The Job Boards Boom
Everywhere you browse online these days, you’re bound to find some new job board. They’re ubiquitous; there’s GigaOM Jobs, the 37Signals Job Board, TechCrunch’s CrunchBoard, Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs and countless others. Regardless of which one you end up browsing or using, the concept remains the same - pay a $200 or higher fee and list a wanted job.
For Them
With the success of professional networking sites like LinkedIn, it’s no wonder these job boards are trendy right now. For the creator, there’s nothing to it. One week of development and designing (I could probably make functioning job board software in a few days, given that Kyle was online), a server, and a professional VeriSign or Paypal account are all it really takes.
For You
So what are the benefits of using these smaller job boards as opposed to utilizing services like Hot Jobs, Monster Jobs, Dice or Indeed? Well first off, if you’re looking for a job chances are you would spam your resumé on all the services you can find. The main difference between smaller jobs boards and the big guys is the type of people that use each.
- The Job Boards Crowd: These people are knowledgeable about all things online and tech, even if their field is something completely unrelated. They know enough about the blogosphere to have found the job boards, which typically run advertisements in the blogosphere. Most of the people in this category are web programmers or designers.
Companies that post and hire through these job boards are typically small startups, however the booming nature of the boards has attracted large firms such as the New York Times and NBC Universal. They are generally looking for that awesome, super do-it-all person and are hoping to hire ASAP. It’s not uncommon to see job listings entitled “Superstar Sys Admin” or “Ninja C/C++ Programmer” on these small, high-traffic job boards.
- The Big Guys Populace: There are far less technophiles using services like Monster jobs (exception: the technically-oriented Dice) compared to small job boards. Large job listing sites are aimed at providing accurate listings for every type of job, however the experience is not as unique. You will often see a dozen listings for the exact same position at a large company. You will generally be “just another employee” and not treated like the rockstar coder you are. That being said, many of the job listings are from large companies. You’ll be hard pressed to find a 4 person social media startup list a job on such sites.
Now that you have a basic idea of who uses each service, you’re probably leaning towards using the small job boards if you are looking for a technical job. I think the smaller boards are more effective as each spot is randomly advertised on several sites. For example, a post on CrunchBoard gets the listing advertised on TechCrunch and CrunchGear while a job listing on 37Signals’ board is advertised on Kottke’s blog.
The main thing to note is that each listing gets more attention. You don’t have to search for anything to find it. For this reason, companies pass off the $200+ fine as an investment since many spots are fulfilled before the 30 day listing expires.
In a nutshell, these small job boards are great places to start looking for your next career or find your next employee. If you aren’t sure which one to start with, I would suggest the 37Signals Job Board so the creator, Jason Fried, can get that new Audi RS6 he’s got his eye on.
Now if you represent a firm looking to contract someone for a week to whip out some little script, chances are you won’t be looking at job boards but rather sites like RentACoder.
Disclaimer: I wrote this article using only my experience from constantly browsing job boards and listing services. I’m not sure why I do it, as I won’t be graduating for another 2+ years, but it’s pretty neat to see all the interesting jobs out there.
Never too early to look at the job market. I wish I would have started a lot earlier than I did.
I usually check those job boards too. Cameron Moll just released authenticjobs.com also, just to add to your list.
Yeah, Darren was the guy to take the intiative, now everybody has their own.
Good for us ;)
Hey Paul, Planing to start PaulStamatiou Jobs ??
Yeah there’s also that one by Performancing.
Haha Thilak. =) Maybe when I get 500k pageviews/month…
I’ll be waiting for the day to come ! ! ;)
Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs looked the most promising as far as I could tell. I was aware of 37Signals and CrunchBoard for some time, but just recently stumbled upon Moll’s. A great alternative for freelancers / job seekers to find quality positions. Guaranteed that the quality of these positions far exceeds that found on your local Craigslist listings.
Disclaimer: I do sales for Yahoo! Recruitment Advertising (formerly HotJobs)
Great post, Paul. I’ll share with you what we are finding from a job boards perspective. The biggest recruitment issue that companies, large & small, are facing is that, in an environment with 4% unemployment, quality people aren’t going to job boards. If you are truly a ‘Ninja C++ Programmer’ your skills are in such demand that you don’t need to go to job boards. In this environment, if you are a halfway decent sales person, marketer, programmer, recruiter, butcher, baker or candlestick maker, you already have a job and don’t need to go to job boards. Furthermore, if you are good at what you do, as you know, your phone rings regularly with opportunities.
Like many advertisers, the challenge that the corporate recruitment community is facing is that the traditional way of doing things has suddenly come to an end. Not only are potential candidates not going to job boards, they also are not reading the paper, they are on the phone in their cars so billboards are not effective, they have home theaters so cinema slides aren’t working. A traditionally slow part of the organization is now scurrying to figure out how to find the best people that they can when the old way of doing things is no longer effective.
Some of the more sophisticated recruiters have seen this coming for sometime and have been able to stay ahead of the curve. The Marines having a MySpace page for example, the famous Google billboard or buying highly targeted ads across the entire Yahoo! Network (blatant plug). Others are going to continue to buy job postings on the big boards because that is the way it has always been. These companies will find themselves at the short end of a competitive disadvantage.
As I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, the recent upsurge in job boards is a result in companies like JobThread making it very easy to build and integrate a job board on your site. It doesn’t make them more valuable, though. Is the audience on TechCrunch more sophisticated than the typical Monster.com from a technology standpoint, arguably, yes. However, if you’re a “PHP / CSS guru” that hits TechCrunch on a regular basis, you know how valuable you are and are probably already aware of any open positions due to your network, which will always drive more job opportunities for you than a job board.
Hope that this wasn’t too pluggy.
I don’t really see this as a good thing. It’s already a pain to keep an updated resume on 4 or 5 sites, much less 2 or 3 times that. But then it’s even worse for the employers that have to pay to monitor each of theses. Hopefully the competition will ferret out the weaker ones fairly quickly.
Does anybody know of any good ColdFusion Job Boards? We are looking to hire a Web Developer, and ColdFusion experience would be ideal, so if I knew of a specific board that focuses on this I’d submit the position to it.
THX!
Hi were looking for Rail Developer with the following qualifications. Feel free to e-mail me at rfacundo@grstaff.com
We’re looking for Rails devs and a web admin or two for full time and/or contracting You have: - Experience with Ruby on Rails - 3-5 yrs Web dev experience - Linux/UNIX skills - A love of tested, elegant code - Desire to change how the music industry works. - OS X enthusiasm a plus - Bulletproof, CSS/standards-based XHTML Remote is OK, but we’re looking for development leads on site and ability to relocate if needed is a big big plus.
We are doing a similar thing at http://www.ciquery.com . Distributing jobs to subjective sensitive site . For example, if you are running a SQL Server performance site , than “SQL Server Performance ” related jobs would be displayed within the widget. So far we’ve partnered with 6 blogs. As the service is free it takes a bit more effort. Although the responses are good quality. Any advice on improving the model would be appreciated