Hacker News Reader

Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

I launched www.rtljobs.com in October and had my first month of $500 in revenue in December.

It's a job board that caters to a very specific subset of electrical engineers - specifically, ones that work with FPGAs and logic design for chips.

Need help hiring FPGA or RTL engineers? Let's talk. fpga.rtl.jobs@gmail.com

View on HN

Cool. I predict (hope) specialized jobs boards will become more the norm.

This is an interesting thesis. How would HR/People/Recruitment teams work effectively in a world where there are many specialized and actively used job boards?

Today, HR teams usually post jobs on LinkedIn and perhaps one or two more platforms. A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.

How would HR/People/Recruitment teams work effectively in a world where there are many specialized and actively used job boards?

I don't care about People and Recruitment teams. I care about People and Recruitment teams for a very, very specific subset of electrical engineers.

My thesis is that HR and Recruiting for the sorts of roles I care about isn't very effective to begin with. The lack of specificity in existing platforms is a contributing factor to the problem I'm trying to solve. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and whatever other generic job boards are just that - generic job boards. They have no reason to care about this niche any more than the other thousands of job categories out there. LinkedIn is becoming Facebook for wackjobs in work influencer clothing. Even StackOverflow Jobs tends to equate this type of work to general software engineering, when it requires very specific, critical knowledge you typically don't get until you're pretty deep into an EE curriculum.

Add value to the Users - the job seekers - and you start to build trust and aggregate supply. The savvy recruiters follow that. Our clickthru metrics already reflect this.

A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.

That the crux of my point. I don't care about non-specialists. I care about recruiters who need to find people to write Verilog or VHDL. If I can become one of their "one or two more platforms" besides LinkedIn, I've made it.

Next up, Leetcode for VHDL/Verilog. Heck what's stopping LeetCode for LtSpice/Altium/Solidworks. Create artificial Supply crunch and You have the exact same scenario playing out in Software engineering field where candidates jostle for "highly competitive jobs" where they are put through a hazing routine called "white board interview". I visited the SAC Goldrush museum recently and came away from this fact embedded deep in my brain" When there is a goldrush, always sell Shovels". You seem to have trailblazed that path for me. So Thank You!

Create artificial Supply crunch

I don't need to do anything to create artificial supply crunch. The talent market has taken care of that for me.

What I'm doing is providing a cost effective means for specialist recruiters to directly speak to a highly relevant subset of engineers.

No idea what LeetCode has to do with that lol.

There used to be a similar site for compiler jobs. I think the niche exists. If you can prove you can attract that audience with high-quality postings, I think it can work.

Cross posting software for HR people to push jobs to multiple job boards is a whole product area in its own right.

It's a thesis I'm banking on myself.

Please add Huntsville, AL to your board. I'm an FPGA engineer currently working there, and there are a lot of us, at a lot of companies.

Rocket town, USA!

I see that name pop up on all sorts of queries and I'm shocked it's not in the db. Digging into that presently. Thanks for the suggestion.

Looks cool, I love this kind of niche projects. How do you / did you drive traffic and job postings to it?

Indexing hiring companies' job sites, and providing helpful comments to people who are seeking jobs in the sector (primarily on Reddit). More on that here:

https://cushychicken.github.io/grow-your-mailing-list-by-bei...

We're seeing a steady and growing trickle of organic traffic, too.

Thanks for sharing this... How did your paying customers became aware of you?

Almost entirely thru word of mouth from an engineer at their company, or thru posting on Reddit.

How do you generate revenue if you only aggregate jobs or post them for free?

By selling Featured Posts, which get prime real estate on the site for 30 days, and a blast out to our mailing list.

Whats an RTL job?

RTL is shorthand for "register transfer logic". It's a term of art for "digital design at the gate level".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com