A job board named Bandana.com that serves New York City and lists jobs with street addresses has received $8.5 Million in new funding. TechCrunch recently wrote about them. It mainly lists hourly type listings and each one has a street address for seekers to determine exact commutes. They previously raised $3.5M one year ago.
Right now they are focused on New York City though they have more cities on the list for the future. Users can also search for jobs by company. Some of the important features are that the jobs are ‘verified and trusted’. Their listings show addresses, maps and info about the neighborhood.
I’ve seen numerous attempts at this type type of “street level” job board. It is kind of a holy grail for job seekers who want to know exactly where the job is located so they can get an idea of the time it will take them to get to work.
Unfortunately, most ATS platforms don’t allow for street addresses to be included in job listing schema and this has been the biggest impediment to growing sites like Bandana. It’s just too hard to get the street address.
I assume employers using Bandana are required to list it but that likely means they have to do it manually. Applies happen on the employer website so somehow they are mapping the street address to those jobs. They don’t list anything on the website about how they accomplish this. My guess though is its probably a manual process.
But starting local in a big city market is a good way to attempt a business like this. Going national will be a tougher road but now they have some runway to expand. According to the article, they are leveraging social media for cheap traffic and it seems to be working. I’m a little skeptical (for the long run) but will surely keep an eye on Bandana. They’ve done well getting this far.
