blogs with jobs

Blog: Problogger
Category: general
Alexa ranking: 2,461
Google Pagerank: 7/10
RSS: Yes
Cost: $50 per posting
Time: 30 days
Born: Aug., 2006

Introduction
ProBlogger, the brainchild of Darren Rowse, is a blog devoted to helping bloggers earn money. Rowse himself maintains more than a dozen blogs on various topics such as Digital Photography, the Athens Olympics, Camera Phones, Digital Photography, Spirituality, Pop Culture, and Life in Australia. In 2005 he helped launch www.b5media.com, a network of more than 150 blogs.

Pros
If you accept the premise that a Web site devoted to helping bloggers make money will be visited and revisited by bloggers worldwide, a job board devoted to helping bloggers find employment is a natural service for ProBlogger to provide. At $50 per posting for 30 days, the site is certainly affordable.

Cons
Before evaluating whether http://jobs.problogger.net/ is an effective site for recruiting bloggers, one must consider what a blogger is. Rowse himself defines a blogger as anyone who maintains a web journal in reverse chronological order. So, if you need to hire someone who maintains a web journal in reverse chronological order – without any concern as to what it is that they write about – this might be a site to consider. However, the fact that the site has only accumulated 25 listings over a two-month period would seem to indicate that a corporation looking to hire someone to write about, say Java, isn’t really interested in hiring someone who blogs about, say movies.

Summary
A blog devoted to bloggers is a winning idea, and listing job opportunities for bloggers is something to be commended. However, the notion of a job board that lists blog openings ever becoming a commercial success strikes this reviewer as far-fetched.

review by Michael Wilder, www.recruitsavvy.com

Blog: Joel on Software
Category: technology
Alexa ranking: 3,078
Google Pagerank: 7/10
RSS: Yes
Cost: $350 per posting
Time: 21 days
Born: Sept., 2006

Introduction
Joel Spolsky is the founder of Joelonsoftware.com. He’s also CEO of Fog Creek Software, the makers of FogBugz, but in a sense, that’s almost irrelevant here. All of the content on the site is strictly Joel’s and one gets the distinct impression that if he were to leave Fog Creek tomorrow, he’d continue publishing his rants…and hundreds of thousands of software developers would continue tuning in.

Pros
The job board lists a total of 87 positions broken into 6 categories. The vast majority (66) are for Programmer/Developers. The other categories are Test/QA (3); Management (6); System/ Network Administration (1); UI/Web Design (9); and Miscellaneous (2). An Internships/Coop category is in the works. Postings within each category are laid out in date order. The available positions are geographically diverse, including a handful of overseas postings. Advertisers range from small companies to the Fortune 500, including McGraw-Hill, Bank of America and Google.

One great feature of the site is a “no questions asked” satisfaction guarantee. Anyone can request a full refund within 90 days of posting a position.

Cons
At $350 a pop, Joel’s guarantee is probably something of a necessity. Also, while the postings are currently easy to navigate due to the relatively small number of listings, a more powerful search mechanism is already needed. The ability to search by keyword is an absolute necessity! Being able to search by company would also be nice. The one useful option of being able to search jobs within a zip code radius was momentarily helpful, but once I used it, I couldn’t navigate back to being able to see all the listings worldwide. A number of broken links were also detected in the job listings themselves (although that may not be Joel’s fault).

Summary
Joel’s been steadily building a loyal following for six years. He’s got the traffic. He’s got the credibility. If you want to reach his audience, it’s probably worth your while to pony up the $350. After all, your satisfaction is guaranteed. Let’s see Monster or Craig do that!

review by michael wilder