

How Can I Make My Dog Food Taste Better? - jaredbrown

I'm a freelance developer. I'm always looking for other talented developers and designers, like the ones that read HN, to help on my projects. But I have a lot of trouble finding them. Job boards and resume search sites are too expensive. elance and other sites like it are full of outsourcing companies and are rigidly structured for quote/bid projects.<p>What I need is a site that's free to search and has quality developers and designers posting their resumes, work samples, etc. I think there needs to be some sort of community validation of the users so they are validated as well.<p>So I started building a site to serve as an open directory of talent.<p>At the moment anyone can sign up and post their resume.<p>What should I do to attract/foster talented designers and developers to the site? Should I make sign up by invitation only? Should the site be limited to only IT professionals? Should I allow users to post code and graphic snippets as sample work? Should all users need to get x number of recommendations before they appear in search results?
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nostromo
In real life, freelancers rely on referrals to get good work. I know that I
have a small rolodex of people I send people to -- including a preferred
designer, a preferred JavaScript guy, etc.

What would be cool is if you made it invite only - but also showed the graph
of invites & connections. So, for example, I know that if I invited my
designer friend, I would be judged based on her work. This velvet rope could
help recreate the quality threshold we all experience in the real world.

To keep it being a second-class LinkedIn, you could limit referrals -- say,
you only get x every year, or you can only recommend x people per field.
Imposing a cost on referrals / connections could keep people using them in the
best way -- not like the people on LinkedIn with 1000 connections.

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jaredbrown
Great points. I think limiting the invites is key. What do you think about
posting your resume and sample works on the site?

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sabj
One approach or "philosophy" which seems effective on other sites is to
aggressively favor relevance/visibility on the basis of past recommendations
or some other metric. So, creating not a high barrier to entry, but a way to
screen out new entrants until they have X factors behind them - maybe a
certain number of examples, or a certain amount of information associated with
them.

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jaredbrown
That's a good point and it is how I believe workingwithrails.com has handled
this. You are ranked by the number of recommendations you have. That way new
users who are unvetted do not rise to the top. Though in my experience
recommendations are generally short and weak in their content. Maybe a system
where users can say if they have worked with the person and if they would work
with them again would be good.

