There's a lot of things that can be said about job boards, finding talent, finding companies... in my mind the salient point is that the job marketplace sucks. It sucks to find a job, it sucks to find good people to hire. And it affects real people in a very real way. The ability to work in job that you love is such a meaningful thing in life, and the inverse is just as true.

I'm not saying our new jobs site is the magic bullet, but it's an area of software development that we think is lacking, and there's a ton of things we'd like to build to help improve it. This is the first step.

It does. A lot.

The unfortunate thing is that all these add-on job board solutions don't really go any way towards fixing the problem.

With the greatest respect in the world; I don't see this being a lot different (though I would be overjoyed to be proven wrong! :)). Not for any other reason that it is not really GH's focus...

See; it would be really cool to see this integrated with GH proper. With payment mechanisms so you could write a spec, post an ad, get someone sign up, code the work and then collect the payment. That's the sort of job board you should do :)

For the "real world" there is a lot of work to do for programming jobs - most of the offerings work for big corps and mid/large startups. Smaller indie firms like the one I work for struggle to find good local talent and there is just no one catering for us. And that is a huge market (I know at least 10 firms with the same problem within about 5 miles of where I work - in a sleepy market town).

But that's more aiming towards freelance type work, while it seems like this is more of for people to find full-time jobs.

As for this being different, I don't think it is supposed to be. But I guess we will find out once it actually launches.

> I think this is a great idea, but, are Job Boards the new "thing" for "community-type" sites to implement?

Community sites implement job boards not because they're the hot new thing, but because they're trivial to implement and wildly profitable.

Thats actually what I meant. Not necessarily that job boards are the "Hot new thing", but that they are the "thing" that is easy to get rolling and always seem to attract listers.

To the people adding them, there isn't very many reasons not to add them.

So what kind of budget to companies put towards hiring? Are tech companies going to continue buying listings on every tiny job site for as much as $300+?

you'd be surprised how much companies spend to find employees. I think recruitment agencies take 10-20% of yearly salaries.

The bounty for employee referrals at the (mid-size but prominent) software company I work for is $4000 US.

If they can place these ads for 30 days on 10 of these little, influential sites, they're already ahead.

I Love this "thing" ..now as an employer i know where to go if i am looking for a rails fanboy/ open source enthusiast /mentors .