How to Build a Job Board with Softr

In this post, I'll go over the following essential tools and blocks for building out your job board.

Airtable - for storing your job listing records
Mailerlite - for building your email list (for your newsletters later)
Forms - Softr building block for easily creating forms that integrate with airtable
Lists - Softr building block for displaying records on your site from airtable
List Detail Page - Softr building block used to display a detail page for each record from your list

Airtable

Think of airtable as the backend database for your records. Before softr, I had never used airtable before. It's super easy to pickup and a pleasure to work with.

Softr has some great documentation to help you learn airtable and easily set airtable up on your site.

Once you've got an airtable account (free up to 1,200 records), then it's easy to setup the integration.

Go to settings > integrations > airtable
Enter your airtable API key

That's it for airtable setup. We'll discuss airtable later in this article with list and detail pages.

Mailerlite

There are lots of email marketing/newsletter platforms out there. I went with mailerlite because I knew it integrated easily with Softr and was inexpensive when compared to some of the others.

To set it up, simply add the "Call to action with email capture" block on to your page.

Then go into the settings on the block and set the button action to "Add to Mailerlite". You'll have to get your action url from a mailerlite embed form that you setup in mailerlite. Softr already has great instructions on how to do that.

You should now see emails added to your Mailerlite subscription group when someone submits a form.

Forms

Softr provides several different types of forms. It's got simple contact forms and it's go forms that allow you to submit info to airtable (they're called "Sales Forms" in the blocks.

Add your "Sales Form" block to the page. It comes with default fields, but no need to worry, you can easily add/remove fields as needed.

In the button action, select "Send to Airtable". Then it will display a list of available bases from airtable, and the specific table to put the records in.

You'll want to make sure the "Tag" has the exact name of your database field in airtable or it won't work!

You should now have a functioning job submission form that writes the records back to airtable!

Lists

Lists blocks provide an easy way to display data from airtable in a list. They have several different list templates to choose from depending on how you want your data layed out.

Once you've added a list block to your page, go to settings for it and you'll see there are tons of options for configuration.

Select your airbase table and view.

Now you can setup the search options and filtering. To see an example of the setup I'm about to show you, take a look at my shipping job board.

Setup inline filters to allow users to sort the data easily. I chose dropdown boxes for categories, regions, and employment type.

Tell it which airtable fields to search and then add your list item fields.

In airtable, you can setup a few formula fields to store your URL slug and things like SEO title. Read more about these fields used by softr.

Per the link above, I created a field called SEO:Slug, which is a formula field that removes special characters from the job title field.

I then create another formula field in airtable for my detail URL. This uses the SEO:Slug from above, plus the airtable record ID (Referenced above with RECORD_ID()). That keeps things unique in case there are multiple job listings with the same title.

With my formula generated URL, I can now select the URL from the button action options.

That's it, now you should have your items from airtable showing on your site! In an upcoming post, I'll discuss some advanced techniques for styling your list based on data values from airtable.

List Detail Page

Where do users go when they click an item in your list? There are different setup options (send them to a url, send to them to a detail page, etc.) but we'll discuss sending them to a detail page for the record they clicked on.

Add a list detail block to your page and select from one of the pre built templates.

Now connect it to your airtable base and add the data items to be displayed.

You should now see your data from airtable displayed on the page

That covers the basic setup of a job board using Softr. In my next post, I'll go over some advanced styling techniques using airtable and Softr.

Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help!

Justin