Mike, I totally agree. We all have a lot to gain if the job boards band together, so that niche publishers can join mini-networks and users have more to choose from. So count me in, but I guess it’s up to the job boards to come to an agreement.

I’m going to start a job board for people looking for coders who can develop job boards. It’s going to be like this micro-niche site and I’ll charge a thousand bucks per posting. This idea will print money.

Sounds good to me! Maybe using the whole social network technology, we should all create “job net”. Seriously.

Rex

I would agree that a centralized job board would make snese, but once that happens doesn’t the value of your targeted audience go down? Instead of visiting techcrunch to see what jobs are available, then to the next site, the user would just go to the one site and apply for jobs in bulk like they do on other sites. Once all of the jobs are aggregated together, what prevents the same situation as the regular job boards(monster, craigslist) of receiving a large number of unqualified resumes?

Unless I am totally missing the concept.

Michael, I agreed with you way back then in August last year and I thought the other “dissenters” were crazy at the time.

All this other opposers just elevate the problem that is currently present in the job market.

In fact, b4 slashdot started their own job board, they asked their users what they would want to see in a job board.

If we all don’t come together, recruiters and employers will continue to recieve resumes that are not qualified for their jobs.

I even started my own job board @ hipfox.com, because there seems to be no solution to this particular problem.

Hopefully we can all come together as bloggers and job board owners to create a unique solution…

(BTW, Om ditched his own home grown job board???)

I have to say, I don’t get it. A Job Board is a relatively simple application. Why would Om ditch his home grown one, for a service that takes 50%? He can have 100%…

And Mike, $2k to develop a Job Board? Insanity.

I tend to agree with you Brian, as there is a lot of value in being a strong (niche) brand these days. A centralized board already exists in something like Monster or Craig list (albeit it’s not all tech). The only difference is that they don’t share revenues and it’s not a collaboration between many.

But Michael, I think your proposed model could also prove to be tricky, because how do you decide how many blogs/websites are allowed to join as operators or partners, and who is in charge of that? If it’s open to anyone, you will get a lot of garbage, but if it’s cut-off to only include an oligopoly of 2.0 sites it becomes elitist (which all of these types of business partnerships are, I guess)

I believe a more practical idea (which sort of exists right now) would be a centralized site in which people upload jobs, but individual publishers can carry the feed on their site. For every job your site sells, you get a cut. Sort of like millions of people uploading videos on YouTube and sites being able to carry the feeds.

That way you directly profit from your brand power but you don’t have to rely on your own traffic to get listings – you would have thousands coming in at one place, but it’s a customized look on your site. I realize this is close to existing with the companies you listed above, but they too have become great in numbers.

If Monster, et al decided to invest in feeds like this (or a start-up jumps on this idea) I think it could be very lucrative, and could take a lot of these other players out overnight. Just a thought?

I think the aggregration tool can come in real handy!

yay! i agree completely! i’ve always wanted to say that here at TC.

i’ve been trying to convince the guys at Emurse ( http://www.emurse.com/ ) to go this way, since their slammin interface leads one to believe they’re storing our resume info in a structured way and could easily XML-ize it, do some web services, etc.

i’ve also had an inkling/hope that google would become the repository for resume/job information of all kinds, and let mashup builders do what they will using the gdata api.

going through the job hunt for the past three weeks - i’ve felt the horror of ‘data silos’. i’m not sure if it’s any worse than it’s been in the past, but it certainly doesn’t seem better, which is pretty ridiculous. i put a lot of blame on the HR departments of companies big and small - mostly big - for using services like Taleo to hide data away. i’ve spent a lot of time retyping my life history over the past three weeks, but I’ve also turned away from applying for lots of good job listings because the ‘burden of entry’ - say, ten minutes of my time - was just too high.

a little bw, with some ranting, of course:
http://shmooth.blogspot.com/20.....tjobs.html

p.s. on a side note - having my info all over the internets leads me to believe that an avalanche of junk mail is generated for each person who starts their job search anew. i haven’t seen it, but i don’t use my exact address. a startup doing something fun in this area, though is greendimes ( http://www.greendimes.com/ ). i suspect/hope we’ll start seeing a lot more ‘green’ startups appear on TC in the very near future.

