Per Joel Spolsky himself "We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked $70m in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The SaaS products (Stack Overflow for Teams and Enterprise) are growing at 200% a year."

Of that amount, the jobs product brings in close to 70% of the revenue.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...

I suspect your challenges with using jobs has to do with scale. It is competing with other companies that are spending a lot more, thus getting served up more in searches and thus generating more impressions.

Your comments about marketing though...yeah, that is daft. Swag costs next to nothing.