Introducing the CrunchBoard Job Site

Like it a lot. Looks like the 37Sigs guys have competition.

Not the most original idea (*cough* 37signals *cough*), but I guess you could choose worse companies to copy.

Seems eerily similar to the 37signals board. Any chance on adding geographic filters?

Jamie, I emailed with Jason Fried at 37 Signals a while ago to see if we could work together on this, either by connecting the networks, licensing me his code, etc. All they offered was an affiliate deal where I could show their listings..not what I was looking for.

Mark - yes…we are collecting zip/postal code information as well even though it isn’t showing in the listings. We’ll add geo filtering down the road.

I’ve been working on solving a similar problem, connecting entrepreneurs and people who want to help them. I’d love feedback.

http://preview.BuildV1.com

Thanks!

Best of luck, Mike. Blogged about it here.

http://blog.bitepr.com/2006/08....._and_.html

A job board is a great idea for TechCrunch and it looks very cool, too. Niche sites are increasingly becoming a very powerful model for online recruitment and we certainly expect to see more niche boards pop up. It’s certainly something that any site with a focused audience should try rolling out. (Of course, I wish TechCrunch would have chosen JobThread’s turnkey solution!)

Here are a few other niche sites that have launched recently:
http://jobs.treehugger.com/
http://jobs.techgigger.com/
http://nextny.jobthread.com/

could use some type of searching, other than just the category listing.

2nd the searching - its 2006!

\”Jamie, I emailed with Jason Fried at 37 Signals a while ago to see if we could work together on this, either by connecting the networks, licensing me his code, etc. All they offered was an affiliate deal where I could show their listings..not what I was looking for.\”

So when someone doesn\’t agree to work with you on your terms you just take their concept, noticable elements of their design, a lot of the same details (500 character postings, no HTML in the postings, roughly the same price point, 30 day ads, and the same messaging/tone in your writing), use basically the same listing style, etc. and you don\’t give them any credit? That\’s low class.

You thanked just about everyone in this post except 37signals. LOW.

Why is it that when we look around we see 37signals innovating and everyone else copying? Are there really no other original ideas or builders out there? Of course a \”job board\” isn\’t an original idea, but the way 37signals executed it is. Execution is what\’s original, and this smacks of \”great idea! I don\’t have any so I\’ll just grab theirs and call it mine.\”

And this took 5 people to do? And many late nights? And beta testers? Gawd. It\’s a freaking job board based on someone else\’s idea and execution. 37signals did the work for you and it still took you 5 people. It\’s like 1998 all over again.

One day it will be written.

another job board? honestly, i really really like eric’s approach above (at preview.bldv1.com) - your crunch site offers zero in the way of filters, and in the end, it’s gonna be indeed.com or monster type boards as the benchmarks…or craigslist for local audiences….

maybe filters by city/state, salary level, experience levels, you know, stuff that the normal job boards attempt to offer with advanced search…just my opinion.

note that eric’s site lets people vote items off and on digg style, that’s a nice touch…you oughta have your coders look over pligg.com for some of this functionality, since the site already resembles the current pligg/meneame structure (and graphics/layout as well)…could be a nice utility, ways to comment on jobs or whatevah..

Brian - take a deep breath. I love 37 Signals, support their products and helped them sell a crapload of books. But they didn’t invent the idea of a job board. And yes, when they didn’t want to move forward with a deal, which is totally understandable, I went ahead with my own project.

Great idea. Really think that niche sites will increasingly dominate the online recruitment landscape as they reach the best candidates.

JobThread offers a turnkey job board solution if anyone else is interested in launching a board for their site.

http://www.JobThread.com

Dave, I hadn’t heard of preview.bldv1.com before the comment above. Digging into it for a possible post. I like it too.

Michael,

I think your visitors will love if it would have search function.

And why, these days you could have a job board with brand new tag-based categorization. People browsing “programming” may want to narrow further and browse “programming+ruby”.

#4 Michael: Instead of a slap, how about a nod?

We built search but disabled it for now. Will add it.

To the 37signal trolls- the difference is audience/reach. TC hits the right people.

Steve_Ray - Thanks…although I think it reaches a “different” audience. Obvioulys Monster, Craigslist, etc are also useful. I’m just hoping this gets companies good candidates without flooding their inbox.

