I used to run a software developer job board startup for several years and I came the the conclusion that what the market needs is a better way of reaching passive job seekers.
While I think this approach is along the right lines, the big problem is that it's incredibly hard to get passive job seekers to sign-up, so mostly you'll get active job seekers signing up and then you'll essentially just be another curated job board / CV database.
I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting lots of passive job seekers to signup.
Personally if I was doing it I'd go the route of making hyper-targetted mailing lists. So like a reverse groupon catering to specific niches. So have one for developer evangelists, one for flash games developers, etc. with the idea being that the niches are specific enough that people want to be on the list not because they're job hunting but because they want to keep their finger on the pulse of their niche.
(feel free to email me if you want to talk more about the developer recruitment space; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it!)
> I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting lots of passive job seekers to signup.
If you want people to do something there is way that often, but not always, works: pay them.
Why not share the fee you charge the companies with the people on the list? Obviously there are issues to be worked out to stop people from gaming the system, they need to be legitimate candidates, but I'm suspect there is a way. Basically it's the same as cashback on credit cards - they charge the merchant and share some of that with the consumer.
You want to incentivize the best developers, not those who want (a relatively small amount of) money. By replacing intrinsic incentive with monetary incentive it may end up making the situation worse.
Someone might happily sign-up to a mailing list for interesting jobs based on the inherent incentive, but offer that person $10 to do the same and they'll think "my time is worth more than $10" and just walk away.
You'll almost certainly better off just putting that same amount of money into traditional marketing channels.
I agree, thats why we built this more around someone's expectations and goals and less about their history (though that is important too). That way we can be more focused on high quality discovery, lowering the barrier to "keeping your finger on the pulse of the market in your expertise".
While I think this approach is along the right lines, the big problem is that it's incredibly hard to get passive job seekers to sign-up, so mostly you'll get active job seekers signing up and then you'll essentially just be another curated job board / CV database.
I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting lots of passive job seekers to signup.
Personally if I was doing it I'd go the route of making hyper-targetted mailing lists. So like a reverse groupon catering to specific niches. So have one for developer evangelists, one for flash games developers, etc. with the idea being that the niches are specific enough that people want to be on the list not because they're job hunting but because they want to keep their finger on the pulse of their niche.
(feel free to email me if you want to talk more about the developer recruitment space; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it!)