What Is Job Wrapping
and How It Works?

What is Job Wrapping?

Job wrapping is the process of automatically importing job posts from a career website into different job boards. Both job boards and employers alike share great benefits from leveraging job wrapping; with employers using it to distribute their jobs easily, and job boards using it to enhance the contents of their website

How Job Wrapping Works?

Employers will most commonly use the job wrapping services provided by either the job boards they post to or the recruitment software (ATS) that they use. LinkedIn is one of the most popular job boards which provides a job wrapping service, whereby employers can connect their career website with the job board. Then, their open positions can either be automatically announced on LinkedIn, or be announced if they meet certain criteria. The latter is used to boost openings with a greater priority. 

Additionally, most recruitment software provide job distribution services which are capable of connecting job listings to the employers’ targeted job boards. For example, Workable, one of the most broadly used recruitment software, integrates with over 200 job boards, including Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter and Monster. With job board integration, employers can leverage their recruitment software to automatically connect all their job listings with their targeted job boards.

Benefits of Job Wrapping For Employers

Saving Time: For employers, the number one benefit of job wrapping they care most about is the fact that it saves them great amounts of time. It’s perfectly common for the average recruiter to make use of multiple job boards and other job distribution channels. Doing this is a great way of expanding their reach in the job market and making their job listings more visible.

However, recruiters don’t want to deal with the additional hassle that comes along with it. This includes logging into all the job boards separately and filling out all the job posting requirements one by one for every job posting. Instead, recruiters want only to do this once, connect their job listing with all their job distribution channels, and get along with other tasks.

Centralizing Recruitment: Recruitment software with job board integrations allows employers to collect data on their applicants in one place. Instead of managing applicant data on different websites, employers can better structure their hiring process by collecting applicants from all sources into a centralized candidate database. Not only does this save time, but it also improves the recruitment funnel by keeping the candidate experience and candidate selection process consistent. All in all, hiring teams don’t want to be all over the place with their recruitment efforts and would much rather prefer for all their processes to be handled in one place.

Benefits of Job Wrapping For Job Boards

Creating Content for Job-Seekers: When a job board first starts out, it can’t just be a blank space. It needs some form of content to attract job seekers to its site, to subsequently become a good advertising space for employers. What better content than job listings which match the search intent of your targeted job seekers?

Before a job board can start to generate interest from employers, it will need to post jobs from employers which are not their clients, for free, to their website. By leveraging job wrapping, job boards can pick out the career websites they want to be importing job postings from, and fill their website with content that is both great for gaining relevant traffic and for SEO.

Creating a Stable, Subscription Revenue from Your Job Board: Job boards can not only use job wrapping to improve the content of their site, but also provide it as an additional service to their clients. Employers looking to facilitate their recruitment processes with job wrapping could see this as a feature worth splashing the cash for. Usually, job boards that provide this feature include it in a subscription package.

For example, LinkedIn includes its job wrapping features for employers in its LinkedIn Recruiter service, which costs $170 per month. Other job boards can offer similar services, whereby jobs posted in a career website can be automatically imported into the job board.

How to Set Up Job Wrapping for Your Job Board

There are two common ways to set up a job wrapping service for your job board.

1) Through XML feeds

Job XML feeds contain structured information of every job posting that an employer has. They are a common standard and are easy to parse by job boards. If an employer’s career website is hosted on an ATS, there should be no problem with getting your hands on an XML feed, since most ATSs provide an XML feed. Here is an example of an XML feed that is provided by Workable.

An example of an XML feed from Workable

Once the XML feed is acquired, a job board would then need to parse all the jobs from there and automatically import them into their website.

The second less common alternative is to scrape jobs from the URL of a career website and have them added to your job board automatically.

Setting up both processes can take quite a bit of time and custom development. But this shouldn’t discourage job boards from realizing the tremendous benefits of job wrapping. 

Luckily if you are using JBoard for creating and managing your job board, JBoard has you covered. With no coding necessary, you can use JBoard to create and add job wrapping to your job board. And we support both options by default: you can automatically import jobs from the XML feed that employers provide to you or just import jobs from the employer's career website.