You can run several job boards on one WordPress site with WP Career Board, and each board gets its own rules for four things: what an employer pays to post, whether jobs wait for approval, how long a listing stays open, and which currency salaries use. On top of that, every board runs its own hiring pipeline. Managing boards is a Pro feature, so the rest of this post assumes Pro. Employers, candidates and your theme stay shared, which is the point: one install, several markets.
Why bother? Growth by region or by profession eventually turns a single board into a pile. Nurses hunting night shifts scroll past warehouse roles, and employers in one country argue about salaries shown in another’s currency. Splitting the board fixes that without splitting your site, your staff or your user accounts.
Ahead: when a second board earns its place, what you can change per board (and what you cannot), and how employers and visitors experience each change. The post closes with a plan for a first split.
When one board becomes two
Not every site needs this. One audience and one price list is simpler with one board, and a second board adds a decision for every employer who posts. Splitting makes sense when two groups of employers or candidates want different treatment and a single set of settings cannot give it to both.
Think about the shapes that tend to appear:
- By region. A national site that grows city by city, or a trade body with separate countries, where each area has its own salaries and its own audience.
- By profession. A staffing business that places nurses and also IT contractors, and does not want either crowd wading through the other’s roles.
- By price. A free board that fills the site with jobs, and a paid board for employers who want a more selective home.
- By trust. A general board that publishes quickly, and a board for sensitive roles where an admin reads every job first.
Every one of those is a business decision about who gets what. WP Career Board gives you the boards and the per-board settings, and leaves the strategy to you. Still working out the audience itself? How to start a niche job board covers that step before any of this matters.
What every site starts with
Free creates a board for you. New installs get one called Main Board, and every job is tied to a board, so a job posted with no choice lands there. Should the default board ever be trashed or deleted, the role passes to the oldest live board (or a fresh Main Board), so new jobs never land on a board that no longer exists.
Because of that default, a single-board site feels like it has no boards at all. Nothing asks the employer to choose, because there is nothing to choose.
Pro adds the part that matters here: a Boards tab in the plugin settings where you list your boards, search them, add more, and set the rules for each. Its list shows each board’s job count, pipeline stage count and credit cost, so differences are visible at a glance. Twenty boards appear per page, and a search box finds one by name.
Keep one practical limit in mind: the employer’s job form lists up to fifty published boards in its dropdown, so a site with more than that needs a deliberate plan for which boards employers can pick.
The four settings each board owns
Open a board and you find a Board Settings box with four fields. Every field either holds a value for that board or defers to the site-wide setting.
Credit cost per job. A whole number of credits an employer spends to post on this board. Zero is the starting value, which means posting is free, so a board costs nothing until you decide it should. Pro’s credit system has to be on for Career Board. Site administrators post free on every board.
Moderation. Three choices: use the global default, auto-publish, or require approval. This is the one that surprises people, because it works in both directions. Set a board to approval and its jobs wait as pending even when your site-wide setting publishes automatically. Set another to auto-publish and jobs go live even when the site-wide setting would hold them.
Listing length in days. How long a job on this board stays open when the employer sets no deadline of their own. Zero means follow the site-wide default under Settings, Jobs. Seasonal boards can run short listings while boards for senior roles run long ones.
Currency. Each board picks its own currency from the plugin’s catalogue. A board with no choice saved uses the site-wide salary currency. The job form opens on the board’s currency, and the salary on the listing card follows it, so a visitor reading the Canadian board sees Canadian dollars without anyone typing a symbol.
How credit cost shapes behaviour
Price per board carries the most business weight of the four, so it is worth thinking through.
Employers who try to post on a paid board with too few credits are stopped before the job is saved. The answer is an insufficient-credits response (HTTP 402) carrying the cost and the balance, so nothing half-created is left behind. The job form adds a kindness: when a new job would open on a board the employer cannot afford, it starts them on one they can.
Two-tier setups follow naturally. Free boards bring volume, and a paid board gives employers who want a selective home a reason to buy credits. Whether employers buy credits at all depends on how you sell them, and the job board pricing models post covers the choices there.
Two cautions are worth stating plainly. First, a price of zero is not a bug: it is the default, and a board you create today is free until you change it. Second, the cost is per job and site admins skip it entirely, so test with an employer account rather than your own.
Moderation and trust, board by board
Most owners start with a single moderation setting for the whole site. With boards you can be strict where it matters and relaxed where it does not.
Consider a staffing business with a Nursing board and a general Admin Roles board. Nursing jobs are sensitive: an admin wants to confirm each employer is real before anything goes public. Admin roles are low risk and high volume, and approving each one by hand would bury the team. Set Nursing to require approval, set the other to auto-publish, and each board gets the treatment its risk deserves.
