And you get your jobs promoted not only on the blog, but on the directory and in our newsletters as well. Bargain.
Making a job board is an incredibly widgety business. The whole idea of job boards cries out for a widget. Done well, the actual job board becomes secondary to the creation of the widget for the board. A niche job board really calls for two way traffic: you want available jobs to be posted and you want potential employees who are interested in that subject to see those jobs. Thus, the widget really needs to link these two sides of the coin together. And to their credit, most job board widgets manage to do this. Most, but not all. I thought I'd review the boards I looked at, for their widgetization capability, not for the job board side of it.
The job boards I tried out were Jobcoin, Jobthread, Job-a-matic and Edgeio. Luckily Jobby had been absorbed by Jobster before this experiment. All job boards work in much the same way. You create your niche job board and you have an option to distribute jobs through their wider networks and also to display jobs from their wider networks. Most boards are fairly mundane in offerings beyond that, with little consideration of widget distribution and affiliate value chains.
Jobcoin's model is a fixed $99 per job submission. You get a share of this and you also get paid for job applications that come through your board. Only JobCoin had this system, which I thought had a lot of potential. Setup and configuration was simple. However, widget configuration was minimalist to say the least, which led to a godawful looking widget.
I was really impressed with Jobthread, they have lovely graphics. Easy to configure with the ability to set your own price and time period for job listings. But, but, but, they let themselves down so horribly when it came to configuring the widget, that I felt betrayed.
Honestly, that's it. There are no further configuration options available, not colours, not size. The only thing I can set is the number of jobs listed, and then I get a horrible anaemic thing.
Jobamatic do a reasonable job of configuration. They offer a range of lurid colours and rounded corners, very 2.0. This makes a pretty natty widget, but for me they fall down in one crucial aspect. They only accept jobs from the USA. Which, in this age of the local in the global and virtual companies sort of rules out almost all the potential of the board. I mean, I could put up a board that no company in Europe or Asia or anywhere else could put jobs up on. Now, how does a company manage to get itself into a corner like that? Everyone else seems to manage quite nicely to be globally inclusive.
Anyway, at this point I was quietly disparing. It seemed to be a toss up between ugly or American. But I had this little inkling that I should go look at Edgeio. I should have had them at the front of my mind as the founder is an old friend of mine and an advisor to Snipperoo and had spent some time explaining to me their distributed affiliate model. For some reason I was focussed on job board companies. Then I went and logged in and took a fresh look.
Edgeio gives you listings boards. You can choose from Autos, Housing, Merchandise, Services, Travel and Jobs. I have only looked at Jobs to make a jobs board.
Configuration is straightforward, with a bunch of options, though at first you are configuring the jobs board rather than the widget. Customising the widget is fairly simple. You get to choose size, which is crucial, colours and background if wanted. Which makes for a sensible, neither ugly nor beautiful, but functional widget.
Ahem, no jobs yet. This widget, however, packs a powerful punch. At the bottom it says 'Become an Affiliate'. This allows anyone to pick up my widget, to feed jobs from their site to our job board - and to share in the fees for doing so.
I even get to choose how much to pay affiliates. In this case, they end up with the same amount we do.
How does this work in practice? Edgeio could be clearer on this "Affiliate earnings are the net earnings collected and paid associated
with affiliate boards. For example, if a lister on your site paid to
have their listing show up on another board then you will receive
positive affiliate revenue associated with listing (based on what the
other marketplace offered). If another board's lister paid to have
their listing show up on your board, then you will pay that marketplace
the affiliate fee (based on what you setup). Your still make money as
the listing fee is greater than the affiliate fee but in this case, the
affiliate earnings would be negative. The affiliate earnings is the net
total of both types of transactions."
I look forward to seeing this affiliate structure in practice. I take my hat off to Edgeio for creating exactly what I wanted with bells on.
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