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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why SO canceled 'Talent', their job board. We got by far the most good people in our team through it. If it was unprofitable, why not raise prices? I was actually surprised at how cheap 'Talent' was compared to other options. I can say without a doubt that we'd have gladly payed more (well, not "gladly", but it wouldn't have been a big issue). The UI/UX was really good, you could very efficiently track communication to hundreds of candidates and it had lots of good ideas integrated, clearly made by people who cared about this and knew a lot about how hiring software developers works. A lot of hours must have gone into this, it's a shame this is just gone now.

While 'Talent' technically still exists, just having a company page there does absolutely nothing and we canceled that one immediately.

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>I will never understand why SO canceled 'Talent', their job board.

From a related article: https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html

"But since it was finally canceled well after the acquisition, I suspect it was no longer growing and, perhaps, unprofitable. I don't get the feeling that the new CEO was interested in this line of business and it could be that Talent was starved of resources until it was easy to eliminate."

Simple: It wasn't making money fast enough for the parent company's investors

Yes, pretty much what this article also says, but I find it hard to accept that as an answer. I can't imagine that this had a lot of maintenance cost. As far as I could see, the whole thing was excellent and pretty much finished, I can't remember ever having to consult anyone at SO for support. They could have tripled the price and we would have payed, because if you compare how much hires/$ we got out of SO compared to for instance LinkedIn, this still would have been a no-brainer.

I also wonder if they could have spun it off as a small, profitable (after price hikes and expense cutting), but non-growing company that existed to buy advertising space on StackOverflow. That might have been too big a distraction though.

It's just a shame that they destroyed what, to me, was the best job board out there.

Not to be too glib, but investors are looking for sure things and on the internet advertising is a "sure thing"

For these kinds of company deals where they don't have 20 years of consistent revenue with a consistent product, like Coca-Cola or Apple sales, investors are going to push the company into doing things that they can understand easily.

I think the line you're quoting is actually from the article we're commenting on?

Yeah same, for some specialized roles we looked for months and managed to snag an excellent person in just 2 weeks from SO's Talent ads. Literally the best eyeballs to put job ads in front of are the ones looking at the relevant problems. It's even nicely tagged by category, tech stack etc.

A few years ago, working at a startup, I tried to convince our founder to pay for SO talent. IIRC, there was a minimum 6-12 month commitment, and while not crazy expensive, it was too much money to lay down on a lark. Since there was no way to 'try before you buy', there was no way to know in advance if the outlay would pay off.

It was a great experience for job hunters, but that value was not apparent to employers.

Compare this to LinkedIn, where you can post a job ad for free, and pay a relatively small amount to 'promote' your ad. Do this, and you immediately see the quantity and quality of applicants increase, so it's easy to make the case to pay, even if in the end you'd pay linked in more than SO talent's upfront costs.

That SO talent didn't have a self-service, pay-as-you-go option was a major miss, especially for an audience of tech companies, where this kind of business model is common, if not expected.

Seriously. SO jobs was great as a job seeker too, great interface, high quality companies and less ghosting/bs than other boards. I'm not looking forward to my next job search now that it's gone.

I used Talent for a while. For the price I always felt it was fairly high touch from the customer success reps at SO.

I could easily see this making it unprofitable or barely profitable.

Agree though it was a great talent pool. I’d think there is still an opportunity there for something more self service.

Plus one - I got my current job via stackoverflow quite soon before they scrapped it and found that it had a higher quality of (interesting) job listings than LinkedIn etc at the time. Was very surprised to see it go

It was good. SO seems to have very bad internal decision-making capability, at least since the founders left.

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