Is there room for another job board?
As a remote contractor, I work with a lot of recruiters. Being the hopeful maker that I am, I was hoping to utilize the 10+ LinkedIn messages a day from them and solve any pain points they have with connecting with candidates. i.e. us.
I think there is room for recruiters to do better in connecting with candidates. Better job/gig transparency, skillset matching, salary/rate disclosures, etc. My goal is to reduce the scorched earth practices that recruiters tend to resort to when looking for candidates. A quality over quantity connection, so to speak
So fellow remote contractors, would you enlist in a platform where you would have these things clearly defined and a recruiter could interface with that? With places like remoteok, stackoverflow.. perhaps there is no shortage of getting the gig you want?
I have tried to do something in this space 2019/2020. Built a product, raised a $500k seed etc. Shut it down at the beginning of 2021. Despite it being such a broken experience for absolutely everyone involved it's a very tough market to crack.
I went down the journey of getting clear structured data on both the candidate and employer sides and then having an algorithm match them together. The product worked really well and we automated a lot of the data collection. The issue I had was getting people to use it. Some of the key problems were:
Employers:
It's such a fragmented space with 1,001 products created in the last 2 weeks trying to solve hiring. So even if you actually have a good product, employers have been taken down the garden path too many times.
Hiring managers rarely know what they want and rarely hire the ideal person they had in their head on day 1 of hiring. So if you rely on what they tell you, you'll deliver them the wrong candidates.
Candidates / Contractors:
They've given so much information to so many different platforms already, it's difficult to get them to want to use one more.
They don't trust you to deliver them the right jobs at the end of the day. So even though they may waste hours going through job posts they'll feel some comfort that they've found all that's to be found
There's a lot more and I could go on. I guess my advice is tread carefully. It's a black hole
This is great advice. I'm an idea half empty kind of guy so it's always good to hear the unfortunate, cynical side.
I'm certain someone will solve it at some point. But they'll need to really want it, have very deep pockets, and a lot of patience.
Yeah, so much truth to what you’ve written. Mine’s not a job board, but close enough that I relate to what you’re saying… and Don, I’m even further away from the magical West Coast than you! So let’s see.
I think there is still enough space for job boards as long they bring some uniqueness. If not, I believe you still can make it but then it requires a lot of marketing and social media
Your idea seems good as recruitment indeed requires a new liftop