Work at Skip!

Skip is hiring, and Mr. Malik said it best, just last week:

"the job boards don’t seem to have the necessary impact or perhaps get the right kind of users"

So first ... check out our ad on CrunchBoard.

Then, tell me if you don't think these are some of the issues that render the "big traditional" job boards less-than-useful for Skip and other startups:

1. They have a poor job taxonomy - many of these sites serve every industry from sanitation to aviation, and yet instead of having a category like "technology," they split tech up into all sorts of categories and subcategories. A startup-type employer has a hard time deciding where to post, and a candidate has a hard time narrowing the search.
   
   
2. Likely, #1 is a symptom of a heavy bias toward Fortune-500 org chart / HR type hiring. All of the tech categories and subcategories look like they came from some post-re-org bad dream at a very large company. The bigco bias doesn't just make it hard for the long tail (like Skip) to get involved, it drives away the audience we want (folks who love startups).
   
   
3. They foster job descriptions (and concommitantly attract resumes) built out of tech acronym lists and bullet lists of "years of" (you know what I mean). If you have "8 years of C#" you'd better have worked for Microsoft. Of course, resumes like this are a desperate response to foolish HR-composed job ads asking for 8 years of J2EE
   
   
4. For us, attitude counts. A whole lot more than the difference between "3 years of C#" and "4 years of C#" -- so these job boards that scream: "the candidates are bored, the hiring companies are boring, and we're both" are not going to draw the right folks.
   
   
5. Lastly, these boards are packed with jobs posted by recruiting agencies (staffing companies). Many of these jobs are widely believed to be bogus. That is, the ads exist to draw resumes, from which the recruiters try to find clients. Now, even if this isn't always true, the appearance of this situation drives away the serious candidates. Dice.com is a great example of a tech job board that used to be (in 1999 or so) rock solid. Then the staffing companies moved in with "jobs" that I've yet to hear of anyone actually getting/taking, and now ... well, let me just say I'm not spending money to advertise there.
   

Long live CrunchBoard and the rest of the niche sites!