Job Board Planner

The problem

"Build me a job board" is a prompt that grows quickly in a coding agent's hands. Within minutes the agent has added an ATS pipeline, a Stripe subscriptions system, a resume-parsing engine, backfill scrapers and a multi-tenant SaaS architecture. You asked for none of them, and they use up your budget before a single real employer can post a job.

The opposite failure is just as common. The agent ships a thin public list with fake seed data, no separation between employers, no handling of expired jobs, and a resume upload that stores nothing. Everything looks finished until a second employer logs in and sees the first employer's applicants.

We tested this. We gave this planner to four coding models and audited what each one shipped, and the failure above is what separated them. Two builds enforce the boundary in both directions: an employer can open its own applicant's resume and is refused on a rival's. We proved it with a control, so an empty result means real filtering and no accident. One build shipped with no authorization at all: candidate contact details and a full database export were open to anyone who asked. All four are live below, and the scores are on the board.

What it is built from

The planner comes from research across 40 unique job-board products and vendors, drawn from 62 reviewed source pages: open-source starters, live SaaS platforms, CodeCanyon-style marketplace scripts and one vendor demo that we signed into. Every scope decision is tied to what those products ship.

That research produces the specifics. Resume upload is never in scope without private storage, signed access and a retention rule. The employer posting flow has a real set of states: draft, submitted, published, expired and closed. SEO scope requires closed and expired jobs to agree with your sitemap and your JobPosting schema. ATS pipeline depth is kept as a named optional branch and is left out of the Basic default, because it belongs to recruiting tools more than to job boards.

A coding agent cannot reach decisions of this kind, such as the exact conditions for resume upload or the point where ATS depth stops, unless it repeats the research. The planner puts that evidence into every scope decision, default and limit.

We publish the list of products we reviewed. We do not publish per-feature percentages for this market yet. The table that gives each of the 40 products one vote per feature is still being built, and we prefer to show you how many products we reviewed over a figure we cannot support.

What you get

A structured set of questions that runs before your agent writes any code. The planner asks about your business model first: one-off niche board, employer-paid business, aggregator, association career center, ATS/recruiting platform or multi-board SaaS. The answer decides which of fourteen feature branches belong in your First Delivery and which must be deferred in writing.

After discovery, the planner generates one complete CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md build spec. It contains: locked decisions, a forbidden-family scan that stops deferred modules from entering active build steps, role and permission tables, a data model, a screen map with UI quality rules, server-side RBAC requirements, security checks for resume upload, job lifecycle and SEO rules, an include/defer/skip list, and a nine-step build sequence with a "do not continue until" acceptance check at every step.

Every major recommendation cites real evidence (INV-, P, UI-, TECH-, PRICE-* or frequency data), so you can check what led to each decision.

What it covers

Phase 0: First Delivery depth. Basic (7-9 build steps), Moderate (10-15 steps) or Advanced. Basic defaults to a single job board with public job search, employer posting, candidate application, resume upload with private storage, admin moderation, basic reports and SEO that follows job status.

Block 1: Business model and board type. One-off niche board, internal careers portal, employer-paid board, association career center, aggregator, ATS platform, marketplace-script clone or multi-board SaaS. Board size and who can post jobs.

Block 2: Users and the workflow that matters most. Which roles exist, and which one First Delivery must serve best. Covers admin, employer/recruiter, candidate/job seeker, hiring manager, finance admin and content moderator.

Block 3: Core job-board loop. Public job list with search and filters, job detail pages, candidate apply flow, resume upload, candidate accounts, employer posting dashboard, employer applicant review, admin moderation queue, JobPosting structured data and sitemap rules, and basic reports and exports.

Block 4: Branch selection. Paid listings, featured jobs, employer subscriptions, job alerts, saved jobs, company profile pages, backfill and aggregation, ATS pipeline, interviews and scorecards, AI matching, API and SSO integrations, multi-board SaaS, SMS notifications and assessments. A branch enters Basic only if you select it.

Block 5: Policies and local rules. Country, currency and language. Candidate model: guest apply, accounts or both. Duplicate application policy. Job lifecycle and moderation approval policy. Resume and file handling. Existing data to import. Privacy, consent and retention rules.

Block 6: Stack, hosting, UI and handover. Next.js, Laravel, Django or no preference. Cloud, VPS or self-hosted. Mobile-first candidate pages or a desktop-first employer workspace. Whether the agent continues to Step 1 automatically after writing the spec.