Relationship Between Blogging and Job Searches

I recently talked about how several high profile bloggers including Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, and Mark Cuban were making job offers via their blogs. This week, Michael Arrington introduced the CrunchBoard job site to help match the right people with the right companies leveraging the strong community of web 2.0-savvy readers of the TechCrunch blog.

Om Malik has a nice summary of why niche job boards like CrunchBoard work better than traditional sites:

CrunchBoard, 37Signals and PaidContent - they are all bringing attention to the fact that narrow niche sites work, and the job boards don’t seem to have the necessary impact or perhaps get the right kind of users. These three sites have very strong communities, and as a result their job boards work and will continue to work. These three boards should enjoy success, because the number of technology job listings in on an upswing. Indeed.com reports that there are 121 job listings per 1000 people in San Jose, and 74 job listings per 1000 in San Francisco. (GigaOM)

Like many people, I have been on both sides of this coin: job seeker and hiring manager. When looking for a job, the big online sites like Monster.com have so many positions that it can be hard to sift through everything to get past the scams and undesirable jobs to find something interesting. As a hiring manager, these big job boards tend to generate hundreds of worthless resumes from people who are not even remotely qualified for your position. I like the niche approach of sites like CrunchBoard to allow companies to find smart, qualified people more easily, and I will be curious to follow the progress of CrunchBoard and similar sites.