yay! i agree completely! i’ve always wanted to say that here at TC.

i’ve been trying to convince the guys at Emurse ( http://www.emurse.com/ ) to go this way, since their slammin interface leads one to believe they’re storing our resume info in a structured way and could easily XML-ize it, do some web services, etc.

i’ve also had an inkling/hope that google would become the repository for resume/job information of all kinds, and let mashup builders do what they will using the gdata api.

going through the job hunt for the past three weeks - i’ve felt the horror of ‘data silos’. i’m not sure if it’s any worse than it’s been in the past, but it certainly doesn’t seem better, which is pretty ridiculous. i put a lot of blame on the HR departments of companies big and small - mostly big - for using services like Taleo to hide data away. i’ve spent a lot of time retyping my life history over the past three weeks, but I’ve also turned away from applying for lots of good job listings because the ‘burden of entry’ - say, ten minutes of my time - was just too high.

p.s. on a side note - having my info all over the internets leads me to believe that an avalanche of junk mail is generated for each person who starts their job search anew. i haven’t seen it, but i don’t use my exact address. a startup doing something fun in this area, though is greendimes.com. i suspect/hope we’ll start seeing a lot more ‘green’ startups appear on TC in the very near future.

…repost without the links

I do think there are arguments on both sides. I have heard countless people complain that the big job boards are simply data collection points…hardly anyone ever gets a job.

On the other hand I think a smaller board can do much to change the growing negative perception.

That was the point I was trying to make too Adrian, but I think there could be a balance of both worlds with a big place that aggregates its feeds to smaller sites. It would be an incredible income generator for niche sites that actually have a decent following and another way for the big boys to spread.

I think the aggregated feed is the only reason YouTube is what it is today. Job boards could learn a lot from that.

“There’s no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos”

If your resume gets deleted on one board it will still be in another?

I’m with the fellow who gasped at the $2k for a job board. A couple lines of SQL and you’re done.

As for a centralized job board, you’re encroaching on Dice territory. Not a bad thing as long as you know who you’re competition is.

Finally, don’t forget about places like LinkedIn. Ever since that service popped up and people started leaving my company, I get recruiting calls about three times a week.

So, yeah, go ahead, somebody, and start one. But I sure ain’t gonna.

you would abandon your $100,000 a month job board?

nice post. I am getting tired of seeing the numerous job boards spring up. It is like the css gallery symptom (I am trashing myself with this since I own http://www.csselite.com and was about to launch a job board).

Something like Christopher Hogg’s idea does already exist - it is Indeed’s Jobroll:
https://ads.indeed.com/jobroll/

Any publisher can put a feed of jobs on their site/blog and get paid each time a user clicks on one of the job links. The feed is customizable so jobs are only displayed that match the job search query that the publisher chooses.

So, publishers putting a Jobroll on their sites automatically get a critical mass of listing content suitable for their audiences and start earning money immediately. They have no need to worry about whether or not they will actually sell postings - money is generated from clicks on jobs in the Jobroll.

@ Mr. Draino and Paul -

$2k for a job board is a good price if you want it done right, and it sure as hell takes a lot more consideration than “a couple lines of SQL”. True web development is a process that considers accessibility, usability, testing, planning, coding, and communicating with the client. It’s not a “tell me what you want done and I’ll spend the night coding and have it done tomorrow - that’ll be $300″ job. This sort of job would especially raise the price because it involves communicating with a payment gateway and sending data over a secure connection. $2k is a realistic bid for the total amount of time that should go into a project like this.

Cha-ching! The best supplement (or replacement) for AdSense I’ve seen yet! People will be more inclined to click on jobs of interest than the average Google ad.

Doesn’t aggregating the job board to these job search engines kill one of the large selling points of not being flooded with random resumes?

I think the services who take 50% of the listing fee are soaking the blogs that employ the board. 50% is a lot! I am surprised so many are willing to use those services.

Regarding #9 — And we hear ya loud and clear my friend We’ll be doing some pretty cool things over the next couple of quarters.

