A niche job board is one of the oldest ways to build an audience around a topic you know well. The catch: an empty board is worthless, and convincing employers to post on an unknown site is a slow grind. The shortcut the big boards have leaned on for years is aggregating openings from existing feeds instead of waiting for employers to come to you.
WordPress is unusually good at this. With an RSS aggregator plugin, you can pull job listings from career sites and niche boards, import them as posts, file them under categories, and refresh them on a schedule. Your board quietly fills itself while you work on promotion instead of data entry.
This guide walks through the full build: finding reliable job feeds, importing them with the free Feedzy RSS Feeds plugin (an aggregator from Themeisle, the same team behind this blog), organizing the listings, and staying honest about maintenance and attribution. It also covers when a classic job board plugin is the better tool.
Time to get into it. 👷
⚖️ DISCLAIMER: Feedzy RSS Feeds is a member of the Themeisle family of products, the same team that runs this blog. Everything below reflects how the plugin actually behaves, free tier limits included.
What you’re building (and what you’re not)
Two kinds of WordPress job boards exist. The first is the employer-posted model: companies register on your site, sometimes pay, and submit openings directly. The second is the aggregation model, where you curate openings from other sources, present them in one place, and link back to the original listing for the actual application.
This tutorial builds the second kind. Aggregation gets you a full board on day one, which is exactly what a new niche site needs. If you’d rather have employers posting (and paying) on your site, a dedicated job board plugin is the right tool, and there’s a full walkthrough in this guide to creating a WordPress job board. The two models can even coexist later, once the aggregated traffic gives employers a reason to show up.
Step 1: Round up your job feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a machine-readable feed that most publishing software produces automatically, and a surprising number of job sources offer one: niche boards, career sections, applicant tracking systems, even government portals. Your first job is collecting feed URLs in your chosen niche.
Speaking of niches: pick one before you collect anything. “All marketing jobs in the US” is a category. “Remote email marketing jobs” is a niche, and niches are what make a board worth visiting. 🎯 Rule of thumb: five to ten healthy feeds in one tight niche beat fifty generic ones.
Most job sites don’t advertise their feeds, so this guide to finding the RSS feed of any website covers the tricks (checking the page source, trying common feed paths, browser extensions). For general inspiration on what a healthy feed looks like, this list of popular RSS feeds is a handy reference.
💡 PRO TIP: open each feed URL in your browser before adding it. Raw XML with recent
<item>entries means the feed is alive. A 404, or a feed whose newest item is months old, means drop it now and save yourself a maintenance headache later.
Step 2: Install Feedzy RSS Feeds
In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New, search for “Feedzy,” then install and activate it. The free version runs on 40,000+ sites and holds a 4.6 out of 5 rating on WordPress.org, so you’re in decent company.
ℹ️ NOTE (tier honesty, free vs Pro): the Feed to Post feature this tutorial relies on is included in the free version of Feedzy, limited to one import project. One project can still pull from multiple feed sources, so it’s enough to launch a focused board. Running several separate import jobs at once (say, one per job category with its own sources and settings) requires Feedzy Pro, and the same goes for a few features flagged below.
Step 3: Create your import job
Head to Dashboard → Feedzy → Import Posts and click New Import. A setup wizard opens in collapsible steps, and the first one is Sources:
- Add your feeds. Paste a feed URL into the source field, click the ➕ button, and repeat for each source. You can test each source for validity on the spot, so a typo’d URL fails loudly here instead of silently later.
- Set your filters. The free version gives you one title-based filter condition, which is genuinely useful: a broad careers feed becomes a niche feed when you only import items whose title contains “designer” or “remote.” Stacking multiple conditions across title, description, author, and date is a Pro feature.
🆘 Possible issue: some sources rate-limit or block feed readers. If a feed validates but nothing imports, check the import job’s status row before blaming the plugin. It shows Found, Duplicates, Imported, and Cumulative counts plus a working/error status, which tells you exactly where things stalled.
Step 4: Map feed items to job listings
The Map Content step is where raw feed items become job listings on your site. Feedzy uses “magic tags” (placeholders like [#item_title] that get replaced with each feed item’s data) and the important settings are:
- Post Type: Post works fine for most boards. If your theme or another plugin registers a “Jobs” post type, importing into that keeps things tidier.
- Post Taxonomy: assign every imported item a category, for example “Marketing Jobs.” Pro can also import the source’s own categories as WordPress categories, and its automatic keyword-based tagging files each post by what it actually contains.
- Post Status: set this to Draft while you test, then flip to Publish once you trust the mapping.
