The Ultimate Guide to Building a Job Board with Webflow and Memberstack

In today's fast-paced world, job boards have become essential for job seekers and employers. They provide a convenient platform for individuals to search and apply for jobs while allowing companies to find the right talent for their teams.

Things to consider:

Design and layout of the site. Find job board design ideas here.
Features that enhance the user experience, such as detailed filters for quick job searches based on location, experience, salary, etc.
Niche vs. general job boards. Niche platforms catering to specific sectors such as design, tech, or marketing are growing popular nowadays, but general job boards have advantages.
Ways to monetize your job board through various plans such as tiered pricing, subscriptions, freemium models, etc.

Part 1 - Before the build

Before you start building your job board, determine some important aspects of the job board, such as:

Is it going to be a niche platform or a general job board? You must understand the pros, cons and challenges associated with both options.
What features will the job board include? Since companies and job seekers interact with the platform differently, you must work on two sets of features tailored to each group.
For job seekers, some features such as search, filter, resume upload, and personal profiles are basic and essential. You can also work on additional features, such as resume builder, memberships, online career counseling services, and so on, to enhance user experience.
For companies and businesses posting jobs, important features to consider include a company profile, quick job uploading options, access to candidate data and resumes, etc. More features can be added by monetizing your job board, such as sponsored job posts which will be featured at the top of job listings for a small fee.

There are lots of different platforms for you to build your project with, each with their own pros and cons, we’re big fans of Webflow so we’re building with Webflow!

Part 2 - The Build

Choose Your Starting Point

Decide whether you want to start from scratch or use a template. Needless to say, using a template is a lot quicker and easier.

If you’re starting without a template, start from here.
If you’re starting with a template, click here.

P.S there’s a whole bunch of great Webflow job board templates out there, if you need some help choosing which template to start with, check out this list we put together here.

Building a Job Board with Webflow – Without a Template

Before you start, have a rough layout of the job board site, different pages and categories, and any other relevant pages on the website. This initial draft itself will serve as guidelines for you to work upon. You can use tools like figma, or simple pen and paper to help visualize your ideas.

Step 1: Blank Canvas

Step 2: Design Tips

Stick to clean and professional. Minimalist design works well with job boards.
Keep consistent with your branding and colors.
Search features with filters and sorting options are necessary for a better user experience. Same goes with navigation, keep it straightforward and simple to follow.
Use colors and fonts to highlight important information so people can quickly find what they need.
Create a quick and easy application process through sign-up forms.

Step 3: Job Listings

For job listings, you can use boxes or containers and grids to stylize your listings. You’ll have full control over how you want to display job posts in terms of appearance, alignment, font, colors, and style. You can display job postings in multiple ways, from simple list views to more appealing grid views and even carousels.

More advanced suggestions, collect essential info related to job posts such as industry, position, experience required, etc. This data can be automatically displayed in specific sections by assigning classes to each data point.

Most job listings display -

Employer's name, website link, application form link
Contract, full-time, part-time, remote, hybrid, location
Job role description
Employee requirements
How to apply
CTA

Step 4: Search Functions

Given the dynamic nature of job postings, we recommend adding a search feature with advanced filters, like, job titles, location, industry etc to help job seekers find relevant postings quickly.

Step 5: Monetizing Your Job Board

Integrate payments into your job board using Memberstack to monetize your platform. You can offer premium job listings, subscriptions, or other paid services. You can signup and test with Memberstack for free until you're ready to go live!

Step 6: Dedicated Ares for Employers and Employees

‍You’ll have to break down your job board into two separate sections for both employers and job seekers. You can set up sign-up forms and profile pages for both sections to onboard both users on your platform. Use Memberstack to manage user accounts, job listings and payments.

Step 7: Optimizing Job Board for Organic Traffic

‍Perform keyword research to see what queries people use to search for jobs, and integrate them into your web pages. Websites built with Webflow are responsive, improving your site’s SEO.

Building a Job Board with Webflow – With a Template

TLDR: The process will be muuuuuch easier with a template!

Step 1: Setting Up Webflow with a Template

Login to your Webflow account (or signup), create a new project and search ‘Job Boards’ in the template search box, take a look at what template you’d like to go with. If you’ve already found a template you’d like, clone right away from the template page.

P.S there’s a whole bunch of great Webflow job board templates out there, if you need some help choosing which template to start with, check out this list we put together here.

For this example, we’re going to go with this Job board starter kit designed by Duncan from the Memberstack Team.

Step 2: Customizing the Template Design

Good news, you can customize anything and everything on a template! To make changes to the template, click on any section you’d like to change, and its customization options will be displayed on the right side of the screen. Change the colors, add custom buttons, experiment with different fonts, pretty much anything goes! Don’t forget to adjust the dimensions for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices using the built-in settings.

Step 3: Managing Job Listings

‍Another benefit of using a template is that it comes with a pre-made dynamic job listings so you don’t have to set too much up. You can set it up to display the jobs posted on your site. There are multiple customization options for this, so you can design the style and layout of the job listings as per your preference.

Step 4: Adding Search and Filter Functions

Along with a built-in job listing section, many templates will include ready to go search boxes with filter settings. If the selected template doesn’t have that feature, you can still rely on CMS libraries to integrate search functionality into your job board.

Step 5: Monetizing your Job Board

Step 6: Job Boards for Employers and Employees‍

Depending on the template you choose, some will have designated areas for employers and job seekers. Even so, managing a dynamic site that is displayed differently to two different parties is a complex task. So it’s still recommended to use an additional tool like Memberstack to better control how your job board functions for employers and employees.

Step 6: Optimizing for Search Engines

‍Whether you build with or without a template, the on-page and off page optimization techniques are the same in both cases. The only difference is that some templates are already SEO optimized in terms of responsiveness and compact code, which boosts loading speed. Such templates can give your job board a slight edge in terms of technical SEO. Make sure you still do your keyword research so you know what your audience is searching for.

You've Built a Job Board, What Next?

Now that your job board is live, focus on growth and maintenance. Check out these helpful blog posts for next steps:

How to Price your Job Board

The Ultimate Guide to Building a Job Board with Webflow and Memberstack

Shuib Abdullah

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1 - Before the build

Part 2 - The Build