Ask HN: Are you hiring? I'm working on a project and would benefit from feedback | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you hiring? I'm working on a project and would benefit from feedback

8 pointsjessehorne3 comments

I work for a small game/web development company based in the US. In my spare time, I've been working on our newest project, 'jobblast'. It's a way for me to pursue a project I've been wanting to work on for a while, and also gives us a chance to give back to the community. We're getting ready to release the "alpha" version within two weeks from today.

jobblast is a "minimal" job board for developers. My goal is to investigate job boards and the hiring process, in general, and create a tool that is truly beneficial to the developers looking for work as well as the companies that will hire them. All job posts are reviewed, by me, and they are free. There's no cost to anyone and there are no ads.

The question for you is...

Are you hiring? Is the company you work for hiring developers? Feel free to check us out and get in touch. If you'd like to stay up to date with the project, you can subscribe to the newsletter with the link below. If you are hiring and would like to give us a try, you just need to shoot us an email (look below) and we will go from there! When we launch, your job posts will be the first that everyone will see.

I welcome any and all feedback. If you have questions for me, ask away! You can always get in touch at the email below, as well. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Some other questions worth considering...

1.) What struggles do you consistently have while searching for candidates for a developer position?

2.) What features would benefit you as a job seeker or hiring organization?

3.) Do you expect there to be a "catch" with a completely free job board?

4.) Does the idea of an open-source job board excite you?

http://jobblast.xyz/

contact@jobblast.xyz

I think in all of this you're forgetting the basic premise of a job board which is matching supply with demand. Curation is a part of maintaining high quality in the board, yes, but there's still the need for enough supply to make people come to the board. In your description above, there's nothing unique.

If you are going to curate the supply by hand, that to me isn't appealing as it's not sustainable. If I post a role on the board and the board becomes stagnant because your ability to curate for free goes away, I wasted my time posting there.

Likewise, if I were a developer looking on your site and the listings are stale, I'm going to turn away.

What unique advantage does your board offer that no other board offers?

I appreciate the response. I'm going to think on this a bit. I thought that free postings would be a good strategy but it isn't enough.

"If I were running a major job board today I would make it a priority to provide value for my customers…both seeker and recruiter. I would build tools and publish information that helped them get a job faster or connect with more quality candidates. I would educate them, I would make them want to come back to the site each day to get what they need."

by "crisr2"

http://www.jobboardsecrets.com/2017/09/05/the-lack-of-innova...

Education for job seekers and employers has been a goal in the back of my head when I've considered this project before. There's a lot of information out there already, but it's food for thought. I know that content-marketing is a thing and could be done with educational articles, but as I stated above, I'm not trying to profit off of this, directly. Good educational resources (maybe even outside the realm of articles) would be good marketing, nonetheless, and useful for the audience.

One feature that I've been working on, is the "stats" page. I want that information to be clear and available. The page will have things like "Current User Count", "Company Count", "Most Viewed Postings" and so on...hopefully to give job posters an idea on what's "working" and what's not.

I'm still considering how filtering will work. It won't be "hard" but I want to get it right. Design-wise, it's hard for me because I've been working on back-end API's most of my career and I've barely touched an interface, besides small fixes/additions. The right interface will make or break filtering.

Along those terms, I want job seekers to be able to get updates effectively when they want them. A job seeker in "Atlanta, Georgia" who wants to find work there, should get relevant updates emailed and/or texted to them. It's pretty straight forward and it's been done a thousand times but I haven't personally written a system like that before. It should be fun.

Innovation is what is lacking but I'm sure it will come. I plan on releasing "early and often" and keeping track of my progress through Medium articles.

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