wellpaid.io
The recruiter-free marketplace for contractors
Two weeks ago, I launched community.wellpaid.io: an invite-only, recruiter-free network for IT contractors and hirers.
To announce the launch, I shared it with my network via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6684459199264526336
I tried to follow a tip given to me by some marketing friends: encourage comments to boost LinkedIn's engagement algorithm.
It worked! The post has 66 likes and 115 comments (granted, a bunch of them are from me replying to people).
40 members signed up in the first 24 hours! It's now approaching 100 members. And, as I'm trying to manually onboard everyone, at points I really was struggling to keep up with the demand.
I just removed 17,000 expired listings from wellpaid.io. This turned out to be 70% of all listings the platform. Quite a shock for me.
Some users had been complaining around the numbers of expired listings, so I knew I needed to address it.
How did I not know that 70% of the listings on the site were for expired positions, I hear you ask.
This never used to be a problem. wellpaid.io is predominately an aggregator of contract jobs. My first source was reed.co.uk, which has an official API and provides me with an expiration date. This made it easy to identify when listings are expired, unless the expiration date changed.
Then, later on, I added indeed.co.uk and indeed.com. They don't provide an API unless you're a registered partner, so I scraped them. But this doesn't provide you with an expiration date, so I set a default of 60 days.
Turns out this was WAY too long. All the positions on wellpaid.io are contracts, and contract positions either get filled or become obsolete very quickly. I should have drawn on my own experience as a contractor here, and set it closer to 1 week.
Anyway, I fixed it by re-scraping all positions on the platform on a continuous loop, and checking for the presence of the Indeed expired div. As soon as a job becomes expired, wellpaid.io detects it and removes the position.
I'm definitely anxious to see how this affects my application numbers this month. All listings, good or bad, provide SEO for low-volume keywords, so the removal of 70% of my content is bound to have a negative impact.
I can't quite believe it but wellpaid.io just hit 4,500 monthly applications in February for contract devs and designers - the shortest month of the year!
Most of the applications are to remote contract positions, and also to Outside IR35 positions for applicantions in the UK.
The growth has been phenomenal over the last couple of months, largely due to a huge boost to my SEO performance via Google Jobs.
It turns out recruiters don't write very good SEO copy, so making a few automated tweaks (like pulling out keywords into the title) really boosts the ranking.
March is looking good, and I'm hoping to hit the 5-6k range. I'll throw a party when I hit 10k 🥳
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Congrats on the milestone, Chris!
Apart from SEO, how are you getting people to know about your product?
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Thanks!
Google Jobs (https://jobs.google.com/about/) is my main driver - if you're running a jobs board and don't have this, you're missing out on a lot of traffic.
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Thanks
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I just did a quick review on your organic rankings and you’re not scratching the surface. Even very low volume keywords you’re not in the top 3. And you’re still getting good traffic and I assume all the jobs are paid job posts? What’s your revenue thus far?
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What tool did you use for this? What pages did you check?
90% of my inbound comes from jobs pages, not the home page. These pages rank well in Google Jobs (https://jobs.google.com/about/) because they have relevant keywords for specific job searches, but aren't likely to rank well for standard Google Search. I don't write this content so it can make it difficult to control the keywords.
However, I do emphasis some keywords (like "remote) by placing them in the title even if the author did not - this really boosted my Google Jobs traffic, which has become my primary source of applicants. I also drive significant traffic via my Twitter (https://twitter.com/wellpaidio).
Traffic is strong, but 99% jobs are aggregated rather than paid. Revenue is still $0 -- I've been offering free listings for the last few months (until recently), although I have made some sales in the past.
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9 Comments
Congrats! Linkedin is probably an underrated growth channel for some verticals. Seems super relevant for wellpaid.
Looks great and congrats! How did you get your first traffic in? I am working on something similar for go-to-market jobs.
Integrating with Google Jobs is the best thing I did
Well done and thanks for sharing
That's awesome! I like the vibe of the board.
Great, and really good idea. But there is something I don't get at your website.
So the promise is: No agency commission
But ads are mostly from recruitment agencies, how does that work?
This is a really good observation, and something I'm working to clarify.
There are two parts of the website:
You're looking at the jobs board. The jobs board itself allows hirers to post directly, and hire contractors without agency fees. However, it is also made up of aggregated contract listings, most of which are, unfortunately, from recruitment agencies.
Going forwards, I plan on highlighting these positions are "agency" positions, and creating a single unified experience between the jobs board and community.
I'd be happy to discuss if you're interested? http://calendly.com/chrisvilla/30min-video-call
Awesome, I think if you can attract some companies to advertise for free that would be a good start to help to achieve your goals.
I might add that I liked the idea of community, I can share some insights. I am a contractor in London and can explain what would be my value from joining a platform like yours. ~~I will reach out on your twitter :) ~~
Edit: Your DM is not enabled on twitter
Have enabled DMs :)