I'm starting a for profit job board dedicated to the IT world in my area. There is a decent IT industry around me and it seems they are always hiring. I plan on offering fair rates, and eventually I would like to be able to offer a guarantee to the employers.
But for now I'm facing an oh so familiar issue. The old chicken/egg problem. Employers aren't going to want to pay for a service (even at the price I'll be offering) if there are hardly any users there looking for jobs. I've considered offering a large number of companies X amount of free listings to try and get potential job seekers to the website but I'm just not too sure how many companies will agree, and then actually spend the time to use the site.
I was also thinking of building a scraper to go and grab IT jobs from companies in the specific area that I am serving, but I'm not sure if this is really ethical. Could I get in trouble for scraping sites like craigslist, or monster.com?
I'm in the mindset now that I need to work on getting employers with little job seekers, rather than job seekers with little employers.
What do you guys think?
you could populate your site from listings from indeed and simplyhired. They have APIs for you to do that, so you don't have to scrape them. Plus you actually earn money when people apply for a job. Also, you can check out jobboarders.com it's a community of people hosting job boards, you'll find plenty of advice about starting a job board. Good luck :-)