It is undeniable that the blogosphere is becoming a prime time source of networking, information, and advertising. With this in mind, we've been watching the evolution of blogging. Authors like Scott Hanselman and Sahil Malik, business owners like Joel Spolsky and Eric Sink all are using the blogosphere to help others in their professional development and other ventures. Recently, the blogosphere evolved again, this time with blog sites like Joel's and 37signals offering basic job boards. These have been fairly successful, but at the same time I began thinking that while these sites are useful, they don't really support the blogosphere all that well and in spite of having an IT niche, they don't seem to be taking advantage by differentiating their job engines for IT specific benefits beyond offering RSS feeds.
With all this in mind, Brendan and I have been working tirelessly on
http://jobs.codebetter.com which we are pleased to announce the official launch of today! When designing our site, we had the following goals in mind:
- First and foremost, we want to be sure that quality jobs find quality people. By requiring all posters to post the real company name for real positions, we will strive to keep the anonymous "headhunter spam" off our boards so that our job seekers can view higher quality jobs from companies they can know, research, and trust.
- Second, we want to ensure technical employers that their ads are reaching the top tier of developers in the world. This is actually the easy part, since it is your top tier developers who actively read blogs to constantly improve their skills and share ideas. (fish where the fish are feeding)
- Third, we acknowledge that we owe the blogosphere in general a lot for the success of Codebetter.com. As such, we want to ensure that all of our friends and contacts in the blogosphere can make money right along with us. Thus we have launched an affiliate program, if you have a technical blog/site, all you have to do is register as an affiliate and then put some javascript on your site. This javascript randomly displays active jobs from our feed ala Google Adwords. You will be create a referral code during to put into the script, and if employers find us and post jobs because of you, you will receive $105 for every ad they post, for life. In this way, not only do we help fund our brothers and sisters in the blogosphere, but we also add value to employers as unlike other job sites where your job exists only in one place, when you post with us your job can be shown on potentially dozens of other sites.
- Fourth, we know that our jobs are for technical workers. We wanted to differentiate our job postings based on this. To do this, during the ad creation process we created a series of optional survey questions for employers that delve into what their IT environment is like... Do you allow telecommuting? What kind of workstations do you provide? Will I work in a cubicle or office? Do you have reward programs for outstanding achievements? All of these questions attempt to go beyond the standard job post and give IT workers a glimpse into the IT perks the employer offers.
In closing, I'd like to thank all of our loyal readers, and our current and future affiliates. Together, we are a powerful force of information and networking, and if we can help quality employers and employees find each other, the positive effect will ripple throughout our field.