Implementation worksheet · 6 min read
A Job Board Moderation Workflow Specification
Specify moderation as trust tiers rather than a single approve/reject queue. New employers are reviewed on every listing; employers with a clean history post directly with post-publish sampling; flagged employers are blocked at submission. Attach the pre-publish checks to the tier, not to every listing — required fields, salary disclosure, location honesty, duplicate detection and the keyword list. Then write the expiry policy down: how long a listing runs, what happens at expiry, and what happens to live listings when an employer account lapses. Boards do not fail on spam — they fail on stale listings that make the whole board look abandoned.
Hosted job board platforms give you one moderation model: a queue where everything waits for approval. That works at ten listings a week and collapses at a hundred, because the founder is the moderator and moderation is the least interesting work on the board. The result is either a backlog that delays employers, or approvals rubber-stamped without reading — both of which degrade the quality the board was differentiating on.
Put it into practice
1. Define three employer trust tiers and how you move between them
New (every listing reviewed), trusted (post directly, sampled after publish), restricted (blocked, manual contact required). Write the promotion rule — typically a number of clean listings — and the demotion triggers: a candidate complaint, a bait-and-switch report, a payment failure. Tiers are what makes moderation scale without more moderator hours.
2. List the pre-publish checks and say which are automatic
Required fields present, salary range disclosed if your board requires it, location matches the remote flag, description length above a floor, no contact-us-to-apply redirect if you ban those, no duplicate of a live listing from the same employer. Automate every check that is a rule; reserve human review for judgement.
3. Write the expiry policy, including the lapse case
How many days a listing runs, whether expiry is automatic, whether the employer can renew, and — the one teams forget — what happens to live listings when the employer's subscription lapses or their payment fails. Unretired listings from departed employers are the single biggest quality problem on ageing boards.
4. Give candidates a report path and route it
One control on every listing, a reason list, and a named destination. A report should be able to demote an employer's tier. Without this you learn about bad listings from a public complaint rather than from the person who saw it first.
5. Instrument the queue so you can see it drowning
Listings awaiting review, oldest item age, approvals per day, and the ratio of approved-without-edit. When oldest-item age climbs past your promise to employers, the model needs changing — more trusted employers, more automated checks, or a second moderator — and you want that visible before employers tell you.
Moderation specification worksheet
Copy this structure into your review document and record your observed result for each row.
| Decision | Your rule | Automated | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| New employer first listing | full review | no | |
| Promotion to trusted | yes | ||
| Demotion trigger | partly | ||
| Required fields | yes | ||
| Salary disclosure | yes | ||
| Duplicate detection | yes | ||
| Keyword blocklist | yes | ||
| Listing run length | yes | ||
| On employer lapse | yes | ||
| Candidate report handling | no |
A failure worth checking
Moderation debt. Months one to six the queue is small and the founder reads every listing. By month nine volume has tripled, the queue is reviewed in batches at midnight, and approvals become rubber stamps. The board's differentiator — quality you personally vouched for — quietly stops being true, and nobody notices until a candidate posts publicly about a scam listing. Trust tiers and automated checks are how you avoid that, and they are much easier to add before the volume than during the crisis.
Common questions
Should every listing be reviewed before publishing?
Only from employers you have no history with. Reviewing everything from a trusted repeat poster buys almost no quality and consumes the moderator time that new employers need. Post-publish sampling catches drift from trusted posters at a fraction of the cost.
What actually kills niche job boards?
Stale listings, not spam. A board full of roles filled two months ago teaches candidates not to come back, and the employers notice the drop in applications before you notice the cause. The expiry and lapse rules on this worksheet are the ones to get right first.
Basis and scope
This is a proposed implementation method using illustrative examples, not a measured benchmark or a customer case study. Prepared with AI assistance. Validate product-specific behavior against current documentation and your own test environment.