Idea: A Modern Job Board

Not sure what to work on next? Need some inspiration? I’ll be posting these startup ideas on a regular basis. My hope is that they’ll help you in some way, but I can’t guarantee their viability or success. You should do your own customer discovery on them and validate a market exists. I could be way off base, but hopefully you’ll discover another problem to be solved in the process.

Job boards are boring, both for those that run them and those that browse them. Look at CareerBuilder, a company that is now 19 years old and still has a website that feels like it’s just as old. Or look at The Resumator, whose big cool features are basically just social link tracking and importing from the LinkedIn API.

And think about the problems of resume management (“fill out your job history in these text boxes and also upload your resume, which has all the same info!”) and searching for job seekers. It’s a full time job trying to get a full time job.

There is seemingly little innovation in the job board space. And there are some very low-hanging fruit to move the space forward. For instance, adding video to the submission form would give great insight into potential candidates. Or you could automatically generate portfolios of work by designers through integration with Dribbble. The same thing can be done for developers with GitHub integration.

A little out-of-the box thinking is all it takes. Look at what Discourse is doing for discussion boards. I think job boards could stand to be brought into this decade too.