| Oh, man. Where were you 15 years ago? Around 2007, when there was this wave of "37signals job board clones" and I was still living in Brazil, my friend and I started a job board focused on the Brazilian market (job4dev.com). It was free to post as long as the name of the company was provided and the contact was direct with someone from the team. No agencies and no clueless recruiters allowed. At first, there was very little traction. We were doing most submissions ourselves. After a few months it started to pick some audience (a few thousand unique users/day). We did all the "Web 2.0" things from the time: auto-classification and filtering by tags, integration with social networks, a company wiki, etc. Our site was featured on some tech magazine as one of the best sites for tech jobs. We had a couple of "repeat customers", companies that were posting regularly on the site and were giving excellent feedback. The one thing that we "forgot" to do: sales and marketing. By 2008 I was moving to the US, right before the big crash, so I was focused on finding any kind of job which could sponsor a visa. My friend on the other hand was more focused on his day job, and he was just too afraid to go to companies that were facing a recession to ask "maybe you'd be interested in some paid features"? I continued moonlighting on job4dev for some years, but because I was in the US and because much bigger companies started cornering this market, it became mostly a hobby project for me. All of this to say: guess what was one the things that I did start to prototype? Yes, it was "OkCupid for Jobs". The algorithm is actually simple to implement. I didn't take it further because I pitched the idea to some and and no one "(in Brazil) knew of OkCupid, and few seemed to care about using "algorithmic compatibility matching". Credentials/Education Level/Networking were the most important filters. Anyway, after a while I left the US to move to Germany, and put aside job4dev for good. The idea of "OkCupid for jobs" still seems to me a good one, and I still wonder why it wasn't picked up by someone more competent than me. |
I think the key is the right vision to make it work. I see replies of "I did the same thing!" but they seem to be missing the killer feature: high-quality data. Good data (and lots of it) enables better algorithmic matching. To get the data, you need gamification. IIRC, OkCupid grew fast because bored people would fill out fun surveys, and that generated tons of data. So a big part of their site was probably just dedicated to "how can we convince people to answer all these questions and submit new ones?", and that's much harder than just creating a job board.