- Post Title: the
[#item_title]tag pulls the listing title straight from the feed. - Content: combine
[#item_description]with a link back, something like “View this job and apply:[#item_url]“, so every listing credits the source and sends applicants to the right place. - Featured Image: map
[#item_image]when the feed provides one. A default fallback image for feeds that ship no image is a Pro extra.
💡 PRO TIP: keep Post Status on Draft and run the import with a small item limit first. Read three of the imported posts on the front end. Fixing your template before 300 listings go live is a lot less painful than cleaning up after them.
Step 5: Categorize and automate the refresh
Feedzy checks your sources on a schedule and imports only new items on each run, which is what makes the board “self-updating” rather than a one-time dump. Free imports follow the plugin’s built-in schedule; setting your own cron intervals is a Pro feature.
Two Pro features matter specifically for job boards, so they’re worth naming plainly. 🗑️ Auto-delete removes imported posts after a set number of days, and expired job ads pile up otherwise. Fallback image keeps the board from looking patchy when a feed ships no image. Neither is required to launch, both become tempting around month two.
On categories: one category per role family (Design Jobs, Developer Jobs, Marketing Jobs) gives readers a way to browse. Since the free tier’s single import project maps everything to the taxonomy you set, plan your category structure before the first import, not after.
Step 6: Template the listing page
Imported jobs land on your blog page or category archives, and your theme controls how they look, so “templating” here is mostly about picking a clean archive layout. Title, short excerpt, posting date, and a clear link out is all a listing card needs. The listing’s job is to get the reader to the original posting, not to trap them on yours.
Resist the urge to import full article text. Beyond the copyright problem (more on that below), honest listing pages with a working apply link are what turn readers into repeat visitors.
Handling duplicates
Job openings travel. The same role often appears on three different boards, and if you aggregate all three, you’d publish triplets. Feedzy handles this in layers: every imported item is cached in the database, so re-running the import never brings the same item back. When one import job pulls from several sources, the Remove Duplicates option imports only one copy of an item that shows up in multiple feeds.
For finer control, Pro’s Duplication Key lets you define what counts as “the same job” using magic tags (title only, or title plus content together). One button to treat with respect: Purge & Reset wipes an import job’s cache so everything can import again. Useful after a broken mapping, awkward if you press it on a healthy import and republish 200 old listings at once.
Feedzy free vs Pro for this build
Everything above works on the free version within its one-import-project limit. Here’s where the line sits:
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Feed-to-post import projects | 1 | Unlimited |
| Filter conditions | Single (title-based) | Multiple, across fields |
| Custom cron schedules | ❌ | ✅ |
| Auto-delete old posts | ❌ | ✅ |
| Fallback featured image | ❌ | ✅ |
| Keyword-based auto-tagging | ❌ | ✅ |
| Full-text import | ❌ | Developer plan and up |
If you outgrow the free tier, Pro starts at $99 per year for the Personal plan (one site, renewing at the $199 list price), with Developer plans from $149 per year and Agency at $399 per year for 50 sites. Current details live on the Feedzy pricing page, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee if it doesn’t fit.
The honest maintenance section
Aggregated boards are low maintenance, not no maintenance. 🔧 Three things will happen to yours eventually:
- Feeds dry up. Sources redesign, get acquired, or drop their RSS without telling anyone. Check your import job statuses monthly; an import job showing zero Found items for weeks is a dead feed that needs replacing, and your board’s freshness depends on noticing.
- Sources change format. A mapping that worked for a year can start importing empty titles overnight when a source rebuilds its feed. The Draft-first habit from Step 4 makes this survivable instead of embarrassing.
- Listings expire. Filled positions don’t unpublish themselves. Without Pro’s auto-delete, prune old posts manually every month or two, because a board full of dead links erodes trust faster than a small board ever could.
⚖️ LEGAL NOTE: publish only what the feed itself contains (title, summary, date) and always link back to the original listing. Importing full article text is a Developer-tier feature aimed at content sites, and republishing complete posts without permission is a copyright risk on top of being bad manners. Feedzy can also add canonical tags pointing at the source, which keeps search engines clear on who owns the original.
Wrapping up 🏁
- Pick a tight niche and collect five to ten healthy feeds before touching any settings.
- One free Feedzy import project is enough to launch; Pro earns its keep when you need several import projects running at once, custom schedules, and auto-delete.
- Map titles and summaries, link back to sources, and keep everything on Draft until the template is right.
- Check feed health monthly, since aggregated boards rot quietly rather than loudly.
And if aggregation isn’t the model you wanted after all, the plugin-based walkthrough linked earlier covers the employer-posted approach instead. Either way, the niche comes first: the tooling is the easy part.
Running an aggregated board already, or sketching one out? Drop your niche in the comments and share which feeds actually deliver. 👇
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