On Wednesday, my podcasting colleague Manton Reece and I launched a new site: Core Intuition Jobs.
I’ve been in the Cocoa business for a long time. I started to learn the frameworks at Apple in the early 2000s, and got more serious after leaving Apple and building up Red Sweater Software as a consulting business and then as a direct-sale software business. When I started looking for Cocoa jobs on my own around 2004, there was no go-to place to search, so I resorted to a series of Craigslist RSS feed searches, tuned to each of the major markets in the US where I anticipated jobs would show up. That was a real drag.
Ten years later, I am no longer in the market for jobs. But after all this time in the community, working as a developer, blogger, podcaster, and occasional speaker, I’ve gained enough of a reputation that other people ask me where to find the jobs. To make matters worse, employers also ask me where to find the talent. The terrible thing is after all these years the situation is not much different than it was in 2004. There are a heck of a lot more jobs, and there is a heck of a lot more talent, but neither knows how to efficiently find the other.
Core Intuition Jobs aims to solve this problem by becoming the go-to source for both employers and job-seekers in the Cocoa development market. Other sites like StackOverflow Careers take a stab at solving the problem, but they suffer from a problem in that they are too large, and serve too many different needs to be uniquely valuable to a niche market such as ours.
I was talking with my wife in the car today about the value of niche job listing sites, and she shared an insight that seems obvious in hindsight: job sites are like dating sites. Matchmakers. If you’re looking for a romantic partner, you’d like to think you’re choosing a service that is teeming with suitable partners, or at least happens by some circumstance or other to be used only by other people who have a higher than average chance of clicking with you. This explains the preponderance of specialized dating services such as Salon Personals (for “smart” people), JDate (for Jewish people), or Silver Singles (for “mature” people).
If you’re looking for a partner, the last thing you need is a single database of every unmatched person in the world. Questions of religion, sexuality, musical taste, politics, and affinity for long walks on the beach may help to narrow the overwhelmingly large field, but some of these categories are significant enough to people that they warrant organizing at a higher level.
Most employers who are seeking Cocoa developers, and most developers seeking Cocoa jobs, are frankly inflexible about one sticking point: the match must involve one Cocoa expert providing a Mac or iOS solution to one company. That’s it. Android, ASP.NET, Java, jQuery, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and so on need not apply.
Well, we launched Core Intuition Jobs on Wednesday and by my estimation it is already the go-to source for pairing Cocoa employers with Cocoa developers. Take a look and see the impressive list of companies with openings in North America, Australia, the UK, Germany, as well as a handful of “anywhere” listings. The calibre of the companies on the site is also staggeringly great. This is no run-of-the-mill list of Cocoa jobs, which is a good thing, because we have no run-of-the-mill audience of developers.
Apart from the number and quality of employers who have responded so quickly by listing positions, I’ve been thrilled by the response from developers who, regardless of whether they are actively seeking, see the jobs board as a gift from us to them. This is incredibly charming because we do see it as a gift, but we also see it as a business venture. We got tired of telling people, often friends, that we had no good advice for how to find or a fill a job.
At some point we took a step back and realized that we’re being asked from both sides, and with our unique position as the hosts of a popular developer-oriented podcast, we have the ability to fill this niche quite nicely. We can give the gift of connecting developers and employers who, up to now, have had no common meeting place to discover one another. In return, we expect to build the job board into a sustainable business that complements our indie software businesses and the podcast.
We are selling 30-day listings on the site at an introductory price of $100. After February 25 (Tuesday) the standard price of $200 goes into effect. Buoyed by the positive reaction over the first few days, we’re hard at work adding new features, particularly to facilitate better tracking of new listings by job-seekers, and considering options for employers who want to maintain a consistent presence on the board.
We’ve already made one improvement with the addition of an RSS feed, so you can keep on top of every new listing we add. We’ll also be building similar notifications into the @coreintjobs Twitter and ADN accounts.
It’s a big world out there, filled with many potential career partners. We’re doing our part to bring passionate Cocoa developers together with companies that are looking to shine on Mac and iOS. In 2014, there is finally a go-to source for Cocoa job listings, and Manton and I happen to run it.