If you want to create a job board type of website, or simply add a job board to your existing website as a feature – WordPress has got you covered!

There are tons of free and premium plugins and themes solely created for WordPress to run a fully automated job board and plugins that allow you to add a job board to your existing website.

In this article, we’ll cover the freemium (free with paid add-ons) plugin created by the WordPress authors Automattic, which allows you to create a job board where you can post job listings right from your WordPress dashboard.

You can post all job ads yourself, or you can allow your visitors to display job listings. If needed, you can purchase premium add-ons that enable you to have alerts and paid listings.

Let’s start!

WP Job Manager

In the Search field at the top-right corner of the page, type in WP Job Manager, and then click on the Install Now button under the WP Job Manager plugin:

Activate

Once installed, click the Activate button to enable the plugin on your website:

Choose if you want to enable or disable usage tracking to help the plugin developers:

Click on the Run Setup Wizard button to start the setup process:

Click the Start setup button to proceed further:

The next step is to let the plugin automatically create necessary pages for your job board (we recommend this option), or you can customize this yourself using shortcodes at the later point.

In this guide, we’ll have the plugin create necessary pages for our website by clicking on the Create selected pages button:

Settings

Next, click the Tweak your settings link to customize our plugin further:

The settings screen provides several configuration options:

Here are our base recommended settings:

Job listings tab

Job submission tab

reCAPTCHA tab

Here, you can configure reCAPTCHA for your website, and we absolutely recommend completing this as it protects your website from spambots.

Pages tab is what we configured in the setup wizard portion of the plugin, but you can customize it here if needed.

Email notifications tab

Job categories

Next, let’s create some job categories by going to Job Listings > Job Categories menu:

It has a granular approach, so you can create both parent and subcategories as needed.

Job types

Now we need to add our desired job types via Job Listings > Job Types menu. The plugin creates some job types by default, but you can edit/remove/add more if needed.

We are now ready to create our first job listing!

Job listings

Head to Job Listings > Add New, and fill in the necessary fields. Make sure to expand the Job Data section for more features.

Job descriptions

It would be best if you fill the following fields:

Job title
Job description
Job category
Job type
Set a company logo
Application email
Location
Company name
Company Twitter
Expiry date

Here’s our example:

Publish jobs

Once ready, click the Publish button to publish the job listing.

Let’s see how our example listing looks like:

Shortcodes

Now let’s allow our users to submit job listings from their end. To do this, head to Pages > Add New option, set the title of the page and paste the following shortcode into the body field:

[submit_job_form]

And publish the page. That’s it!

Reading

If you want your homepage to display job listings by default, head to Settings > Reading section, and set Jobs page as a static page:

Here’s how our website looks like now:

If you want a separate page to display job listings, you can input the following shortcode into the body of that page:

[jobs]

There are tons of available customizable shortcodes that allow you to filter job lists in different ways. To learn more about those, please check the plugin’s official documentation.

If you haven’t selected Job Dashboard as a default page during the setup wizard, you can create the page manually and insert the following shortcode:

[job_dashboard]

Addons

While the plugin itself is entirely free, you have the option to expand the functionality of your job board via paid add-ons. You can purchase paid submissions add-on where a person submitting the listing needs to pay before they’re able to do so (via PayPal).

Or, you can expand your listings with resumes, applications, bookmarks, tags, deadlines, recruiters, and more. There are tons of add-ons created by the plugin author, but there are also third-party add-ons and integrations available as well.

WP Job Manager plugin is fantastic because it’s entirely free, and it allows you to add a job board capability to your website, without radically changing it.