Is your job board credible?

I am reviewing hundreds of job boards with top rankings in Google. It feels a little bit like rummaging through a landfill looking for something clean and usable. There is a lot of junk out there! Here is what you need to do to make sure you don't blend in with the garbage.

Build credibility in every way you can:

• tell your story and personalize your site -- anonymity is dead. Authenticity is in.
• create a unique, aesthetic and usable design (thanks Willy)
• follow conventions, use no proprietary jargon -- feel free to get creative if you are monster.com or careerbuilder.com. Otherwise follow.
• link your about-page in your main menu.
• on your about-page, lead off with who you are, not what you do. Your visitors have already seen your logo and your tagline -- they know what you do. Here's a great example -

FitnessJobs.com was founded in 1998 by Alan Cohen, a 30 year veteran of the health and fitness industry. Alan was an Executive Recruiter for the industry at the time, when he saw the infamous Monster.com Super Bowl ad. He immediately researched Monster.com and their business model, and went online and purchased the domain name – FitnessJobs.com and over 50 other health, fitness, recreation and leisure industry related domain names.

• Use dates on your about page -- when you launched, when you won awards, when you launched a new product, etc. and keep it up-to-date. Here is an example of what not to do (about-page is four years out of date):

Our inaugural career fair was held on March 9, 2004 at Madison Square Garden. Based on its success, we are hosting two more career fairs this year; one in Los Angeles and another in New York.

• Link your contact-us page in the main menu and show your mailing address (not a P.O. Box) and your telephone numbers.
• Join the IAEWS and display the logo.
• Show logos of your customers. Display testimonials from them.
• Jobs (with dates) should be no more than one or two clicks away from the home page. Never require registration to see jobs.
• Never use white text on a black background anywhere.

Fashioncareercenter.com is an example of a job board that looks like search engine spam:

1. it's anonymous
2. it has no about-page
3. it's monetizing everywhere - school information right up front and Google ads spread all the way across the home page.
4. the design is flashy -- reminds me of marketing class "if you have nothing to say, sing it"

The end result, is that this website does not pass the sniff test - this may be one of dozens or hundreds of unrelated websites run by an seo-savvy webmaster. There's nothing wrong with that, it is so. But, just recognize the difficulty it poses for recruiters and job seekers to distinguish your site from the average.

Want to go beyond credibility and authenticity? Some dry follow-up reading on 'about us' pages?