Great idea Michael.

Do you have any plans for an automated posting API? This would allow job distributors to automate the process of getting the right jobs in front of the right audience.

The Atom encoding of jobs used by Googlebase would be a good standard to follow.

certainly a natural fit for the audience of this site…

Getting an invalid character error for the RSS feed.

Buck, thanks, we’re on it.

37 Signals has a good job board but it’s pretty thin in certain areas. I’m a Canadian who’s looking to work in the US as a Product Manager. I’ve already found 3 jobs posted on Crunch Board. Tech Crunch profiles the types of companies (start-ups) that I have worked for in the past and want to work for in the future.

Denis Krukovsky: Code Snippets (Google it if you want to find it) job board works in that way. You can target pages and sections on the site by tag, so you can advertise to Python devs, Ruby devs, or whatever

And.. this isn’t really a copy of 37signals. Job sites have been around for nigh on ten years now. Some of the details are vaguely similar, but the mechanism is hard to make original.

It makes total sense… 37signals did it first in an attempt to monitize their blog audience (smart)… they had a great idea and great execution (as usual kudos to them)… if I were Mike (or any other blogger with a significant readership) I would do it as well. Maybe CrunchBoard will do what 37signals didn’t do… open up the job platform for the long-tail of web publishers to tap into and share revenues.

Cool, I’m in the market for another opportunity. Looks good.

Mike,

This is a great extension of the brand you are continuing to build. Nice job on this. It would be great in the future if users could subscribe to particular types of job openings (by tags, location, or categories) by RSS.

Thanks for all the feedback, there are a number of features that haven’t been launched yet such as search. It is hard to have more detailed categories when you only start with a small number of jobs but more categories (and sub-categories) will eventually be introduced. There are some good ideas in the comments here, so thank you.

As an aside, the idea of a Techcrunch job board first came up back in February, there were some prototypes done then but there wasn’t time to finish the project until now.

This looks like a far better venture than Edgeio.

Hey Michael,

I like the job board, but when do you estimate it will be out of beta?

The other thing, any chance you can add a little consistency as far as format goes to all your crunch sites.

Good luck.

Mike,

Great idea. Good initial execution. We look forward to using it soon.

This makes total sense for TechCrunch.

congrats mike… nice “job” there

This is a good move for Crunch Network to expand to CrunchBoard, given that TechCrunch is the center of the startup tech world. They are $50 dollars cheaper then 37 Signals and they have a better tech startup branding than 37 Signals. Then I started contemplating about the cost effectiveness of these small job niche boards and the major job websites.

Meta job search engines have made my life easier. I am an active young job seeker looking for an entry level position in a startup or VC in the greater Los Angeles area. My time is split between working part time for my family’s small business, studying for the level 1 CFA, and preparing for the GMAT. I primarily use RSS feeds from meta job search engines, but I still occasionally visit the Monster network on a weekly basis and I will subscribe to the CrunchBoard feed.

In the end, it would probably be the same to just post with CraigsList or any other major job website, because they will eventually be crawled by the meta job search engines with the right keywords and you probably want to hire someone who uses job meta search engines for the tech startup world. With that in mind, it seems to me that job websites like Monster do not have a great long term outlook unless they really diversify.

Sorry, just comment ranting.

Someone should let the indeed.com folks know so they can add this board to their collection.
(http://www.indeed.com/jsp/includejobs.jsp)

Often times there is just about 1 good way to do things. 37signals have a pretty nice job board. There is no harm in someone else designing their job board in a similar way. Why should TechCrunch’s job board be different just for the heck of it ? If the end goal is all that matters, it is irrelevant how that was reached. With the vast readership of TechCrunch, this could be a nice source of revenue for Mike.

We are hiring btw in SF and NZ - see the board.

Nice stuff, but kind of ironic. Web 2.0 is all about the death of the walled gardens and here we have another little one!

Great site. I checked out 37signals’ job board after seeing the rants about it here, but the types of jobs posted were different. While there is some overlap, on the CrunchBoard there seemed to be more representation for the kind of jobs that interest me - product management and content-side work. It’s also handy that if you follow TechCrunch postings, you know something about many of the companies that are advertising on CrunchBoard.