We met with the folks over at SimplyHired this past summer and their a solid group of guys (and gals). We wish them the absolute best of luck with this launch.

Paul (#16) mentions his company’s jobroll offering — we use Indeed’s API over at Emurse.com and it’s been incredibly easy to work with. Highly recommended for anyone looking to implement something quickly.

Mike, I think you’re right.. Separate silo’s suck.

EdgeIO might be able to do a better Craigslist (Metro scale job listings), but it’ll be tough competing directly because Craigslist is generally “good enough” for 95% of the work out there, and they have the mindshare and eyeballs now. For the other 5%, you’re looking at the professional headhunter space.

You always need HR people to through resumes. A good recruiter can filter through a pile of a hundred resumes in a day. The trick is to get those thousand resumes.

Getting one resume every two or three weeks isn’t helpful when you need to fill multiple positions.

Of course, most people still get their jobs through friends and ex-co-workers. That’s never going to change. Blogs and social networks fit in here.

We built a startup company job aggregation site on Go BIG last year. Mike was kind enough to syndicate his TC listings as soon as we launched.

http://jobs.gobignetwork.com

We still have a lot of work to do on the site but we could easily syndicate a customized feed of the aggregated job listings to other sites and blogs. We’re working on a similar syndication piece to syndicate all of our classifieds, including funding requests, projects, partners, etc. and allow participants to offer all of our paid products from Go BIG. Even a silo on Go BIG (which is inherently a classified marketplace for startups) is too narrow.

We have over 40,000 startup companies on Go BIG so if we could expand the reach of the network that would certainly help. If anyone is interested in picking up our listings or adding their own listings just drop me a line.

wschroter@goBIGnetwork.com

Mike - couldn’t agree with you more on this post.

hi Michael

JobThread (http://www.JobThread.com) does offer the functionality to create niche networks of sites.

This is what we’ve done with Slashdot (http://jobs.slashdot.org), Linux.com (http://jobs.linux.com), Freshmeat (http://jobs.freshmeat.net/), IT Manager’s Journal (http://jobs.itmanagersjournal.com/) and Newsforge (http://jobs.newsforge.com/). They all have their own job board and custom look-and-feel, but they are all linked, so that a company posting on one board automatically has their job posted on all of the others in that niche network.

Certainly some of the publishers using JobThread (as Richard Macmanus of Read/WriteWeb indicated above) are interested in combining forces to create high value niche networks of sites.

Please feel free to get in touch with me to discuss coordinating this at:
eric@jobthread.com

A couple quick notes:
(1) as for distributing jobs out to search engines, JobThread does this automatically and job posters have the option to distribute their job to Indeed, Google/Google Base, SimplyHired, Oodle and several other aggregators/vertical search sites.

(2) regarding the value proposition of diluting audience reach by putting several boards together on one site, I don’t think this happens as it is still a combined audience of niche sites… and not the general, very active job seeker audience that would be found on a Monster or CareerBuilder.

very best,
eric
CEO, JobThread
eric@jobthread.com

http://www.JobThread.com

michael…

i’m laughing at your assumption/assertion that the more skilled/better targeted people are on the tech blogs, and will therefore generate better resumes/fits for jobs.

have you actually looked at the majority of the posts/replies to the techcrunch postings/forums???

but to the point regarding job boards. job boards may have their place in the job placement/hiring process, but they’re woefully ineffecient and frankly don’t really work.

there really needs to be a better system that ties placements, applicant tracking systems, distributed reach, open source functionality, testing, past projects/functions, resource rating/ranking, payment for access function, etc…

for my $0.02 worth, this area can use a great deal or re-engineering, and thought in a new direction.

-bruce

It’s all about krop.com, baby.

Really cool job board I found… they were advertising on I think k10k.

I think its really freaking easy - to do something, then make fun of anyone that does it after you. Its like people who think their idea got stolen even though it was simple; like no one else is this whole world could be thinking the same thing?

- Mike a couple of points! , You started yours in the middle of the bubble, YOU WERENT EVEN NEAR THE FIRTS ONES!

- You charge in exorbitant amount, but I guess that is a economics problem not with you.

