

Ask HN: getting content for online jobsearch - kamme

Hi HN,<p>First of all, I've used searchyc to see if this topic has been discussed before and I didn't find anything. If it has, please point me to it. If it hasn't, please give me your oppinion/ideas.<p>A little background: some time ago I was looking for a new job. The search was horrible, most jobsearch websites I looked at where not good at doing their jobs imho. I had to enter a whole lot of data to find jobs that had nothing to do with what I wanted. Recently there was a post on HN about where to search for a job in some countries in europe (I live in Belgium). I gave some links to the author of websites I knew from my search earlier. When I visited them myself again, I got annoyed again and decided it could be done far better.<p>So now I've got the domain I wanted and I've made a proof of concept. I think it's quite an improvement over the others, but how do I get content for such a site? I have no experience whatsoever with this issue. I do know how to create some attention for the user aspect (actual search), but it's getting the jobs to put up on the site that seem hard for me.<p>Does anyone have any experience with this? The market here is probably small compared with cournties as the USA, France, etc... and I see this as a good thing. I'm probably unable to go on location a lot as I'm working during the day. Quitting my job will be pretty impossible as I like it a lot and am also dependent on the monthly paycheck.<p>Any advice is welcome!
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byrneseyeview
Like the dating market, there's a chicken-and-egg problem, here. You might
start out by aggregating other job boards' information (if you present the
same stuff in a more usable format, you'll get traffic). You _could_ offer
companies a money-back guarantee for posting jobs -- or just offer to not bill
them for the first three months, and then to bill them only if they got at
least one qualified applicant per week (or whatever). Make sure that's a
limited-time offer, though, and don't publicize it unless you have to.

Most people don't like recruiters, but recruiters _do_ tend to look for new
places to post job ads -- especially if they know they won't have much
competition. If you can contact a few recruiters in your field of interest and
get them to play around with your service, you'll probably get somewhere.

After that, it's a tough slog. Job boards in general are not all that good at
SEO; if a search for X jobs in the Y industry near Z-ville lands a user at an
even slightly relevant page, you're doing your job.

(Helping new sites get the attention they deserve is my more-than-full-time
job, and I love talking shop -- so feel free to send me an email; the address
is in the profile.)

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ig1
Not sure if you'll read this now (11 days after you posted it), but shoot me
an email if you do. I was working on something similar for the UK market so
have some ideas about how to bootstrap, I'd be happy to discuss them with you.