And as others have pointed out, there is room for more than one job board on the Internet! Since they both offer RSS feeds it’s easy enough to keep track.

\”Often times there is just about 1 good way to do things. 37signals have a pretty nice job board. There is no harm in someone else designing their job board in a similar way.\”

That\’s maybe the most depressing thing I\’ve read all day.

There\’s only one way to do something and it just happens to be the way 37signals does things? It sure seems like everyone thinks that since they seem to be the most copied company around today (in these circles, at least). Following the leader never puts you in the lead, it always keeps you behind.

37signals does things their own way and you should do things your own way and the next guy should do things their own way too. We don\’t need everyone doing the same thing the same way. That\’s what makes people, companies, and products different.

It\’s nice that TechCrunch launched their own job board, I just find it disappointing that they didn\’t at least acknowledge that 37signals played some part inspiring its creation. Michael seemed to thank everyone but 37signals. That\’s just not the right way to go about things. Cite the source, that\’s all.

I have nothing to add other than the weird addslashes thing that is going on with BryanJ’s comments is making my brain cry.

In the rant above it seems the complaints are neither from job seekers nor employers – if Michael was planning on marketing the job board as a stand alone offering then only these people would have mattered. Of course this is a special job board because its success will depend on the success of this community so it is utmost important that people who are complaining should not give up on this community .. That’s the irony the folks who are complaining have not given enough importance to role of community here and focused on very secondary issue of features in the job board. Here are my two cents - the heart & soul of this job board (and that of 37 signal’s and that of craigslist and that of any job board) is connecting right people. There is high probability of right matches if people are part of the same ecosystem/community. This is a great community and because of that it is going to be very useful job board. Everyone of us has contributed to building this amazing ecosystem (with the lion’s share from the techcrunch team). So the feature set of job board is just icing on the cake. My two thumbs up to this effort because the expected stakeholder participation is pertinent and is in the context of this community. It is going to address a significant pain points for certain community members. This will lead to more passionate users in this community - and as the number of passionate users increases there is step (not linear - not exponential but step) increase in the value returns for everyone in the community. So this will create positive feedback loop..No hesitation .. Two thumbs up!
Btw, Michael how about featuring people who post most (meaningful) comments on your site in the job board pages? I guess right now Calacanis will bid us out in hiring these folks so no use to us:) I would say, the more value you can extract from your community (without disturbing it anyway) the better it is..

37 Signals. Hmmmm. I see TechCrunch’s job board going much further than the one developed by 37 signals. Its the law of the jungle. Fight or die, and when someone copies you don’t moan about it. Keep innovating.

1) Ideas are dime a dozen. Execution counts.
2) Competition is always good.
3) Being different for the sake of being different is not.
4) What yongfook said.

When does the candy bar come out?

A couple competitors entrenched in that space, but nothing 55,000 or so early adopting, sugar-inspired tech weenies couldn’t re-arrange in a hurry:

http://www.cadbury.co.uk/EN/CT.....unchie.htm
http://www.nestlecrunch.com/

This is E-X-C-E-L-L-E-N-T-!-!-!

p.s. I’m currently working on a Firefox plugin to automagically remove any ‘rock star’ job listings from my viewing of CrunchBoard. The premium version will actually delete the posting company’s website and send the company’s staff on a week-long vacation to beautiful Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Developing…

Our corp. Websense filter is blocking CrunchBoard.com as “Adult Content” !?

Good work on the new product. But I have to admit surprise at the claim of TechCrunch having “millions” of readers. MILLIONS? I’m willing to bet that’s an uncertifiable claim.

I think you could also consider this a success if it alleviates your inbox flow of employment-related email! Good job developing a solution to your problem that serves the dual-purpose of linking these people together and covering your costs with a business model.

Cheers.

Darren - http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=st.....techcrunch. They’ve had the link on the home page for little while now… I don’t think TechCrunch claims to having millions of readers (at least not that I heard of):

TechCrunch is generating over 2 million page views per month from over 1 million unique visitors and 80,000 RSS and email subscribers.

If also you consider unique visits and page views throughout the entire network (TC France, JP, etc), I can easily see this exceeding.

Mike,

Where on “TechCrunch” or “MobileCrunch” do you promote these jobs? Beside the one post about “CrunchBoard” I don’t any links. So, how exactly do job advertisers get access to the “millions of technology and business savvy readers” from your various “Crunch” sites?

hi mike…

interesting idea regarding the job component to your system.

if i might, given that techcrunch appears to attract a number of people interested in forming/being part of startups, why not have a section for people who are looking to get together for sweat equity/garage-type start ups.

i have skills abc, looking to join a team with skills xyz…

i’m sure others have opinions as to the strength/need of this kind of site.

-bruce

Good point Colin. I don’t see an obvious link for the CrunchBoard. It seems obvious to me to put it in the TechCrunch Network sidebar module, though you might want to give more details about it, so its obvious what it does to new visitors on the site.

Hi Colin and Brooke,

We’re creating a module that will go in the sidebar of all the crunch network sites that will go up this weekend. I’m trying to figure out a way to include the most recent job listings via RSS in the module, but the titles are a little long. Either way, will be up soon.

I love the layout and it is a good move for TechCrunch. I would think that search by location is the next addition…

why not have a section for people who are looking to get together for sweat equity/garage-type start ups.

Last year I heard of some folks in the Valley who supposedly started doing this - maybe even more than a year ago, but I don’t know if they pulled it off, what came of the idea, etc. Couldn’t remember names, etc.

Sam/Peter,

That is a fantastic idea… I have been scrounging around the web looking for something like this, as I have several projects that may end up being huge but need others to collaborate with that aren’t asking for money up front. Scanning Craig’s List is about as effective as sorting through junk mail for a good credit card offer.

The job board is going to be very beneficial to startups. It’s going to make some money as well.

You’re building your brand out very well. I just wish you could do more TalkCrunch podcasts.

congrats on your new job board. Maybe I can get an rss feed of the jobs and put it on http://www.startupjobs.com

Thanks

Jason

Mike, i think you’ve set off a trend for every tech blog on the planet to have a job board. 37signals = the apple of jobboards and techcrunch = microsoft. What do u think?

A great idea Michael; and well placed to attract the right people. But there is an easier (and, I think, better) way to do it. You know how software projects never end. This board will keep you busy with bug fixes, udpates, maintenance, and feature requests forever. It’ll distract you from your core business of building a great media network.

My recommendation: outsource it to someone else, and share revenues with them. If you put a post on your blog requesting bids, I’m sure you’ll receive hundreds from people who are willing to work with you on your terms. Good luck, and keep up the good work.

Just to be sure, we’ve got thousands of folks willing to work for startups and for equity on our site - http://www.goBIGnetwork.com. If some of you guys are looking for talent, I would encourage you to find someone there.

You can also setup a sweet little matching engine so that if someone comes along that fits your needs, we’ll send you an e-mail. We’ve seen some really nice connections get made.

Mike - this is a great idea - kudos. I love the fact that people are busting your balls over “copying a job board’ as if it’s a new idea that you’ve ripped off. You don’t need to explain yourself to anyone.

Wil your link doesn’t work ?

can you e-mail me mmyrtle@yahoo.com

Where are all the New York jobs? There’s definitely a huge bias for California jobs. I know there’s more startup and web 2.0 activity on the West Coast, but if I used job postings as a data point, it looks like NYC is a ghost town!

James - sorry about that.

http://www.goBIGnetwork.com

The blog software included the period at the end of my sentence - doh!

Mike,

Do us all a favour and do not justify idiotic comments with responses. The claim that you are “copying” 37s is ludicrous. If the job board works, and it gets postings, it cannot be disputed - simple.

Looks like a nice little money-maker too. Congrats.

Michael,

Great job on the Boards. We got some very well qualified resumes in on the first Piczo posting we put on CrunchBoard, and are now putting up more jobs. I’m also hearing the same from multiple other sites that have posted. Congrats and thanks!

Best,

Jeanine

What happened to the Crunchboard Feed? It used to be very informative, now it is teaser info and provides no value whatsoever. At least provide the company name and job description in the feed!

http://www.itdarbs.lv is quite similar site from Latvia (job ads only for IT&T professionals), but the idea about the most populr vacancies, and some other features is better than in any other.