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Have at it, folks!
by
witten
https://jobdescription.app/
https://jobdescription.app/
Oh, I almost forgot the most important part: GREAT WORK LAUNCHING! :D
You're moving forward.
You're crushing it.
You're making the world a better place bit by bit with every step you take.
KEEP GOING!
YOU'VE GOT THIS!
You're awesome, witten! :)
Thank you for the encouragement. :D
I'm totally not in your target market here, so take my feedback with a grain of salt, but something about your main headline struck me: "Tune up your developer job descriptions and attract candidates"
What I've read about and seen of the hiring process is that attracting candidates isn't a problem. Companies are flooded with applications when they post on any of the common job sites.
The problem they face is attracting the right candidates.
A headline like "You're losing 90% of the best candidates because of bad job descriptions." or "You just posted an opening for a developer. Will any rockstars actually find it?" would probably more closely capture the pain someone looking to hire is feeling (and serves as a good lead-in to your solution).
I also think you might be fighting an uphill battle knowledge-wise. Do people know their job descriptions suck? Are they actively looking for solutions? My experience as part of a company went something like this 1) "Hey HR, we need to hire somebody", 2) HR writes a job post, 3) "Hey tech lead, do these bullet points match the skills you need?" 4) Tweaks are made, 5) Post goes live. There was not a lot of introspection in that process.
If I may continue to give unsolicited advice, I think a good direction your product could go is to take things up a level: Provide some kind of concierge service around job postings. e.g. offer a 15 minute call where you speak to the team lead and HR to, write the post for them to best attract candidates, suggest where to post, etc. Take this too far and you become a recruiting company, which you might not want. But it seems like there might be a niche for something like ZipRecruiter, but specifically for software engineers and with a more hands-on/high-touch approach (e.g. I'm imagining you saying "ZipRecruiter just spams the internet with your job post, we carefully curate the posting and the sites where it goes to ensure that only the best see it and apply).
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, tylerchurch! I really appreciate it.
I totally agree about attracting the right candidates, and in fact I use that copy in the paragraph below the hero text. I'll try to promote it to the hero text to address this feedback!
And I fear you may be right that, due to the lack of introspection companies apply to their job postings, there may not actually be a market here. I created this landing page to find out if there is! It's odd though: If my premise is correct that the different job postings perform differently in attracting (the right) candidates, and companies are interested in filling open positions, then they should be interested in the quality and performance of their job postings, right? If they're not, then what about that logic breaks down? Maybe it's that there's very little feedback loop between bad JDs and (un)filled positions.
As to your suggestion about going up-market / more white glove: The thought had occurred to me. In fact that may be the only place there's actually a market here, as it's more of a "complete" solution and not just a feature. We'll see.
I think the logic breaks down because of an uneducated market. They're doing what they've always done, and it's hard to know what's going wrong because hiring isn't a tight feedback loop (as you said).
I think you could have a shot here with a big educational campaign - Get some data on what works and what doesn't (if you don't have that already) - and then write content or run ads targeting HR/recruiting/engineering managers who are really frustrated with their results.
You might even be able to get some good attention by picking some high-profile companies, re-writing their job posts, and highlighting what was bad and why and why your's is better.
And one unique thing about you're niche: You have direct access to many of the people who are struggling! Find the bad job posts and pitch them on your service! The response rate will probably be abysmal. But if you could get even 1 and then improve their outcomes, that would be an amazing case study.
Anyways, best of luck to you! :)
In regards to the educational campaign, getting that data is the hard part. One benefit of running a more "complete" solution of a job board is one could conceivably gather that data on job description performance before and after revisions. It's a good idea though. I'll need to think about how to tighten that feedback loop.
This is brilliant. I'll have to try this.
Way ahead of you. :) I've been cold-emailing recruiters and hiring managers with reviews/suggestions on their job descriptions. Including "applying" to jobs online and including the review in the "application" form. No real bites yet. One agency recruiter did tell me that it may be of more interest to internal company recruiters, since they're the ones who often write JDs. Which is fair.
Awesome! Sounds like you're well on your way! :)
crickets