You can build a niche remote job board on WordPress with WP Career Board alone. Every job carries a Remote flag that visitors can filter on, every employer gets a public company page, a Find Companies directory lists them all, and the board publishes a jobs feed and Google for Jobs markup. All of that is in the free plugin. What you add yourself is the part that makes it a niche: the audience, the first employers and the rules.
Say you run a site for people in one profession, and your readers keep emailing to ask where the remote work is. That’s the situation this post follows. It’s an example, not a case study, so swap in your own field. We’ll go from first install to the end of the first month, and mark where the plugin helps and where it doesn’t.
Key points
- The Remote flag is set per job, and visitors can filter to Remote only.
- Each employer has a public company page, and the Find Companies page lists every company with its open jobs.
/jobs/feed/is a feed of your jobs with remote, salary, company and deadline fields.- Jobs go to Pending until you approve them, unless you switch on Auto-Publish.
First, decide what the board is for
A job board for everyone competes with the giants and loses. A board for one profession, with only remote roles, has a reason to exist. Visitors already trust you on the subject, and employers who want that exact reader will pay attention.
So write down two things before you install anything: the profession, and what “remote” means on your board. Fully remote anywhere? Remote within one country? Our plugin marks a job as remote or not, and that’s all it knows. If your rule is stricter, such as “remote in Europe only”, the rule goes in your posting guidelines and in the job description, not in a setting.
That sounds like a small point, but it decides how much moderation you’ll do. A loose rule means you’ll be reading every job for hidden office requirements. A clear one you can enforce in a sentence.
Install it and let the wizard build the pages
Career Board has a setup wizard that creates the pages a board needs. Two of them matter for this story: a page for finding jobs and a page for finding companies, which hold the job list and the company directory.
The addresses may surprise you. The browse pages live at /find-jobs/ and /find-companies/, because /jobs/ and /companies/ already belong to the job and company archives. Don’t fight that. Link to the browse pages from your menu, and let the archives do their own work.
If you want the longer walkthrough of the first listing, install to first job listing goes click by click. We’ll stay on what’s specific to a remote niche board.
Make “remote” a feature, not a tag
A remote board lives or dies on how fast a visitor can get to remote jobs.
On the job form, an employer can mark a job as remote. On the job list, visitors see a badge for it next to the Featured, job type, experience and location badges. And in the filters, under Location, there’s a Remote only option that shows only jobs marked remote. That’s the whole mechanism, and it’s enough.
Here’s the behaviour that matters most for a niche board: there isn’t a switch that makes the entire site remote. Each job carries its own flag, so an employer who forgets to tick it posts an office job that looks like any other. Two habits fix that. Say it clearly on the posting page, and check the flag when you approve each job.
What it does for Google
This is where the flag earns its keep. Career Board writes Google for Jobs markup for each job, and a remote job is marked as such, with the country applicants may live in. That country comes from the Default country setting, which starts as the country of your site language.
There’s one rule to know. Google rejects a job with no place to work, so Career Board leaves a job out of the markup when it has neither a location nor the Remote flag. The job form asks for a location unless the job is marked remote, and on new installs that requirement is on. For a remote board, that means most of your jobs satisfy the rule just by being remote. Our post on job posting schema for WordPress covers the rest of the markup.
Ended jobs behave sensibly too. A job past its deadline keeps its page but isn’t offered to Google as an open posting.
The employer directory is half the product
A job list tells a candidate what’s open. A company directory tells them who’s worth applying to, and for a niche audience that’s often the more useful page.
Every employer on your board can have a public company page. The page shows the name, logo and tagline, links to their website and social profiles, an About section, company details such as industry, size, type, year founded and headquarters, and an Open Positions list of their jobs still taking applications. Only the company name is required, so an employer can save a profile in thirty seconds and improve it later.
The address follows the company name, for example yourdomain.com/companies/your-company-name/. Anyone can see it, signed in or not.
The Find Companies page puts all of them in one place, with a grid or list view and filters, including industry. It shows how many jobs each company has open, counting only jobs that are published and still within their deadline. Candidates can bookmark companies from it and see them later in their saved items.
Why this beats a plain job list for a niche
Think about what a reader of a profession-specific site wants to know. Not just “is there a job” but “which companies hire people like me, and are they any good”. A directory of ten employers who all hire your kind of person answers that, and it’s something the big boards can’t copy, because it’s filtered by your editorial judgement.
