First, a mini victory: after announcing watchlist emails back in week 11, they finally sent out last Friday without broken subject lines. There it is in my inbox with emoji and everything.
It’s been exactly three months since I launched Job Garden. A proper version zero launch.
I’ve now built the thing I meant to build: a tool to help me get the word out about great jobs working with teams I know. Prospective applicants hear about these jobs on social channels (i.e. they follow me on Twitter), and later by opt-in subscription (watchlist emails).
Moreover, it seems like there is some appetite from others to use this exact same tool. Not many others, but still there are a bunch of people similar to me: affiliated with a couple dozen startups and wanting to help.
And — as I’ve learned in yet more conversations — there are places to take Job Garden beyond this core use. Those ideas sit in my notes.
So I reckon I’ll keep working on this for a while longer.
Job Garden isn’t a collection of social job boards, not really, or if it is then only as a side-effect of dealing with the distribution problem: how to get awareness of a role from A→B as effectively as possible in an era of fierce competition over user attention.
People don’t have disposable attention any more. To increase bandwidth, there are two approaches:
- increase engagement. The more minutes you capture of a user’s eyeballs, the more you can stuff down the pipe. I hate this shit
- reduce noise. Given the limited attention a user allows you, only present super high signal information
That second approach is what I’m trying to do: aggregate jobs from career pages and, using a combination of explicit preferences and affiliations such as social connection, route the jobs to great individuals, whether or not they are actively looking for a new role. All without being spammy. And in a complementary way to the excellent recruiters, job boards, and so on out there already.
The strategy for the next three months is to avoid doing any fancy stuff.
The strategy is more: more companies, more integrations, more social job boards hosted for people I know, more ways for job seekers to filter and customise the webpage and the watchlist email.
There’s a phrase I use when I’m advising startups (that’s the day job) which I try not to say out loud:
Quantity has a quality all its own.
At the moment there are 10-or-so integrations, 400-or-so jobs in the system, two job boards. Enough to see that it works. But what if there were 2x that? Things would start breaking so I would have to build new systems and new tools. What if there were 5x? There would be enough data for some slicing and dicing. I would have to find faster ways to build the integrations. Or 10x? By this point things would get interesting.
Sometimes the best thing to do isn’t anything new, but the same thing again and again and again and again a hundred times.
The reason I try not to say that phrase out loud is that it’s a quote from Joseph Stalin. Kinda inappropriate.
I’m going to take the next couple weeks off and have a bit of a think. See you on the other side.
First, a mini victory: after announcing watchlist emails back in week 11, they finally sent out last Friday without broken subject lines. There it is in my inbox with emoji and everything.
It’s been exactly three months since I launched Job Garden. A proper version zero launch.
I’ve now built the thing I meant to build: a tool to help me get the word out about great jobs working with teams I know. Prospective applicants hear about these jobs on social channels (i.e. they follow me on Twitter), and later by opt-in subscription (watchlist emails).
Moreover, it seems like there is some appetite from others to use this exact same tool. Not many others, but still there are a bunch of people similar to me: affiliated with a couple dozen startups and wanting to help.
And — as I’ve learned in yet more conversations — there are places to take Job Garden beyond this core use. Those ideas sit in my notes.
So I reckon I’ll keep working on this for a while longer.
Job Garden isn’t a collection of social job boards, not really, or if it is then only as a side-effect of dealing with the distribution problem: how to get awareness of a role from A→B as effectively as possible in an era of fierce competition over user attention.
People don’t have disposable attention any more. To increase bandwidth, there are two approaches:
That second approach is what I’m trying to do: aggregate jobs from career pages and, using a combination of explicit preferences and affiliations such as social connection, route the jobs to great individuals, whether or not they are actively looking for a new role. All without being spammy. And in a complementary way to the excellent recruiters, job boards, and so on out there already.
The strategy for the next three months is to avoid doing any fancy stuff.
The strategy is more: more companies, more integrations, more social job boards hosted for people I know, more ways for job seekers to filter and customise the webpage and the watchlist email.
There’s a phrase I use when I’m advising startups (that’s the day job) which I try not to say out loud:
At the moment there are 10-or-so integrations, 400-or-so jobs in the system, two job boards. Enough to see that it works. But what if there were 2x that? Things would start breaking so I would have to build new systems and new tools. What if there were 5x? There would be enough data for some slicing and dicing. I would have to find faster ways to build the integrations. Or 10x? By this point things would get interesting.
Sometimes the best thing to do isn’t anything new, but the same thing again and again and again and again a hundred times.
The reason I try not to say that phrase out loud is that it’s a quote from Joseph Stalin. Kinda inappropriate.
I’m going to take the next couple weeks off and have a bit of a think. See you on the other side.