How to Create an Online Job Board Classifieds Website

1. Pick a domain name
2. Register a website with Yclas
3. Get a start-up or a professional plan

Once you're done with those steps you can now start doing what makes your website a fully functional job board.

Part of the guide Starting a marketplace

The main goal

Your goal from this website is to enable companies to post their job opportunities and job seekers to either post their C.Vs or apply for posted opportunities. Let's go over them one step at a time since Yclas is ready with all the features you need to achieve this goal and makes it easy for you to build a strong interface that serves this purpose.

Setting up the company interface

Companies will want to come to your website and find an easy way to post a job opportunity, so your first task is to edit the text "Post new ad" to something more relevant to your website. You could pick something as simple as "post a job opportunity" or "post your offer" the latter can work as a call to action for both companies and employees. Now that we're done with this simple issue we need to add the fields that companies will have to fill, this can be done easily through the custom fields created template that we had already added to your website but you just need to activate it. To activate those extra fields like salary, working hours, job type, and others you simply need to follow those steps:

• Log into your website administration panel
• Go to settings > custom fields
• Pick jobs
• Click save

Those steps are also explained in the screenshot below

Once you clicked save you can see that a list of custom fields is created, and if you go now to post a new job opportunity you will find those fields visible in your ad. Remember that you can edit those fields, make them required or searchable and you can also have them show up in ads listing view. As soon as you're done configuring those fields' settings you can move to the next step.

Job board rules you need to know in 2026: pay transparency and job scams

Two things have changed a lot since this guide was first written, and both affect how you set up the job posting form: employers increasingly have to publish pay, and job scams have become one of the fastest-growing kinds of fraud.

Pay transparency is becoming the law. In the EU, the Pay Transparency Directive (EU) 2023/970 had to be transposed into national law by 7 June 2026. According to the European Commission, it gives job seekers a right to information on pay before employment, bans employers from asking about salary history and bans non-disclosure agreements on salaries. In the US, New York State's pay transparency law requires businesses with four or more employees to include in job advertisements the minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly pay they believe is accurate at the time of posting, and to state clearly if the job is commission-based.

The legal duty falls on the employer, but a job board that makes pay easy to publish is more useful to employers and job seekers alike. In your custom fields:

• Add Salary from and Salary to as number fields, plus a select field for the pay period (hourly, monthly, yearly). Make them required if most of your employers are in a region with a pay transparency law, and searchable so job seekers can filter by pay.
• Add a checkbox for commission-based roles.
• Do not add a "current salary" field to your C.V. category: the EU Directive bans employers from asking candidates about their salary history.

Job scams are rising fast. The US Federal Trade Commission reported in March 2025 that reports of job and employment agency scams tripled between 2020 and 2024, and that reported losses grew from $90 million to $501 million. Losses in the wider business and job opportunities category reached $750.6 million in 2024. The FTC's warning signs make a useful moderation checklist: honest employers never ask candidates to pay to get a job or to deposit a check and send part of the money on, and "reshipping" jobs that forward packages are a known scam.

For a job board this means turning on ad moderation so every new job is checked before it goes live, using the blacklist for repeat offenders, and publishing a short "How to spot a fake job" page in your footer. Settings that would add friction on a general classifieds site, like requiring registration before posting, are usually worth it on a job board.

More job board rules for 2026: US pay laws, task scams, expired jobs and Google for Jobs

This page also replaces our older posts on creating a job listing website, on starting a job posting site with classifieds software, and on how the job search has changed.

Pay transparency in more places

• US states. A growing number of states require pay information in job postings, including California, Colorado, Illinois, New York and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia (see SixFifty's state tracker, updated September 2026). Three more took effect in 2026: Virginia (1 July 2026, employers with at least one Virginia employee), Maine (29 July 2026, employers with 10 or more employees) and Connecticut (1 October 2026). Thresholds and details differ by state. In California, employers with 15 or more employees must also give their pay ranges to the third parties, such as job boards, that post their ads.
• EU. According to the European Commission (5 June 2026), employers must tell job seekers the starting salary or pay range in the vacancy notice or before the interview.

Many job seekers now pass over ads that show no pay. The Yclas Jobs custom-field template already includes Salary, Salary type, Job type and Experience in Years, and you can make the salary field required. Add a line to your posting rules and FAQ saying that ads must show pay, or a pay range, where the law requires it.

