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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

> Job boards are not doing anything even remotely innovative enough to disrupt the recruitment industry and the primary reason for that is purely because no-one wants to upset their cash cow. Except us that is. We don't pander to the recruitment industry. Quite the opposite in fact. We've sent a number of warning shots into the air to make them aware that we intend on impacting the need for reliance on their industry. It's very early days but in my view at least, the demise of the industry is only just beginning.

What are you doing different? Would be interested to read about it.

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It may be exaggerating if I claim that http://jobs.usethesource.com/ is "doing something even remotely innovative enough to disrupt the recruitment industry" but it does have some pretty simple rules:

1. To post a job you have to have high Hacker News karma

2. You can't be a recruiter

I personally love this site but the biggest barrier to entry is that you're preventing a massive amount of the market from advertising. Our goal is to raise the standard across the board.

Those rules work to a degree, but I posted two jobs on Hacker Jobs and then spent the next two weeks telling recruiters to get bent, as they apparently didn't waste time in finding the site and mining it.

Good question.

We are still pretty much at MVP stage but you can hopefully get a hint in our intro blog:http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/3/25/when-jonny-met-stevie

Long story short, all job boards with a tiny number exceptions are catering primarily to the recruitment industry. Our priority is currently, and will always remain with the direct employer and the job seeker.

As the site grows we will be adding features that don't currently exist on any job board we know of with the intention being to elevate HJ to the point where people can use it as a more effective alternative to recruitment companies.

Once we have a more clearly defined timeframe for our future iterations, I'll create a blog post highlighting more details on how we plan to achieve the above.

But why launch even an MVP that is essentially no different to the vast majority of other portals (HN, stackoverflow careers, gumtree) etc? Would it not be more useful to launch with at least some of the innovative features you've hinted at? What value are you adding to direct employers or job seekers?

But why launch even an MVP that is essentially no different...

In the short few months we've been up, we've had confirmation from a large number of companies having successfully filled vacancies via our site. That alone is justification to get it up and live. Also it's the best way of testing what works and what doesn't and more importantly, getting feedback on what users like and what they don't.

Would it not be more useful to launch with at least some of the innovative features you've hinted at?

If they were complete, they'd be live! The process we follow is to launch an MVP and iterate often. As we get a feature to a usable level, we'll update.

What value are you adding to direct employers or job seekers?

At the moment there are few publicly known job sites in the UK that contain zero recruiter vacancies. As a minimum, we provide that alternative right now with the promise of a lot more to come.

I'm hoping that http://jobstractor.com is doing it's bit to disrupt things. I actively try to filter out jobs from recruiters (some improvements to that coming next week actually) and focus on the more word-of-mouth jobs you perhaps wouldn't always find unless you had the right contacts.

I think the things recruiters have in their favour is a big network of job seekers and employers. The lower barrier to publishing a job brought about by social media can I think help disrupt that model. There's a way to go though and I think recruiters will always play some part even if that role changes.

Well, since this came up I thought I'd share what I'm doing: http://www.teamcruiting.com. Would love feedback.

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