How’s WP Job Manager doing?

WP Job Manager is one of my side projects which I’m having a lot of fun with at the moment.

This week the plugin passed 20,000 downloads which is a nice milestone to reach – so far I’ve done little marketing and just built it up slowly, so it’s great to see it growing in popularity naturally (which also allows me to keep up with support and feature requests).

Keeping core lightweight

Rather than build out a full ‘job board’ I’ve made a simple, lightweight job lister mainly aimed at companies wishing to list vacancies on their own site.

Thats not to say it cannot handle a full job board however (many users are using it for this as well) which is why I’m building out add ons to cope with that functionality to avoid feature bloat.

So far, this is working out nicely and is allowing me to monetise the plugin for a far greater return than a solely donation based model.

5 premium add ons to date

To date, I’ve written 5 functionality add ons for WP Job Manager which are doing pretty well:

1. Simple Paid Listings – For paid listing functionality using Stripe or PayPal.
2. WC Paid Listings – For paid listings and job packs (packs of x jobs) powered by WooCommerce for taking payments.
3. Job Alerts – For keyword based email alerts.
4. Job Tags – Adds a job tag taxonomy which can be used for things like skills, and used to filter jobs on the frontend.
5. Application Deadline – For setting a application deadline date and having the job expire automatically when the date passed.

I have a few more in the pipeline based on user feedback too.

A job board theme by Astoundify

Jobify is a job board which was built by Astoundify and is powered by my plugin. The guys seem to be doing well with it, and thus far its incurred other 700 sales. Not bad at all.

Whats next and future challenges

Short term I’m working on bug fixes and small feature additions. I’m also working on the biggest feature request; a resume add-on. This will be separate because its out of scope, and will enable resume submission, browsing and a candidate dashboard for job seekers.

Something else I’m looking into (more mid-term) is to eventually get a little marketplace/dedicated site going (when time permits of course). I think this will really boost popularity of the plugin, and will enable me to get some third party devs involved.

I envision support to be the main challenge in the future; right now its manageable, but once I build a marketplace it could get out of hand. Before that point I’ll probably tweak the pricing model to make things more sustainable and allow me to get some extra hands for support if needed.

Wish me luck 🙂