I still remember the urgent email and meeting request about job boards. I was confused. There were over 40 names copied on this message, many of which I had never seen before. I knew something bad happened.

Long story short, the client implemented some new technology and accidentally posted their jobs on at least 50 new job boards. It went up on sites their PR and media team definitely did not approve of.

But there was also a lot of unknown. What was the impact of posting to all these sites without the approval? Did they need to alert PR? As the most junior person on the call, I was assigned the task of visiting each and every one of those job boards.

I went back, again. Not to all 50 but to some of the most memorable, and nothing has changed.

Observations From Opening 50 Job Boards

1. Job boards are really ugly. A lot of them look like they were built in 1999.That view alone is enough to make your brand look old and stodgy.
2. Boards focused on specific niches seem to be winning, especially IT only job boards. I was surprised at the traffic data behind some of the no name job boards like ItJobCafe.
3. The whole "it's free. Just pay us a fee if you hire any candidates on our website" model still means that site probably has terrible traffic. Been there, sold that.
4. Free classifieds are totally still a thing. I know most of you have moved on to Facebook Marketplace but globally, there are millions of people using classified ad sites.
5. People are making incredible traffic numbers off publishing the same site to multiple niche named domains. I don't know how but we're talking millions of views a month.

Now I need to go clear my cookies because I don't even want to see the terrible remarketing these sites will inevitably do now.

You should consider these data points when posting your next niche job or looking for new places to post. Look for unexpected places and stop relying on the big names to deliver the traffic you need.