Hiring Tech Kids
I have been playing around with a few sites, as I am trying to hire a part-time java (with a little AJAX) developer to help on our UI (i.e. non-crawling), and one of the sites I used is GoJobby.com.
Despite being slang for ’shit’ in Scottish, the site turned out to be quite useful and out of all the means I used (craigslist, friends, gojobby, NYU+Columbia CS depts and a few Google Groups I belong to) it has produced by far the best quality stream of applicants.
Randomly, the company was ‘bought’ by Jobster today, a larger startup. I say bought, because with venture funding, it looks more like a lego add-on, with perhaps a small hiring bonus, than an exit that lets the founders buy Carribean islands.
Back to my original point: the reason why I posted this was that in the Techcrunch comments there are a few morons citing the “bubble is back” meme. Let’s take score: The site was not venture backed. The acquirer is obviously paying a small subset of their own venture capital raised. So where is the bubble? This isn’t webvan raising $300m, it’s two guys proving that have the smarts to go out and do something themselves that provides value (at least a few hundred dollars in my case). For Jobster, they have lowered their risk on two smart employees that might help them build a great company.
That said, the site does have the ultimate ‘techcrunch’ Alexa graph. Take a look at this beauty:
Lesson of the story? Techcrunch should build a place where their readers can upload their resumes and employees can pay say $10 a pop to contact those that are interested in looking for work. The profit center for newspapers has always been employment classifieds (and real estate and autos to a lesser extent, at least historically). Mr Arrington: Why do you think Dice.com are buying up all the ads on your site?
