Due to my weekly jobs list I spend a silly amount of time trawling various jobs boards to identify the ten I link to each week. None of them are much fun to use really — the big ones are bloated and full of agency roles that may or may not exist, the specialised ones are often clunky with obscure eccentricities and the company ones are almost without fail dreadful — sending me down blind alleys and often providing barely useful job descriptions or often no actual page to link to.

Part of the problem is there is nowhere that aggregates the kinds of roles I go looking for but part of it is just that most of the software people are using seems to suck.

So this is just a quick brain-dump of things I’d like to see on a jobs board if I was ever in a position to influence anything. Some of them might not even be doable but this was pretty much off the top of my head. It is even possible someone does all of this (I haven’t come across them yet though!).

[1] Vacancy per page
[2] Cool URIs
[3] Mobile first
[4] Accessible
[5] Schema.org jobPosting standard
[6] Enforce the dotEveryone Better Job Ads checklist

• Is there a clear location for the job?
• Is there a clear salary or salary range for the job?
• Are there clear working hours?
• Is there a creative commons licence permitting reuse?
• Does the job description contain any gender-coded language?
• What is the Flesch–Kincaid readability score for the job description?

[7] Smart, faceted site search (with subscriptions by email / RSS)
[8] Archive of jobs ads after closing dates (hidden from Google)
[9] Links to employer Glassdoor profiles
[10] User recommendations
[11] Folksonomy / tagging
[12] Sign in to LinkedIn to see if you know anyone who works there

I also have a couple of ideas about what the job poster might like to see — at the very basic level I’d be interested in knowing this information in real time →

[13] Traffic per page
[14] Referrals information
[15] Conversion to apply
[16] % of applications completed
[17] Diversity %