Very recently, we were looking for a web developer to join our team at LeadLog. We searched high and low, nationally & even internationally to find the right person, and we did. It wasn’t easy though! We listed the position on Startuply, Hacker News, SnapTalent, Career Builder, Krop, Facebook & Craigslist; then we waded through 85+ applicants, followed up with about 25 of those people, and interviewing about 10 candidates. It was an invigorating endeavor, but it was a serious detractor - which took more time away from development than we originally anticipated.
So, in the spirit of Open Source, we wanted to share some of our numbers with the community to try and help make the search for a great candidate less painful and save you some money as well.
I’ve broken down each network with a summary and statistics on ad exposure, response, applicant quality, customer service & ease of use. Our scale is from 1-10, 10 being the best.
Startuply:
Startuply is a free service. So it’s really hard to complain about it. We received three applications from Startuply organically. It’s easy to use and makes managing potential candidates easy.
- Exposure: 6 (Auto re-listing, tops result on Indeed.com/myspace jobs - ~500 views)
- Response: 4 (Only 3 applicants total)
- Applicant Quality: 7 (More than 65% of candidates had degrees + some experience)
- Customer Service 9 (Quick response to emails)
- Ease of use: 9 (Very easy to use, plus it’s free!)
- Overall: 7 (Decent Response, Great Support, Sweet UI - Free!)
Hacker News:
Hacker News is my playground on a daily basis. So I might have some bias towards HN. I believe the quality of candidates we received was significantly higher than any other source. But due to the national reach of HN it was/is hard to get the best candidates in here.
- Exposure: 7 (~1000 views in 24 hrs)
- Response: 4 (Only 3 applicants total)
- Applicant Quality: 8 (100% of candidates had degrees + correct experience)
- Customer Service 0 (No way to get on the jobs page!)
- Ease of use: 8 (Easy to use, plus it’s free!)
- Overall: 7 (Decent Response, Highly Qualified Candidates - Free!)
SnapTalent:
SnapTalent is a job ad network, where you pay per click/view. I’m assuming the principles that apply to Google/Yahoo PPC apply to SnapTalent, but we simply did not have time to perpetually optimize/test ads for performance of our SnapTalent ads. There are plenty of other possible reasons for the poor performance of the job ads; not enough reach in South Florida, poor ad placement, disenchanting opportunity, location, etc, etc… In the end, I’d say that given the circumstances, if we had a sexier offering (SV startup, BIG name funding, or equitable brand) this would have worked very well.
- Exposure: 10 (Blog Network + Jobs Page on YC - ~80k small ad views)
- Response: 1 (No Applicants)
- Applicant Quality: 1 (No Applicants)
- Customer Service 10 (Quick response to emails, easy to reach on the phone)
- Ease of use: 7 (Fairly easy to get used to)
- Overall: 6 (Great customer service, Great reach, easy to use, No cost for us)
Career Builder:
CareerBuilder is like Monster or Dice. I believe it is a Tribune Company, and it is rather expensive. But it does provide a large quantity of candidates. This is a very clear cut process, you pay, you post and you get candidates. They aren’t usually bad, but they tend to be relatively un-targeted applicants or people who are applying to about 20-40 jobs at a time. When you bring these candidates in they will not have researched your company or industry, so be prepared.
- Exposure: 9 (CNN, Forbes, Main site, etc - ~10k views)
- Response: 9 (45 applicants)
- Applicant Quality: 5 (6% of candidates had extensive experience, 20% had some experience, 64% had college degree)
- Customer Service 9? (Never had to email/call)
- Ease of use: 5 (Really confusing UI)
- Overall: 6 (Amazing reach, great response, decent applicants - but really expensive [$500])
Krop:
Krop is a newer job board, similar to JSNinjas or 37Signals jobs. It uses a live search and has a great interface for job posting. I suppose we got our ad at a good time because the policy used to be $200 for 30 days, but we were granted a 60 day job posting. The effectiveness of this network is positive, a relatively small number of candidates, with the right skills
- Exposure: 8 (Syndication across a few sites + first page listing on indeed/myspace jobs, ~3500 views)
- Response: 6 (7 applicants)
- Applicant Quality: 7 (28% had some experience, 71% had college degrees)
- Customer Service 9 (Free Extra 30 days)
- Ease of use: 8 (Simple UI)
- Overall: 6 (Mediocre or just above average in areas that matter - and fairly expensive [$199])
Facebook:
I tapped into my social network to pull some applicant’s. The people that come from your network are obviously usually trustworthy and meet your needs. We had a good experience using facebook to pull out some applicants; we were able to retrieve 3 potential candidates who would all be a great fit for us.
