Ask HN: Please review my website, job4dev.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my website, job4dev.com

8 pointsmgalves9 comments

Job4dev was a simple free job board website that I started with a friend of mine in 2007. We were looking for a way to learn Django development and there was no equivalent to a simple board (like 37signals') in Brazil. After that, we haven't changed much about the site.

That changed a few months ago, during the "Stackoverflow Careers" debacle (http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/12/joel-inc-stackoverflow-careers-and.html), when I started thinking about how one could fix the hiring process. We have some ideas about it, and we started working on them.

Motivated by that, and also by the "who's hiring?" threads here on HN, we are putting together an international version of the website and started working on new features.

We are trying to make it as easy as possible to foster communication between professionals that are already employed, recruiters and job seekers. Also, we are putting together a resume editor/publisher, and it's optional to make it public or not.

We are releasing it as early as possible, and we sure know that we are going to be terribly embarrassed by it, but this still is just a side-project for us.

Any feedback will be much appreciated. I think that the best thing you guys could do is to try to revive the "Who's Hiring?" thread and put those companies and listings on the site.

Consider the most important thing for visitors who come to this site.. finding jobs that are in the place they want and related to the technologies they know. You can currently go down by tags (though it took me 10 seconds to notice this) but I don't see a location search.

I think you need some sort of search or widget smack bang in the middle under the header that lets people do searches or filter by location and/or tags.

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

The home page doesn't currently mention it, but you can browse by tags, location and by type of job (contract, telecommute, part-time, internship) on the "Jobs" section, http://job4dev.com/jobs/ . From there, you can get set any kind of filter you want, and get a custom RSS feed.

Yeah, you have the features - you just need to make them a lot more obvious and easy to interpret :-)

I agree that the home page needs more information about the filtering options. It's already on my list.

Do you have any suggestion for the "Jobs" page, though? How can we make it easier to interpret it?

Without going into too much detail, format the filtering better. For example, there's currently a mix of checkboxes, font sizes, text colors.. it needs to be more uniform UI wise and more prominent and friendly presentation wise.

Clicky: http://job4dev.com

It looks like you're allowing people to post available jobs for free. On job sites, typically this is a source of revenue. Where do you anticipate your revenue coming from?

Yes, it's free to post jobs on the website, and it always will be. The only requirement for now is that information about the company has to be provided, or we won't approve it to be listed.

We have a bunch of different ideas for revenue:

1) Offer a service for managing the hiring process. Allow companies to browse through resumes, setup interviews, keep tabs on interviewed candidates, etc.

2) A "matchmaking" service. Given a job seeker's resume and given the listing's requirements, we can set up a freemium system where companies get to see candidates that are a better fit, and vice-versa.

3) A more traditional ad network. Something like Jobthread.

4) Another freemium service: "Career Analytics". Given a professional's resume and qualifications, we can collect aggregate data and see how he or she compares with others, how "employable" one is. Or answer questions like "How does my salary compares to the average?", "Would it be a bad idea to quit my job and go for a PhD?", "Would I make more money if I leave the technical side of the job and went for management?", etc.

It looks a lot like a Jobberbase install with custom theme and tags. http://www.jobberbase.com/

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