You can add your own fields to company profiles as well, without code. A “Remote policy” field on each employer is a neat example, and the field builder docs show how.
Getting the first employers without a launch
You can’t launch a job board with no jobs. So don’t launch. Do this instead.
- Pick ten employers you already know hire in your field. Look for ones whose own careers pages list remote roles.
- Write to each, personally, and say what you’re building and who reads it. Offer to create their company page for them.
- Ask them to post one job. Even one is enough to show a candidate the board is alive.
- Approve each job yourself, and read it for remote rules as you go.
Don’t copy listings from other boards. It’s tempting when the page looks empty, and it’s the quickest way to lose employers’ trust and annoy the boards you copy from. Our guide to the first ten listings goes through this in more detail.
By default, every job an employer submits goes to Pending until an admin approves it. You can approve from the Jobs list with one click or in bulk, and the employer gets an email when it goes live. That’s a lot of control for a small board, and you can switch on Auto-Publish later, once you trust your regular employers.
The feed, and what to do with it
Career Board publishes a feed of your jobs at /jobs/feed/. WordPress decides how many items it shows, using the Reading setting for syndication feeds.
What’s special is what each item carries. As well as the usual title, link and date, there’s a short summary of company, location and salary in the description, plus fields for the job’s company, salary range, locations, type, category, experience, deadline, apply link and a remote flag set to true or false.
What can you do with it? Plenty, and most of it is cheap:
- Feed it to a newsletter tool so a weekly email of new remote jobs writes itself.
- Connect it to Zapier or IFTTT to post each new job to a social account or a chat channel.
- Give it to aggregators who want to list your jobs.
- Open it in any RSS reader to see your board the way an aggregator sees it.
You can narrow the feed to one category, job type or location by adding its slug to the address. Be aware of the limit: the feed has no filter for remote, so you can’t ask it for remote jobs only. On a remote-only board that doesn’t matter, because everything on it should be remote. On a mixed board, use the REST API or build a category for remote jobs.
If you want to syndicate to job sites such as Indeed, Pro adds an XML feed at /wcb-jobs.xml that’s compatible with Indeed and Glassdoor.
Keeping candidates coming back
A candidate who searches today and finds nothing has no reason to return. Job alerts fix that, and for a niche board they’re the main retention tool you have. Alerts are a Pro feature: members save a search and get an email when a matching job appears, including a remote-only filter. Our post on job alerts for guests and members covers the options and limits.
Even without alerts, the feed and a newsletter do much of the same job.
What about a business directory?
You might also want a directory of things that aren’t employers, such as coworking spaces or agencies for freelancers in your field. That’s a separate job, and Listora is our directory plugin.
Be clear about what that means. Listora lists Career Board as a suggested companion, with the line “A job board next to your business directory”, but we haven’t found any code that links their data. Jobs and company pages stay in Career Board, and directory listings stay in Listora, as two separate sets. Run both if you want both. Don’t promise visitors a combined search, because there isn’t one.
Charging employers, when you’re ready
Don’t charge in the first month. Employers who post for free tell you what they actually need. Once they do, the question of what to charge is its own subject, and job board pricing models walks through the options. Pro adds credits so employers can buy a balance and spend it on postings.
The first month, in order
Here’s the order we’d follow for a board like this.
- Week one: install, run the wizard, set your default country and write your posting rules.
- Week two: write to ten employers and create their company pages.
- Week three: approve the first jobs by hand and check each remote flag.
- Week four: announce to your own readers, start a weekly email from the feed, and look at which jobs get clicks.
If you’d like the background on running a niche board in general, the niche job board guide is the reference page.
Questions people ask
Can the whole board be remote-only? Each job has its own Remote flag, and there’s no site-wide switch. Make it a rule in your posting guidelines and check the flag when you approve jobs.
Is the company directory free? Yes. Company pages and the Find Companies page are part of the free plugin.
Do remote jobs show up in Google for Jobs? Remote jobs are marked as remote in the markup. A job with no location and no Remote flag is left out, so each job needs one or the other.
Can I filter the feed by remote? No. You can filter by category, job type or location. For remote you’d use the REST API.
Do I need Listora? No. Career Board has its own employer directory. Listora is for a separate directory of other businesses.