These days, career sites and job boards are a dime a dozen, so it’s more important than ever that site managers continue to improve their offerings.

“Do not rest or become satisfied with your work because technology and new competition are moving forward every day,” says Michael Jones, co-founder of HospitalRecruiting.com. “You have to work hard every day to maintain and grow a business like this.”

Michael says sites like his also work to build the trust and loyalty of job seekers by promising never to sell, rent or distribute their personal information to anyone except as directed by that job seeker for the purposes of his or her job search.

SEE ALSO: 8 Tips for Promoting Your Job Site

Here he offers more insight on best practices for running a job site, including ideas for everything from marketing to writing the perfect job ad.

Tell us a bit about HospitalRecruiting.com. What does your site offer?

Our site offers a venue for hospitals, physician groups and other healthcare entities to advertise physician and advanced practitioner jobs. For job seekers we offer nationwide jobs in all medical specialties, and we protect the job seekers privacy while providing great tools to enable a better job search.

What are some of the challenges of managing a site like HospitalRecruiting?

In order to keep our ads both effective and economical for our clients we have to make very careful and deliberate decisions with how we spend our advertising budgets and our development budgets. We’re always tinkering and adjusting in order to get our clients and ourselves the biggest impact for our dollars. Another challenge is that there is a lot of competition in this market and much of it isn’t very effective at the end of the day.

Differentiating ourselves from our competition during a regular sales call can be challenging, but we work to overcome that by offering an excellent discount for new clients and just asking for a chance to prove our worth. We’re also fortunate in that we get a fair amount of new business through referrals and word of mouth.

What tips do you have for writing job ads that attract quality applicants?

1. Be as specific as possible regarding job details, schedule, compensation and benefits. Practicing physician are usually searching for a new job because they need to be in a specific location or because they need to solve a personal problem related to those specific job details so it helps to attract their attention by being very specific. Some employers try to be very general in order to attract the largest number of candidates, but since what they really need is a candidate who will take their specific job this can actually be counterproductive.

2. Keep titles concise and without descriptive language. On a niche job site like HospitalRecruiting.com, descriptive titles are fine, but they are confusing to search engines and general employment sites. For example, a job title like “Join Group in Sunny, Fun and Exciting San Diego” does make sense in the context of a niche physician job site, but search engines like Google and general job sites view titles as a big indication of what the rest of the page is all about. So in the example given Google is more likely to present your job to a person who is looking for “exciting fun in San Diego” than they are to present your job to any type of physician. A better title for this example would be “Physician job in San Diego”.

How do you help job seekers manage their job hunt?

Each registered job seeker has a personal dashboard, which they can use to save jobs for later review and track jobs for which they have already applied. Every job on the job seeker’s dashboard has an area for keeping notes. We also provide new job email alerts and we make our email alerts more targeted by allowing candidates to tell us which states they are interested in and how often to send the alerts.

What do you do to market your site?

We market ourselves to employers through normal channels like phone, email, LinkedIn, etc. We try our best to do that in a non-intrusive and low-pressure manner. When it comes to marketing to job seekers, we do everything we can possible think of. Currently we split most of our efforts between building a stronger presence in organic search engines, and paid advertising venues such as general job boards, email marketing and pay per click advertising. We are definitely not a passive job board when it comes to attracting candidates and we’re trying new things on a constant basis.

How has mobile technology affected the way you do business?

These days mobile technology is so pervasive/necessary it’s almost assumed that all decent websites will have some type of mobile version. We have offered a mobile version of our site from its beginning so I can’t say that it’s had a major impact on us, although if we didn’t offer the mobile version we would probably get about 20 percent less traffic.

What do you think is the future for job board sites?

Within our specific niche of physician jobs, advanced practitioner jobs and other high-end healthcare jobs we believe that the future is very bright. The demand for these types of workers is obviously very high and still growing, plus these specific jobs have very different requirements, qualifications and other aspects that make it difficult for the larger and more general job boards to do a very good job.