Thursday, August 24, 2006
Rise of the site/industry specific job boards
Problogger just recently launched their job board site for the blogging industry. Currently there are 14 companies looking for bloggers for their various blogs and this will probably grow as word gets out. What I, and probably everyone else, has noticed is how popular the whole job board concept has become. One of the first of these new wave job boards that I noticed was jobs.rubynow.com becasue I'm a Rails blogger and I probably noticed it on some Rails blog or mailing list. It's a site where only companies looking for Ruby on Rails programmers can post. Three are a decent number of job listings on this site, with new posting coming in at around a 1-3 every few days or so.
A while after I noticed that site, 37 Signals released their job board site. This site is pretty heavily trafficked and has posts from a number of companies looking for either web designers or coders. They even have an Executive Jobs section which has a few posts. While the jobs.rubynow.com is free to post to, 37 Signals site is not. There charge $250 to list your job post for 30 days. At that price and with the 123 jobs listed, their job site alone has ranked in at least $30,750 since the time it's been released.
Next up is the more recently released Crunchboard job site from Techcrunch. This site is very new (a week or two old) so it doesn't yet have as many jobs listed as the 37 Signals site does but they're not hurting for listings either. They current have 50 jobs listed across two pages. They charge $200 for 30 days per job post. At that price, Crunhboard has generated around $10,000 in revenue in the short time since it was opened.
The potential problem with these job sites is that their well being is dependant on the well being of the tech and start up industry. If, for whatever reason, the web startup market hits a rough patch, these job site's ability to make money could be somewhat hindered. With that being said, these sites can't cost too much to run and with hardware and hosting getting cheaper every year, their profit margins wll most likey increase (for the short term at least). The benefit they provide to the companies who post their available openings on their site is huge. It's a much better benefit to these companies to stick a post up on one of these sites, of which their ideal canidate most likely frequents, than to having to comb through stale profiles on a larger all-in-one job site like Monster.com. It'll be interesting to see how big these sites become, how long they last and how specific future job boards become. ¶ 5:19 AM
A while after I noticed that site, 37 Signals released their job board site. This site is pretty heavily trafficked and has posts from a number of companies looking for either web designers or coders. They even have an Executive Jobs section which has a few posts. While the jobs.rubynow.com is free to post to, 37 Signals site is not. There charge $250 to list your job post for 30 days. At that price and with the 123 jobs listed, their job site alone has ranked in at least $30,750 since the time it's been released.
Next up is the more recently released Crunchboard job site from Techcrunch. This site is very new (a week or two old) so it doesn't yet have as many jobs listed as the 37 Signals site does but they're not hurting for listings either. They current have 50 jobs listed across two pages. They charge $200 for 30 days per job post. At that price, Crunhboard has generated around $10,000 in revenue in the short time since it was opened.
The potential problem with these job sites is that their well being is dependant on the well being of the tech and start up industry. If, for whatever reason, the web startup market hits a rough patch, these job site's ability to make money could be somewhat hindered. With that being said, these sites can't cost too much to run and with hardware and hosting getting cheaper every year, their profit margins wll most likey increase (for the short term at least). The benefit they provide to the companies who post their available openings on their site is huge. It's a much better benefit to these companies to stick a post up on one of these sites, of which their ideal canidate most likely frequents, than to having to comb through stale profiles on a larger all-in-one job site like Monster.com. It'll be interesting to see how big these sites become, how long they last and how specific future job boards become. ¶ 5:19 AM