Task scams and how to screen employers

In December 2024 the FTC reported that losses to job scams grew from $90 million in 2020 to $286 million in 2023, and reached $223 million in just the first half of 2024. "Task scams" grew from about 5,000 reports in all of 2023 to about 20,000 in the first half of 2024. In these fake jobs, people are paid small amounts to like videos or rate products, then asked to deposit money to unlock their supposed earnings. Rules that help:

• Ban any job that asks applicants to pay to start, to unlock earnings or to buy equipment, or to pay for training or a "background check". Say so in your Terms of Service.
• Treat vague offers ("earn $500/day, no experience, contact on WhatsApp") and employers who move the conversation to a private chat app before any real interview as warning signs.
• Screen the employers, not just the jobs: charging a small fee to post a job and approving new employers by hand filter out most scams. Turn on the built-in spam protection (reCAPTCHA, Akismet, blocklists, blocked email domains).
• Require a real company name and a way to apply in every post.

Expired jobs and Google for Jobs

Google's job posting guidelines (updated 8 September 2026) do not allow expired job postings. They also exclude jobs that require payment from applicants, fake or non-existent jobs, postings that misrepresent the employer, listings with too little detail, and listings with no way to apply. The markup requires datePosted, description, hiringOrganization, jobLocation (with addressCountry) and a clean title with no job codes, addresses, dates, salaries or company names in it. Once a job is filled, Google asks you to set validThrough to a past date, remove the page so it returns a 404 or 410, or remove the markup.

Set an expiry period for ads (30 days is common for jobs) so filled positions drop off automatically, and ask employers to deactivate a job as soon as it is filled. If you allow it, employers can reactivate an expired listing from their account.

A practical setup

• Extra fields: contract type (list), remote work (yes/no) and closing date (date).
• Revenue: charge per posting with paid categories, sell featured listings that appear first, or offer monthly memberships to recruiters and agencies that post often.
• Candidates: job seekers can create accounts, save listings as favourites, get email alerts about new ones, and message employers through the site.

Why a niche board still wins

The big platforms report huge scale in 2026:

A general site gets thousands of applicants for each post, and a local or specialist employer gets lost among them. A focused board (nurses in one region, kitchen staff, remote developers in one language) gives a smaller and better-matched audience.

Configuring job seekers interface

Practically at your website, there is no difference between job seekers or job posters except for the way they look at and use your website. 

The main focus for job seekers is to find a relevant job opportunity that suits their specific industry expertise, salary expectations, and availability. Also, they need to be able to contact those job posters directly and apply for the opportunity without any barriers. 

To make it simpler for job seekers you need a proper setup for your categories, categories are the first thing that would show up after featured or the latest job opportunities slider.  To add categories you can follow those steps: 

• log in to your Yclas website admin panel 
  
• Go to classifieds > categories 
  
• Type in the name of the category that you want to add and hit enter 
  
• Type in another category and hit enter ... etc click save

If you want job seekers to be able to post information about themselves then you should create a third category and call it whatever you may see fit, as an example: "Post your C.V.". 

Then you will need to create custom fields that are specific for that category, the custom fields you will add here are set depending on what you want job seekers to fill; e.g. Salary expectation, years of experience, industry field ... and so on.

Remember that you can also set up locations and sub-locations depending on where your website is focused.

Setting up the overall job-board appearance

Now that we're done with the core information we can move to the next step of picking the best appearance for your site. As you may already know, Yclas start-up and professional plans both give you access to all templates to choose from for free and without any extra charges, so you might want to spend some time picking the best theme for your site. 

I recommend getting some nice icons for your categories and uploading them before making your final choice regarding the theme, and keep in mind that you can change your selected theme at any time without affecting any content on your job-board classifieds.

Interactive map

This part is optional and can be done later on, but I'm mentioning it because it gives a nice touch to your website appearance and it's flexible for you to change any colors in the map you choose. 

The interactive map is part of your job-board landing page, you can pick any country, continent, or group of countries (EU) to be displayed with the colors you choose for the active region, inactive region, border color, and the whole map borders settings. I have already explained in detail how to create an interactive map in this video:

Some settings you might want to consider

Some other settings are optional but could be useful for a job board classifieds website, keep in mind that those are the ones I thought of and if you have any other settings you think should be considered then please say so in the comment section. 

Register before contact: 

When turning this on your job seekers/companies will need to register before sending a message to anyone at your site. Although I recommend trying to keep barriers to a minimum I have seen some sites already using it and still are so I guess it proved to be good for them. 

Register before posting 

Forcing to register before posting is not one of my favorite features to activate but I've seen many people creating their job boards and activating this feature. 

ReCAPTCHA: 

For better security and less hassle for users on your site, activating reCAPTCHA will make it easier to post an ad and it could give your user some sense of security. 

Black list: 

The black list feature prevents spammers to post on your website after you had marked them as spam so this is useful in almost any classifieds website, but due to the high appeal of job-boards then activating the black list feature is essential. 

I could keep listing features but then I would be just wasting some of the precious time that you should be spending now on testing your website and learning by practicing how to create a job board with Yclas.

I hope this was useful and let me know your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment in the section below.