(2006-04-26) 37 Signals Job Board

Thirty7 Signals has entered the Job Market. Interesting low-tech approach... We will be promoting the job board in various ways over the next few months including a permanent position in the SvN sidebar which is seen by tens of thousands of people every day. Ah, so it's Advertising....

Aug4: Tech Crunch is doing the same thing.

I guess this is one way of filtering candidates... I'm not sure how a great a predictor of quality it is, esp for a general-tech site like Tech Crunch.

It also assumes you need a filter like that - for a Start Up looking for a great Python developer, you generally don't have this problem! (We recently had our best success paying for the right to query the big job-site dbs.) I'm chewing over the idea of buying AdWords next time, just on blogs (Google's "content network").

• Fred Wilson writes about IndeedCom's business of serving ads to job-seekers. (Wow the site is slow.)

Aug26: Mike Arrington (Tech Crunch) wants everyone to have an open API so that the little markets can integrate.

• But now that I think about it, the real point of these mini-MarKet-s is to mutually set expectations in terms of Culture. Certainly Thirty7 Signals has its own Human Voice, and if you post a job you're implicitly saying you accept/prefer people with a similar style.

• If that's "true", then Arrington's approach only makes sense to the extent that Tech Crunch readers are "like" Thirty7 Signals readers, etc.

• Jason Fried makes a similar argument. If you want to reach executives interested in broadband, wireless, and technology, you post on the GigaOM Jobs board. If you want to reach someone interested in new company/product launches and the other stuff that is posted on Tech Crunch, you post on the Crunch Board. Yes, there's some overlap between those audiences. But there are also significant differences.

• On the other hand, each of these mini-MarKet-s is too small for either party to depend on, so having an API that let's you deal with a number of these at one time makes sense. As long as you don't have to deal with all of them together.

Sept7: Joel Spolsky starts another one. And runs into an interesting issue.