- Exposure: 2 (I only have like 110 facebook friends)
- Response: 3 (3 applicants)
- Applicant Quality: 9 (100% were highly qualified as far as experience goes, 100% had college degrees)
- Customer Service 9? (Never had to use it)
- Ease of use: 8 (It’s facebook…)
- Overall: 7 (Great applicants, Already have established trust & free - but small no. of candidates)
Craigslist:
Craigslist jobs for South Florida used to be free and there used to be a lot more posts. It became paid recently and I believe that we benefited from this greatly! We were able to retain the top position in Web Design/Internet Engineers for close to a week! The response from Craigslist is always very mixed; companies in the U.S. trying to pick up business, people from India trying to telecommute, untalented candidates and most importantly, qualified applicants! We were able to find Tom through craigslist, so this was the most beneficial to us.
- Exposure: 8 (guesstimating)
- Response: 3 (20 applicants)
- Applicant Quality: 4 (20% were highly qualified as far as experience goes, 30% had some experience, 40% had college degrees)
- Customer Service 9? (Never had to use it)
- Ease of use: 7 (Craigslist is easy to use - but ugly)
- Overall: 8 (Found our hire here, I’ve personally found other work through craigslist, good amount of candidates/exposure - Only $25!!!)
All in all I would reccommend starting your search in your network (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), move from there to free alternatives (Startuply, Hacker News, possibly Craigslist, etc) and finally on to paid options (Craigslist, Career Builder, Krop, etc). Let us know if you have any questions! I’m definitely eager to hear your thoughts…
This is a great post and I definitely will use your advice when posting job listings (or encouraging people to look for jobs).
I think you described the CareerBuilder applicants perfectly.
Just curious why you didn’t give LinkedIn a go.
@pmarsh my linkedin network is not particularly rich with developers; it’s more executive level, managers & business owners. Anyone who does not fit that profile most likely is an artsy person or will not be leaving their extremely well paid position for a startup.
Jared & Esteban don’t have a vast linkedin network either.
Although I do not discredit linkedin because that is probably a huge benefit of linkedin, just not for us at this point.
I agree! Hiring people is incredibly challenging, especially when you’re a small company, hiring someone to join a small team. Every hire seems so much more critical at that juncture. I just wanted to add my vote for Craigslist…I have tried lots of other job hiring services in the past, but 85% of the people who I’ve hired, I’ve found through Craigslist. The other 15% were from my personal network (people I knew or who knew someone I knew)
Thanks for the interesting analysis!
I’d also suggest looking for niche job boards. Krop almost counts since it is designers and developers, but the more specific, the better.
For example, if you were looking for a Django developer, you’d get a great response on http://djangogigs.com/
In the best case, niche job boards have a community of people who are qualified and engaged in that field - ideal candidates. They use the job board because the jobs posted to it are specific to their interests.
Employers who seek out the niche board instead of just using Monster or one of the big sites are also showing themselves to be more savvy and engaged with the community. That’s probably the place candidates want to work.
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I’m not sure all these metrics are important. Out of all those metrics, there’s only one that matters in the end — where you found the 1 person you hired. The other 99% are irrelevant unless you flipped a coin to make the decision.
Great post - this is the most detailed comparison of a startup job search that I’ve seen yet. It’s also sweet to get feedback on how Startuply, in particular, could do better for you in the future. We’ve definitely got some work to do, but thanks for giving it a shot!
Hopefully JobSyndicate will be in the comparison next time around, but that’s a conversation for another time.
Other than the time it took to filter and funnel, what about the overall hiring process could have been smoother? Were there any times where you said or thought “I wish I had something that could do THIS”? Any resources you wish you had access to?
@LukeG to be honest, we would love some way to import candidates from careerbuilder/monster/other sources. That way we could easily manage & sort ALL the candidates.
I haven’t really searched for this kind of service, but if it was put in front of me, I’d probably use it.