Eight job portal trends to follow this year

Month after month, every single thing in the digital realm changes, and job portals are no exception.

Here are some of the most important trends for job portals to follow in 2020:

1. Gig Economy Segmentation

Unlike just five or ten years ago, we now have a huge freelance workforce that’s looking exclusively for flexible, part-time, remote projects. According to research, the United States alone had 62.2 million freelancers in 2019, which is expected to increase to 64.8 million this year. 

Usually, job portals posted these ads alongside regular, full-time jobs, but work trends demand that portals now differentiate between the two and give freelancers and remote workers what they’re looking for. 

2. Advanced Filtering Options

Another work trend that job portals will have to start catering to is the increase in applicants’ standards and perks.

While 401k matching and advanced insurance were considered extremely nice perks just a couple of years ago, the millennial generation is looking for more: from flexible work hours, option to work from home, pet-friendly offices, education opportunities, free food and beverages, on-site gym, and much more.

As a job portal, you should give your job-seekers the opportunity to narrow down their search according to perks and benefits they consider most important. 

3. Detailed Company Info

Long gone are the days where a company could post a job ad without owning a website, LinkedIn profile or another type of online presence and expect rivers of applicants to come their way.

Nowadays, applicants want to know as much as possible about the company they’re applying to, both for their personal benefit (keeping themselves informed) and for extra points in the interview phase.

One of the companies that perfectly exemplify how important company data is to today’s job seekers is Glassdoor.  With over 50 million international visitors per month, Glassdoor informs job seekers and applicants about a company’s salary, reviews, benefits, interview difficulty and questions and more. 

Job portals that want to stay ahead of the curve in 2020 will likely introduce the same kind of detailed company information to their job ads. This way, applicants will know exactly what they’re in for before applying. 

4. Content Marketing

Like all other industries and sectors, job portals are likely to increase their investments into content marketing. Given that the HR & job industry is very keyword-friendly (in other words, deals with questions and issues many users search for on the Internet), it's likely that job portal owners will continue to differentiate through content marketing efforts.

If you want to up the content marketing game for your job portal, you can use some of the following online tools and services: TopEssayWriting (to hire writers for category descriptions, pages and role descriptions), SmallSEOTools (to check whether your job portal is SEO-friendly), ClassyEssay (to find content writers for your job platform), Google's Optimize (to perform tests and experiments for improvement of your website) or SimilarWeb (to compare the performance of your job portal to competitors and other websites).

5. Reviews and Recommendations

These days, marketing and sales are all about testimonials and recommendations. To successfully implement this marketing technique, introduce reviews in any section of the job portal that you can: from company reviews, application and hiring process reviews to recommendations for the portal itself. 

6. Elaborate Applicant Profiles 

As the almighty resume is still not decreasing in importance, but new ways of introducing one’s professional history arise, job portals will have to offer their own version of a resume:

“Thanks to social media networks, we know more about our applicants than ever before. This will also translate into detailed profiles and applications on job portals – if a candidate wants to differentiate themselves among a sea of job-seekers, they will have to go in-depth with their professional history, skills and interests,” says Kelly White, an HR manager at BeGraded. 

7. All-Around Application & Hiring Solutions

In recent years, many tech solutions and tools cropped up to help talent management and HR departments to have a systematic, objective and efficient approach to their hiring process. 

Surprisingly enough, many job portals didn’t recognize this need for all-around solutions to offer their HR visitors and users: namely, if you provide questionnaires, surveys, resume-screening platforms, tests, and other resources for hiring, your visitors won’t have any reason to use any website but your own. 

This is especially advisable for job portals who have already established their position on the market and are looking to expand their portfolio by introducing new services. 

8. Mobile & App Focus

Finally, we have come to the indispensable aspect of every website or portal in 2020: mobile-friendliness. In a Glassdoor study from 2019, results have shown that the majority of job-seekers (58%) use their mobile phones to search for jobs.

When you take these numbers into consideration, it seems absolutely crazy to ignore the importance of the mobile version of your job portal.

Also, a mobile application for iOS and Android will also be the investment of job portals in 2020 for those that haven’t created it already. Namely, mobile apps have been proven to significantly increase engagement, average time spent on the app (portal) and returning visitor rate. On the other hand, it’s a one-off development investment that will serve your business for years to come.

Conclusion

There are so many interesting and promising directions you can take as a job portal to increase the satisfaction and engagement of your visitors: job-seekers. The first thing to keep in mind is the function of your website and what your visitors are looking for (jobs, duh!) and simply go from there.

For example, UX/UI design, filtering options and general simplicity of the site are much more important for a job portal than aesthetic design.

The best way to keep up with those changes is to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to changes in the way we work, search for jobs and apply to them. Like we said, if you notice that the workforce is shifting to freelance, respond to this on your job portal by offering segmented freelancing opportunities.