A job board has a retention problem that most owners notice late. A candidate searches, finds nothing right today, and leaves. The board might post a perfect match tomorrow, but the candidate has no reason to know. Unless they remember to check again, that match goes to somebody else’s board.
Job alerts close that gap. The candidate saves what they were looking for once, and the board emails them when something fits. It turns a one-off visit into a standing relationship, and it costs the candidate about ten seconds.
WP Career Board Pro has a full alerts system. This guide walks through what an alert stores, how the three delivery speeds differ, how guests can sign up without an account, what you can limit, and what to check before you rely on it. Alerts are a Pro feature. The Free plugin ships the slots and a sidebar card for them, but both stay hidden until Pro is active.
Where candidates find it
There are three places a candidate meets alerts.
- An “Alert me” button on the job listings. A candidate who has just searched can press it and the alert saves exactly what they searched for, filters included.
- The alerts tab in the candidate dashboard. Signed-in members manage their alerts here. An empty tab tells them to search for jobs and press Alert me.
- A sidebar card. A small “don’t miss new openings” card can sit on a company profile. It links to the dashboard tab, and it only appears when Pro alerts are active, so a Free-only site never shows a dead link.
You manage the feature from the Job Alerts tab in the board’s settings.
What an alert remembers
An alert is a saved search, not a simple subscription to everything. It can store:
- the keywords the candidate typed
- category, job type, location, experience level and tag
- a salary minimum and maximum
- remote only
- one particular company
- one particular board, if you run more than one
A job has to satisfy all of the chosen conditions to match. A candidate who saves “nurse” in one category, as a part-time role, doesn’t get full-time listings. A filter left blank is ignored.
Because the “Alert me” button shares its code with the job search, what gets saved is what the candidate was looking at on screen. There’s no separate alert form to fill in and no chance of the saved alert drifting from the search.
Instant, daily or weekly
Each alert has a frequency, and the candidate picks it: instant, daily or weekly. If none is sent, the plugin falls back to daily.
Instant alerts go out when a job is first published. The moment a job moves into the published state, matching instant alerts are queued. Editing a job that is already live doesn’t resend anything, and a job only triggers its alerts once.
Daily and weekly alerts are digests. The daily digest is scheduled for 8 a.m. server time, and the weekly one for Monday at 8 a.m. Each digest collects the matching jobs published since that alert was last sent, so a candidate gets one email with several jobs, not one email per job.
Both digests rely on WordPress cron. A digest looks back one day for the daily list and seven days for the weekly one, so if cron stalls for longer than that, jobs older than the window are never included. If your site disables WordPress cron, make sure a real server cron triggers it.
Guests can subscribe without an account
This is the part that adds subscribers a plain “log in to save an alert” flow loses. A visitor who isn’t signed in can still set an alert. They enter an email address, and the board sends a confirmation message first.
Nothing is sent until the guest clicks the link in that message. Until then the alert is saved as unconfirmed and every send skips it. That’s a proper double opt-in: nobody can sign up somebody else’s address and start filling their inbox.
Two protections sit behind the form:
- A request limit per visitor. A guest can make a handful of alert requests an hour from one network address, and after that the form says to try again in an hour. This stops anyone using your board as a way to mail strangers.
- A cap per email address. The same limit on how many alerts one address can hold applies to guests as well as members.
Signed-in members skip the confirmation, because their account email is already known. The whole guest route is a setting, switched on by default, and you can turn it off if you only want members to subscribe.
Limits you set
Two settings in the Job Alerts tab keep the feature in check.
- Guest alerts: on or off. On by default.
- Maximum alerts per member: how many saved searches one person can keep. The default is 10, and you can set anything from 1 to 100.
When a candidate reaches the cap, the form tells them they can keep up to that number and asks them to remove one to add another. A cap matters more than it looks. Someone with fifty alerts is mostly generating email, and every extra alert is another pass for your server at send time.
Built so a large list doesn’t stall your site
Sending is where a naive alert system hurts. If publishing a job meant emailing ten thousand people inside the same request, the employer would sit watching a spinner. Career Board does it differently.
Publishing a job only queues a task. The actual sending runs in the background in batches. Instant alerts are processed 50 subscribers at a time, and when a batch comes back full, the next one is queued. Digests go in batches of 100. The work runs through Action Scheduler when it’s available and falls back to WordPress cron when it isn’t. A big list becomes a series of small, retryable chunks.
Imported jobs get special handling. If you migrate a board and import a thousand old jobs, you don’t want a thousand alert emails. By default, jobs that came from an import don’t trigger instant alerts. A filter lets a developer change that for a particular import.
One-click unsubscribe
Every alert email carries a signed unsubscribe link for that one alert. It works when the person is logged out, which matters, because the person who clicks it is usually reading on their phone and isn’t signed in. The link carries a token tied to that alert, and one that doesn’t match is refused.
Making it easy to leave is good manners, and it protects your sender reputation. People who can’t find the unsubscribe link press the spam button instead.
Beyond email
Email is the default delivery channel, but the system doesn’t assume it. Each alert goes through a list of delivery channels, and a developer can add to that list with a filter. Each channel is a function that receives the alert and the matching jobs. That’s the hook a custom add-on would use to post matches to Slack or Discord or send a text. It’s a developer feature. Out of the box, you get email.
Limits to know before you promise anything
- It’s Pro. Free carries the placeholders only.
- Matching is on the fields above. An alert for a particular word matches how the board’s own search matches, not a smart reading of a candidate’s skills.
- New jobs only. Alerts fire when a job is first published, not when it’s edited or relisted.
- Email depends on your mail setup. A site with poor email deliverability will lose alerts like any other email. Set up an authenticated mail service first.
- Digests depend on cron. See above.
How to roll it out
Turn alerts on early, before you have much traffic, because the list of subscribers is an asset that grows with every visit. Put the “Alert me” button where candidates search, and place the sidebar card on company pages so a candidate looking at one employer can follow its openings.
Test it with three accounts
- Enable alerts and run a search as a signed-in candidate. Press Alert me and set it to instant.
- As an employer, publish a matching job. Confirm the candidate gets one email, and that publishing didn’t slow down.
- Edit the same job and confirm no second email arrives.
- Open the board logged out, set an alert with a test email address, and confirm nothing is sent until you click the confirmation link.
- Set a daily alert, publish two matching jobs, and trigger the daily send. Confirm both arrive in one email.
- Click unsubscribe while logged out and confirm the alert stops.
- Lower the alerts cap to 2, add a third alert and read the message.
Where to go next
The candidate side of the picture is in using the employer and candidate dashboards. If you’re deciding when a board is ready for features like this, signs your job board has outgrown its plugin is a useful checklist, and what an applicant tracking pipeline is covers the other end of the funnel. The features page lists everything else, and the pricing page shows the plans.