I don’t know who started it first, but now every top blogger is thinking (some are acting already) about providing a job board. I first noticed it when Joel Spolsky did it. In his case, it was only natural – highly focused “blog” like his is read by thousands of developers who pride themselves of being, well, better than the average. Presumably, on a job board where his readers would apply, there will be much higher percentage of good candidates than elsewhere. To balance things, Joel imposed some rules on the job providers too, effectively cutting out the middle man (hiring agencies), trying to make the whole experience good for both sides.

It appears that he, at least financially, succeeded. Based on the numbers for just the first week, the job board earned $40K (the numbers are smaller as the novelty wore off and amount to less than $10K now). That’s a lot of money for something that an intern hacked up with Joel over a few weeks, part time. Naturally, it’s not the site’s technical merits that attract job seekers and providers to Joel’s site but his reputation (and by extension “reputation” of his readership), something he has built up over the years.

Before Joel, I knew of one other company that did this, but in their case it made even more sense – 37signals, the authors of the Ruby On Rails framework, have a job board for RoR jobs – even more targeted than Joel.

The last one I encountered just a few days ago is Guy Kawasaki’s job board. Guy is a cool guy but not a developer – you could say that he is a marketer. His blog is a lot younger, but he worked fiercely to capture as much readership as possible  and appears to have succeeded. His logic is the same - come to my site, my readers demographics are here, my readers are entrepreneurial… He does charge a lot less than Joel though and won’t make a lot of money IMHO. But it may end up paying rent, or something like that, which is not bad at all.

For me these are one of the few completely legitimate business moves enabled by the Web. There’s no hype here and the boards provide a real value, the business model is sound and clean.

If only I had tens of thousands of readers…