Reverse logic works too. Suppose your global setting is approval, but one board belongs to a handful of vetted partners: set that board to auto-publish and those employers post without waiting.
Each board gets its own hiring pipeline
Boards do more than hold jobs. Pipeline stages, the columns in the Kanban view where an employer drags applicants from one step to the next, belong to the board. First publication gives a board the default set: Screening, Interview, Offer, Hired and Rejected.
From the Boards tab you manage those stages for each board: create, rename, recolour, reorder or delete them. Opening the pipeline for a job shows an employer the stages of the board that job belongs to.
This matters for businesses whose hiring really differs. Clinical boards might want a Credential Check stage between Screening and Interview. Seasonal retail might prefer a quick Trial Shift. Light, fast hiring might need only three steps. One shared pipeline would force all of them into the same shape, which is how pipelines end up ignored.
Existing sites are covered too. An upgrade routine gave boards that predate the pipeline the default stages, so nobody opens an empty Kanban after updating. For why a pipeline helps in the first place, read what an applicant tracking pipeline is.
What stays shared across boards
Shared ground outweighs separation here, and it helps to be exact about that so you promise the right thing.
- Accounts. Employers, candidates and your team use the same WordPress users on every board.
- Design. Your theme and page layout are shared. A board is a way of grouping jobs and setting rules, not a separate website.
- Custom fields. Field groups from the Field Builder are global. What you can do per board is opt a group out, so a field group about shift patterns can skip your IT board. You do not define a different set of fields for each board from scratch.
- Everything else in settings. Anything not listed in the four fields above follows the site-wide setting.
You might expect more per-board options, such as a different map provider or AI settings per board. Neither exists in the code, so plan on the four settings and the pipeline.
What employers and visitors see
For employers, the change shows up in the job form. Once more than one board is published, the form shows a board dropdown. With a single board there is no dropdown, which keeps a simple site simple. Editing an existing job preselects that job’s own board in the form, so saving the edit does not quietly move the job to another board and change its price.
Visitors meet boards as a Job board group in the filter panel of the job listings block, one checkbox per board. Visitors can narrow a mixed listing to the boards they care about. For a dedicated page per audience instead, the Job Listings block has a board setting that pins the block to one board, so a Nursing page shows only nursing jobs and an IT page shows only IT roles.
Pair that with plain page titles and a menu link per board and you have what feels like separate boards to a visitor, running from one site to you. Every page can speak to its audience and carry its own currency, while you manage them all from one place.
Keeping the rules readable
With several boards, the settings can drift into a puzzle that only you understand. Staff who moderate jobs need to know why one board holds jobs and another does not, and employers who see two prices will ask why. Team notes with a short table help, listing each board against its audience, price, moderation mode, listing length and currency.
Board names do real work here. Employers see them in the job form dropdown, and visitors see them as filter labels, so a name like “Board 2” tells nobody anything. Name each board for the audience it serves, such as the region or the profession, and the dropdown explains itself.
Write the reason down too. Months from now you may not remember why a Nursing board requires approval, and a note saves you from relaxing a rule that exists for a good reason.
Removing a board without losing jobs
You will eventually retire a board, so it is useful to know what happens. Deleting a board asks for confirmation, and the dialog says it plainly: the board’s pipeline stages are removed, and the jobs on it move to the default board.
Visitors are safe, because no job disappears. Employers may not be, since a moved job lives under the default board’s rules, including its price and moderation. Folding one board into another? Warn employers first and check the default board’s settings, so nobody is surprised by a different credit cost or currency.
A first split, step by step
Convinced a second board will help? Start small to keep risk low.
- Write down the difference. Name the one rule that needs to differ, such as currency, price or approval. If you cannot name one, a second board may not be worth it.
- Add the board and set its four fields. Leave the others on the global default so you change as little as possible.
- Review the pipeline. The default stages arrive automatically. Adjust them only if this board’s hiring genuinely differs.
- Test as an employer. Use a real employer account, not an admin one, because admins skip credit charges. Post a job, watch what the form shows, and check how the job appears.
- Give each board a page. Pin a Job Listings block to each board and link both from your menu.
- Move existing jobs deliberately. Existing jobs sit on the Main Board, and moving one means editing it and choosing the new board, with the price following the board. Decide which jobs belong on the new board before you announce it.
Check what the numbers say after a month, and fold back any board that stays empty. Keeping a board costs you nothing, yet every board adds a choice for employers, and a choice nobody needs is friction.
What Pro includes is on the pricing page, and the features overview shows where boards sit among the rest.