How do you solve a chicken or egg problem?
How do you solve a chicken or egg problem?
Say you have a job board, or a classified ad site... visitors won't come if there are no fresh job or ad listings, and posters won't post job or ad listings if the site does not have user traffic. You need both parties at the same time.
I guess one can populate the site with job or ad listings scraped from other related sites, but this seems fishy/illegal to me.
Any other ideas?
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Fake it till you make. Most other job boards have rss feeds https://remoteok.io/remote-jobs.rss . Show them in a different color and show your original one in a different color and probably with easy apply option like that of linkedin.
All job boards do this no shame in that.
Thanks, I've noticed this trend too and was thinking about this. I'll probably pivot the site to build up the user side first. Thanks.
As I've been working in two-sided marketplaces for 10+ years now (as an employee, building their core product) I can verify this is the most difficult and expensive problem to solve.
You can start by operating as an aggregator (eg. providing the original listing URL), while you also offer the option to post a job (most new marketplaces I've seen the last few years, start with free listings). You can phase out the sourced ads, or promote yours in a different way
Gaining market share can be very expensive though, and growth can be slower than you expect.
I'm sure there are ways to optimize your offering if you step out of the common experience of "here's a job ad, click apply" and provide a more human-friendly approach, where you make sure the candidate and the job are a good match.
Aggregator - so that's the term. Yes, this makes sense. Thanks for sharing. You've given me ideas.
Not directly related to your space but there is a good podcast on how Bumble, a dating app (slightly different matching optimization) solved this problem. Basically they got creative with their roll out on a college campus and created a perceived market in the minds of one audience then once that audience engaged with the platform they leveraged it to get the other audience. They did this at a pretty small scale at first then it just kind of snowballed. Specifically, they went to a single sorority house where they had connections and tried to convince as many people as they could to sign up, then went around to other places on campus and leveraged their existing signups to drive new signups. Worth a listen to get the full story: https://www.npr.org/2017/11/29/557437086/bumble-whitney-wolfe
It's not fake, It's work.
I personally populate my job board. it's a service I provide to the readers of my newsletter.
https://influence.directory/careers/
Thank you. Nice site BTW!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago.