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Comment by sarhus | Hacker News Reader

What could a job listing do or implement other than listing the job description?

I run a similar website to hackerjobs.co.uk (http://roundabout.io/about) and I'm starting to realise that's not the way forward.

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Job listings are the MVP. Take a look at any of the major job boards. They are used by millions daily and turn over a very real profit. Problem the majority of them have is that they primarily cater to recruiters. We're taking a slightly different approach by eliminating recruiter listings, blogging about relevant topics and interviewing people who hire developers on a regular basis to help job seekers get an insight into what does and does not work.

It'd be interesting to know if those profitable job boards are profitable because of recruiters paying and re-posting the same jobs (changing few words here and there) in order to gather CVs.

I was looking for some statistics about the ratio of a real (as posted by a company) vs recruiter job post on those job boards, but I couldn't find anything.

A huge chunk of their revenue comes from selling access to the candidate database to recruiters specifically.

Recruiter (and blogger of jobtipsforgeeks.com where I advise engineers on career/interview/resume) here, and that is pretty interesting that you take recruiter listings out of the job postings. Although you might think otherwise, I like that idea quite a bit from a pure biz standpoint. I'd think candidates would be more willing to go to a site where they knew recruiters weren't posting, as there is some 'danger' when going to sites where you could potentially apply to the same job (via recruiter listings) multiple times. Good luck with that!

Thanks!

I'd think candidates would be more willing to go to a site where they knew recruiters weren't posting

We completely agree (obviously) and our analytics tend to confirm our theory. So far so good. As we roll out more features it will be interesting to see how sustainable it is.

so you don't let recruiters list jobs ? how do u restrict that ?

Manually. It's pretty obvious if you read our blog posts but occasionally a recruiter will slip in a listing. We get emailed every time there is a new post and if it's a recruiter post we manually remove them ASAP. The longest a recruiter job has ever appeared on the site is 23 minutes. That was a bad day.

The solution simply isn't another database. The candidates simply don't exist.

The only solution is to make more talented candidates. Go and invent http://hackerschool.com/ UK.

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