— Also any buisness model that takes 50% profit for work that is no longer on going; for 50% you better get like a call everyday from these people Its like when I sell you a pallet jack, do I charge you for the potential amount of money you might make with it? -

- Mike what is your forum software charged you for every post? or made you give them 50% of your ad revenue? WHACK!

- why?! becuase they quit working on that, code long ago, they sold it for a certain amount of money.

- they are basically renting you the Job Board software; and also its even worse then rent, it adjusts with every single action. Its like the rent on my house adjusting depending on how long my car stayed in the drive way.

-Makes absolutley no sense- RB

Sam,

The applicants may not be more qualified, but they ‘re probably a lot more motivated.

anyone experiences with krop? i’ve seen a bunch of affiliates popping up in the creative scene.

Mr. Drano I’m with the fellow who gasped at the $2k for a job board. A couple lines of SQL and you’re done.

And the Mona Lisa was like, what, $10 in paint? Come on! Okay that works if you say it like the $3000 suit guy from Arrested Development.

Mr Drano if you think it is that easy then why don’t you produce one for $100 as it is only a few lines of SQL. You’ll be rich instead of posting how easy something is on TechCrunch.

Now back to the job board: dice would be okay if they didn’t have 10 contractors all posting the same job. I’m not sure there’s a way to protect against that on a job board, maybe if you ban contract firms.

FM publishing charges about 50% I think, but if these job board companies are not doing the sales it looks a little high.

If they are doing the sales, they are probably doing that function better and without the potential for conflicts than a blog authors.

I still don’t get edgeio or any aggregated sales listings without fees. Fees cut down on spam and drive revenue and listing relevance, charging no fees drives spam, produces no revenue and reduces listing relevance.

hi Michael

Thanks for mentioning JobThread in this post.

JobThread (http://www.JobThread.com) does offer the functionality to create niche networks of sites.

This is what we’ve done with Slashdot, Linux.com, Freshmeat , IT Manager’s Journal and Newsforge. They all have their own job board and custom look-and-feel, but they are all linked, so that a company posting on one board automatically has their job posted on all of the others in that niche network.

Certainly some of the publishers using JobThread (as Richard Macmanus of Read/WriteWeb indicated above) are interested in combining forces to create high value niche networks of sites.

Please feel free to get in touch with me to discuss this at:
eric@jobthread.com

A couple quick notes relating to some comments above:
(1) as for distributing jobs out to search engines, JobThread does this automatically and job posters have the option to distribute their job to Indeed, Google/Google Base, SimplyHired, Oodle and several other aggregators/vertical search sites.

(2) regarding the value proposition of diluting audience reach by putting several boards together on one site, I don’t think this happens as it is still a combined audience of niche sites… and not the general, very active job seeker audience that would be found on a Monster or CareerBuilder.

JobTarget charges as little as 20% - but focus mostly on associations on .orgs.

Micro-Job board RSS feeds.

How hard is that?

ps….

the fact that simplyhired is going implementing a ppc approach to job placements is interesting, and can be interpreted in a few ways depending on what side of the fence you’re on.

personally, i can’t imagine that as a company with a position, that i’m going to want to pay a certain amount, every time the ad is clicked. i can imagine that simplyhired works out a relationship with the ‘affiliate’ sites where simplyhired pays a certain amount of the fee (from the client) to the affilitate site(s) on a ppc basis, while also running the ad/posting on the simplyhired site…

the rationale for me stating this, is that for the most part, if you’re offering a paid/salary position, then you have no trouble getting plenty of resumes..

-bruce

1st, it could be that

There’s also JobCoin (http://www.jobcoin.com/) which is free to set up and takes a 30 percent cut of the listing fees, as opposed to 50 percent.

hmm, perhaps those interested might simply browse sourceforge (or elsewhere) for “like craigslist” or “like monster/hotjobs” etc…there are some very interesting projects already out there for this kind of stuff..not sure why on earth somebody would bother trying to tackle craigslist unless it’s for a school or small community site with an interest in zero adult content…

people go to the crowds, they are not looking for tons of jobs on sites like techcrunch, though i do believe that a few niche sites make sense for this particular need- like 37signals’ job board for ruby related work…

Cool stuff. I could see “Niche” sites like ours generating multiple income streams completely not related to job listing (although thats an option).

