Backpacker job board : Australian e-recruitment specialists

Recently, Jobboard Finder had the opportunity to interview Matthew Heyes, the founder of BackpackerJobboard.

We are very familiar with the concept of niche jobboards and already spoke a lot about this on this news section and especially about language job sites. However, we found out that Backpacker Job Board has a positioning which makes it very unique and therefore very interesting. We warmly recommend it for all recruiters wanting to recruit in Australia.

It was setup as a free online service to help backpackers find work to help fund their travels around Australia. This job board has already helped thousands of backpackers find work in Australia and combine work with leisure and discoveries.

About BackPackerJobboard.com.au

We pride ourselves on promoting job vacancies which offer a really unique experience to backpackers. Those experiences cannot be purchased via a tour operator. Our vacancies are appealing to young travellers as they give the opportunity to see outback Australia as well as rural,coastal or city life. We have aupair and help exchange positions, which give backpackers thechance to live with a real Australian family and get a true sense of Aussie culture and life DownUnder.

Our most popular job categories are fruit picking jobs, farm work, au pair jobs, bar work and labor and trade positions.

The idea of creating a job board for backpackers only

Backpacker Job Board was launched in 2008. I was a backpacker myself travelling around Australia and looking for work to help fund my travels. There were classified boards and recruitment websites but nothing which would specifically help young travelers find casual work which would also help enrich their adventure.

Specific features

We find that so many job boards are often overrun with spam, fake jobs or ambiguous recruitment agency positions. As such we decided to manually moderate all the jobs that come through the Backpacker Job Board. It’s a painstaking process but it means that the vacancies we have online are the best.

Australian e-recruitment

Recruitment online is growing year on year in Australia. There’s never been a greater demand for job hunters to have a clean, professional online reputation. We’ve noticed most recently a move to more and more niche recruitment tools. Moving away from big generalized recruitment websites, niche area job boards are able to offer a more customized and relevant job search.

Major challenges in the coming years

Currently our biggest challenge is guaranteeing the safety of our site users. Protecting backpackers from phishing scams and fraudulent employers is becoming more and more difficult. Our manual moderation team are expertly trained and are able to identify such attempts. However, identifying employers which have poor working conditions is more problematic. Educating users about online safety is also very important. As such we see the future of our service is to move into the peer review arena and allow backpackers to rate and review employers they have worked for. This will provide reassurance and another layer of security for applicants.

Next steps for BackpackerJobboard.com.au

Our user generated review system is currently being developed. We will also be investing time later this year in further developing our New Zealand targeted sister site. Our social media presence is an area where we always benefit from investment so we’d like to focus our endeavours here too.

Your experience with Job Board Finder

“We have been hugely impressed by the services of Job Board Finder. The service is unique and very innovative. The team behind the project seem to be very dedicated and have been a pleasure to work with. I look forward to further developing our profile on the Job Board Finder and I’m excited about the advertising options available here and the chance to learn from other job board projects”

Matthew Heyes is the founder of the Backpacker Job Board. Originating from the UK, Matthew arrived in Australia on a working holiday visa in 2008 and spent most of his time travelling throughout Queensland as a backpacker. Soon after Matthew setup the Backpacker Job Board, a free online service to help guide backpackers through the jungle of recruitment agencies and classified ads to help them find meaningful work Down Under.