Job Board Tar Pits

Common job board mistakes every founder makes.

If you want to build a lifestyle business, this post is probably irrelevant for you. But if you want to go big, you gotta be very careful with this game. Below are common mistakes founders make when building yet another job board and trying to compete with LinkedIn.

1. Charging candidates

What do you do when you start gaining meaningful traction from job seekers? How long should you keep growing your candidate base without earning a dime? It seems impossible to charge employers because you’re a nobody. So you do what everyone else eventually does when you have traction and are desperate for revenue: charge candidates and turn it into a lifestyle business.

RIP

You can never build a massive outcome by charging job seekers. People who land jobs won’t care about you for the next few years until they’re in the market again. That can’t be sustainable if your pricing is too low. You can’t increase pricing because job seekers simply won’t buy it.

2. Going too niche

This is my favorite one. You listen to advice from well-intentioned VCs who tell you to narrow your focus and go niche. So you build a job site for dog lovers and advertise your site as “Top Companies Who Love Dogs”. Haha!

Another cute one is “Ruby on Rails Jobs” or “Top Product Design Jobs”.

You’re going to die fast.

Here’s the thing: people are in the job market every few years. You won’t have sufficient traffic flow to keep your job board popular.

Going a bit broad from early-on has many benefits. People talk about you, you get steady traction, and so on. But you can’t go too broad or you’ll turn into Indeed. Defining borders is really hard. But startups are hard!

3. Ignoring employers

Candidates have a massive pain point: filling application forms. People hate lengthy forms. So you build a Google Chrome extension and BOOM. You’ve successfully attracted hundreds of thousands of people to your job site.

But then you run into a problem: Employers don’t see value in the free candidates your website is giving them. Because it attracted a ton of interns and new grads and people with little to no experience.

But that’s ok, because your next big idea is: Lets turn this into a career advice site, similar to what Credit Karma with finance and….

Uh oh…

4. Manufacturing differentiation

You wanna stand out from the crowd because after all this is a red ocean. So you put on your thinking cap and start brainstorming different ways your site can be different from the big guys.

You start thinking of really cool features that will help you stand out.

And then you die.

Job seekers don’t care about your strategies. They’re like sharks (as Paul Graham describes). They either want your product or simply ignore you. And they definitely don’t want to change their patterns and behaviors if your site doesn’t actually solve their pain points.

I learned this lesson the hard way: Differentiation is for losers.

Differentiation is a gift that gets handed down to you once you do the hard work of building on a unique insight you have about something that everyone else is ignoring.

Once you do that, your product may look more or less like the competition, but the value prop will be very clear to your end users.

You can’t just manufacture product differentiation for the sake of differentiation. That’s the fastest way to die.

5. Revenue

Silicon Valley has a big problem now. Back then, it was cool to build consumer products and not worry about revenue. It was uncool to think about TAM, market segmentation, MRR, BRR, GRR, and all the grand-pa MBA 101 bullshit.

The pendulum has swung to the other side.

These days, even the brightest kids out of Harvard are thinking about XRR and GRR from day one. How sad and pathetic.

Sometimes innovation requires you to stay hyper-focused on user growth and retention. Thinking about revenue too early can kill your big vision.

But it’s really, really, really difficult to ignore revenue these days, especially when building a job site. Because traditionally a job site is supposed to generate revenue from day one.

But focusing on revenue too early can cause your startup to make other dumb mistakes… like renting traffic.

6. Renting traffic

Traffic renting is a very common problem with job sites. Simply put, it’s when a job site publishes their jobs on other job sites to attract sufficient candidate traffic. Doing this will turn you into a lifestyle business because you have nothing interesting to offer. It’s literally just an arbitrage. You might as well buy potato peelers from Walmart and sell them on Amazon.

This is also a terrible way to growth hack, because organic candidate flow is critical to build an everlasting, sustainable job board. If you rely on traffic from other job sites today, you’ll most likely rely on it in the future.

Side note: one of the reasons why job boards suck so much is because too many job boards are renting traffic.

7. Focusing on one side way too much

Map out the entire journey of a job seeker - from the moment they’re in the market to the moment they land a job. There’s a gazzilion steps along the way, with each step having multiple sub-steps and lots and lots of pain points. It can be very tempting to just focus on one thing.

For example, a job site that automates application process. Or a job site that lets you stay organized and track all your job applications in place. And so on.

The problem with this approach is that job seekers have too many options. The market is flooded with fragmented tools. Suddenly you learn about the concept of compound startups and start building a ton of tools for job seekers. All of a sudden, you’ve created an all-in-one platform for job seekers.

Here’s the problem though: you’ll eventually start charging job seekers a subscription fee because you’ve focused so much on one side that if you start focusing on employers you might end up hurting the user experience on the job seeker side.

But as I’ve said earlier, depending on revenue from job seekers is a sure way to die. It’s a painful death because it happens very slowly.

Ok I’m done I have to go back to work now.