Last Saturday I attended my first recruiting “unconference” at the offices of Stack Overflow in lower Manhattan. An unconference is a one day event where the sessions consist of a track leader who introduces a topic to a group and then lets the group take the discussion to wherever they want. truNewYork was put on by @billboorman. It was a great event and Stack’s employees were awesome hosts.
I got a chance to chat with some of their sales reps and recruiters about their tech job board Careers 2.0. It has over 110,000 vetted technical resumes that they sell access to. It has job postings that sell for $350 each and they just launched a product called “Company Pages” which highlights their employer clients. To me this is what the next gen job board (or any company career site) should look like. It has pictures of the office. It has interesting, unique copy written by a human. And it tells you who you’ll be working with.
Stack Overflow started with a community of developers and they added the job board later on. Let that serve as a lesson to you would be job board operators. Having an existing community of like minded people will make it easier to add a job board later on since you will have a built in audience.
Whats also interesting is not just anyone can post their resume. You have to be invited. That way they can vet each person to make sure they are a quality candidate. If you study what Stack does you will learn a lot about how to run a job board, they do it very well.
So well in fact they are embarking on a big push to hire over 40 sales reps to help sell to employers. If you like sales and job boards, check ’em out.
