A site-builder for beautiful careers pages
Hi IndieHackers, this is just a quick idea introduction post
The idea
A Wix/Squarespace-like website builder, focused entirely on creating beautiful company career pages, able to display jobs directly from whatever software the company uses to create/track job postings
Why I think this could help others
Recruitment marketing, and building an employer brand is becoming more and more important. It's frustrating to find an interesting job post, and have no insight into the company itself because their careers page is just an embedded list of jobs. Even a basic level of transparency can help drive candidates to apply.
Why not use Wix, Squarespace or another site-builder directly?
When I was personally building a career page I didn't want to embed Greenhouse's job board iframe, but rather use the API for a more custom design
I also think general purpose site-builders can be overwhelming, especially to non-technical or time-constrained users. The landing page builders often shared here show how much nicer a more focused product can be. I'd like all my UI blocks and examples to be clearly focused on career page design, integrations with applicant tracking systems to be as easy as possible, and I think the product can guide users to really improve their candidate experience.
Validation:
I've set up a rather ugly landing page, and experimented for a week with paid ads. I got 5 subscribers on a waitlist, but had strongly climbing CPCs due to low quality scores. I've definitely got more work to do to figure out a sustainable campaign, or conclude whether paid ads can be a useful distribution channel for me. My landing page should also be far prettier if I'm advertising 'beautiful career pages'.
I'm setting up calls now with internal recruiter friends, and initial waitlist subscribers. I've also been examining the current state of the market - the HR tech space is pretty crowded, which makes it quite worrying that nobody is doing exactly what I've suggested here.
However, I think my biggest validation issue will be validating distribution channels. Even if there are many recruiters out there who are unsatisfied with their career pages, who'd be willing to use a site-builder to create a better one, I don't think many of them are actively searching for a DIY solution. Even if it's a valuable product, I might need discovery to happen via recruitment blogs, affiliates etc rather than google search, and I'm not sure how to test that.
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If anyone has feedback I'd love to hear it! (even if it's feedback I'll hate to hear)
have you engaged with any biz who really like this idea?
I started off with the stereotypical dev approach of "not talking to people". Today I've got my first interview with a waitlist subscriber (hoping to schedule more, but I've got a few no-replies atm). I've also got calls this week with two internal recruiters from my network, both of whom I think would benefit from this, so we'll see how those go
I'm hoping to also try some cold outreach in the next couple days. I've been hesitating on that stuff, instead of just pushing for as many conversations as I can arrange
yeah. if you can work off your warm leads (folks who are already trying it) then that's better!
This is a great idea! What you may find is that if they are tied into a platform they may also be tied into some sort of exclusivity nonsense - we all know how frustrating it is seeing job posts on LinkedIn that are hidden behind a recruiter's logo so you don't know who you're actually applying to, right? Hopefully your recruiter friends can shed some light - and you can get a good idea of pain points from your waitlisters and see if that helps inform your next steps. More than happy to help from a brand standpoint if it's useful! Best of luck :)
Thanks Meri! I'm hopeful I can avoid exclusivity issues - many current HR platforms have feature overlap with each other, but still seem to have open APIs and integrate well, if companies are mixing ecosystems. I think APIs to get jobs from an ATS will always be available to me, since I'd be using the same API and API keys a company would use to build their own custom careers site. I'd likely even benefit from app marketplaces provided by Greenhouse, JazzHR, Workable and maybe others. But yeah, I guess there's still platform risk there...
More worried that companies are either happy with their current basic careers page, willing to pay a marketing agency for something amazing, or using a full "recruitment marketing platform" like Symphony Talent which include career sites as part of their offering. Or even just that I don't provide enough value over things like Wix, as you can totally build a custom page in that, and embed an iframe of your jobs list from Greenhouse etc
The problem I see with recruitment is that no one has a really solved the recruitment problem. There's so many solutions but no one has solved the problem.
Normally when you join a company you're joining a team, so how the company presents itself may be completely different from the team you're joining. Most companies would like to filter out candidates so that's why they have excessive job requirements. Having more candidates isn't necessarily a good thing as it's extra work.
I think boring job advertisements are a symptom of the company culture, even if you fix the job board for the company I'm guessing the Glassdoor score will have a bigger impact on candidates applying. Are companies with a bad culture going to be receptive to this idea/product, I'm not so sure.
epicjobs is a site I seen where companies are advertising themselves with promo videos and office tours.
Side note - the closest thing I can find to this as a standalone SaaS product (and not a design service or an add-on to an existing software suite), is a product called Swivel which seems to have disappeared. Not a good sign!
But the maker seems to also have an IndieHackers account. Tagging @yizi :)