I’ve used several blogs (including TechCrunch) in recruiting and recently extended an offer to someone who came through a blog.

As someone who used to work in the newspaper business, the thought of using classifieds never even occurred to me.

I talked about using blogs in recruiting on my blog:
http://redesign.wordpress.com/.....eb-talent/

Yes, indeed this is the next evolutionary step for all these job boards and there is one company which is already tackling the problem. Check out http://www.jobcoin.com which is already mentioned by Rich Miller. They have recently launched a network approach to job boards across multiple organizations. You can read about their latest venture in their news blog section on their main page.

I also got the chance to talk with the founder of JobCoin and in my opinion he is already working on providing a solution to these scattered job boards and in my view has some very interesting perspective apart from just aggregating them all. So keep an eye for this one.

Similarly, I agree that job boards are very hot right now. I agree with most of Paul’s sentiments here: http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/.....ards-boom/

I was considering making a job board for the company I work at but as you said, at the time there was no service/software to use.

Our site midwestbusiness.com just started working with jobcoin, referenced above. It’s only been a few days, but we are pleasantly surprised by the reaction from our readers so far. It helps that jobcoin linked us into a chicago area network with the local IT association and some complementary blogs. IMHO, network approach is the way to go.

I’m surprised by the 50/50 revenue share. That strikes me as *high* on the part of the job board platforms given how valuable a niche audience like yours is. You have the thing that’s hard to replicate, not the blog-board in a box and servers. Is it really that painful to mind your own garden or is this really just a statement that you see jobs as nothing more than a small, ancillary revenue steam at best?

When we first began thinking about the service that launched this morning as Job-a-matic, we did so with job seekers in mind. “How,” we asked ourselves, “could we bring jobs to them in their own backyards, those spots on the Web where they spend time each day?”

We didn’t believe the industry needed yet another large job board, even one that was market-specific (Dice and others have already done this well in the tech sector). We still feel that way.

Instead, we support the “let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” idea. Tech differs wildly from segment to segment (the mainframe software community is in a different universe from that of the Web 2.0 crowd, for example). Let a panoply of publishers run paid job listings on their own sites/blogs.

We’ll aggregate those listings on Simply Hired, of course. And we’ll also distribute them via our network of partners, which includes sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, New York Post, and others (build your own job board and you won’t get syndication like that).

We do think, however, that it makes a ton of sense to group similarly themed publishers together, and to let them share “like listings” among one another. Grouping publishers this way would also allow companies that want to post jobs to distribute those listings to multiple sites at once. Not only would that be efficient for these companies, it would bring help publishers to win more business.

Why not have all those job boards add xml feeds to Google Base? Google Base has over 29K jobs and counting right now from many different job sites.

http://base.google.com/base/s2.....&gl=US

Google base offers a great way to search and the job boards still get the traffic they are expecting. Win Win situation

There is tons of action in this space. I have never needed to post a job but I have found these niche boards very helpful as a job seeker. 37 Signals has a nice one in their blog as well. Jobcoin.com has been getting a lot buzz and doing some good things.

I would compare this to Adwords where you get to pick the sites within the Google network your ad runs on. As an advertiser I love zeroing in on my niches.

An alternative approach to simplify the posting of listings such as jobs is to have one place that allows the purchase of postings on an ala carte basis. A recruiter can create the posting and then check the sites that they want to be included on. One stop, one payment.

vFlyer, the one-stop shop for creation and submission of classified ads, already does the submission of ads to horizontal marketplaces such as Google Base, Oodle, Edgeio, Vast, and vertical marketplaces such as SimplyHired and Jobalot. In an upcoming release, it will allow the ala carte purchase of exposure into premium marketplaces.

Our efforts to create mini-networks or bundled offerings have been nearly impossible to create. Whereas, offering to resell listings at rack rates has been met with nearly universal acceptable.

blogger is down

Here is the problem http://pragmaticstudio.jobcoin.com/ they have one job listed and they are in jobcoin press release for launch from back in October. This system needs sites with enough traffic to make it worth it to the employer.