Ask HN: How would you promote a jobs board? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you promote a jobs board?

7 pointsbenologist10 comments

We recently set up a jobs board and we're having trouble getting it off the ground, we have tons of people to actually show the jobs to but finding people to post them is proving a lot harder than we thought.

Any suggestions?

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Without wanting to be negative for the sake of it, many many MANY people have tried to build job boards to compete with the established players. Few if any have succeeded even when well funded. What is it that made you feel that yours would be an different to the legions of others who have thrown themselves against the rocks of the established market leaders. I ask not to be facetious or mean, it's a real question - why is yours different? Honestly, it seems a little ill-advised to be "building a new jobs board".

It's not so much to compete with anyone, we just happen to have 1000s of game developers using our platform and thought it would be a nice supplement.

I run a small site[1] that links to most of the popular developer job boards, and I browse most of them intermittently. Even a site like StackOverflow Careers only gets a few posts per week for a location like Boston.

Are you charging money to post? Do you have any incentives for developers to sign up (like email notifications) or is it a chicken-and-the-egg problem?

[1] http://careers.sh/ (no ads or referral links)

We don't charge anything yet although we intended to, we're already a widely used SaaS. That's interesting that SO only gets a few posts a week, we might not be large enough to pull this off yet.

Nice. How does one go about getting our site http://www.hackerjobs.co.uk added to your list?

I'll be happy to add a UK section.

Welcome to my world my friend.

A few things I've learned in the short few months hackerjobs.co.uk has been live:

* Blog often

* Twitter is your new best friend

* Don't be afraid to email/call people your target market if you see them advertising on other sites

* Free job listings for a limited time is a brilliant way of attracting advertisers

* Have stats at hand at all times. Daily uniques, time on site, etc.

* Use case studies. Got a decent company advertising on your site? Tell the competition.

* Are you allowing recruiters to use your site? If so, email individual recruiters to let them know. Recruiters go crazy for new job sites that may give them an edge in the market.

* Finally, and this is a big one, when posting questions like this on HN, include a link. Hacker News is a massive source of traffic.

As others have mentioned, the biggest challenge is differentiating yourself from other job boards.

Thanks for all that.

Here's what worked for me (for CoderStack[1]):

1) Cold-call sales

2) Advertising on Linkedin

3) Sponsoring & speaking at events

[1] http://www.coderstack.co.uk

What makes your job board better than all the others?

Reach out to people posting jobs on other boards telling them about your site. Reach out to tech recruiters telling them about your site.

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