Shutting Down My Job Board for Software Engineering Positions After 2.5 Years

I started The Pragmatic Engineer Job Board in October 2021. 2.5 years later, I am shutting it down permanently, despite a reasonable success in traction. The shutdown was triggered by my vendor – Pallet – discontinuing their job board and talent collective approach. However, I might have eventually come to the same decision myself, even without Pallet making this call.

In this post, I outline what led here; the results of the job board (and talent collective), and what I learned about the tech jobs market.

Context

My initial motivation with the job board was to add a kind of "helpful monetization" to both my blog, and The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter (a few months after I started this newsletter). In the blog – and at the end of all free newsletter issues – jobs posted by customers of the job board were shown. Like this:

These featured jobs were posted by companies I pre-vetted

I accepted posts that scored at least 9/12 on The Pragmatic Engineer Test – which is a measurement I put together, aiming to put a number against how "modern" a company's engineering culture is.

Companies paid $500/month for a job posting or $750/month for two, featured job postings. On top of the ability to post jobs, they had access to The Pragmatic Engineer Talent Collective. This "collective" is something that my job board vendor, Pallet, innovated, and it was an instant hit both for companies hiring and for candidates looking for jobs.

The Talent Collective

Pallet started out as a job board. However, early 2022, the startup innovated with the concept of a "talent collective." The idea was this:

"Creators" have large audiences of professionals in a field. (E.g. a YouTuber doing design videos has designers watching, or a software engineer like me writing on software engineering has developers reading)
These "creators" would vet people looking for jobs
And they would also vet companies looking to hire. Companies can then message these vetted candidates!
... creating a place that is kind of like LinkedIn: except it has higher signal-to-noise. Companies get more frequent responses, and candidates get higher-quality inbound requests!

The core insight Pallet had was how people trust "creators" – and how these "creators" already have engaged audiences. This is what it looked like, from the outside:

And this is what it looked like, for companies signed up for the collective, from the inside:

The interface for companies hiring, from inside Pallet's platform

I was personally reviewing every candidate application: and for the ones that I approved, I added a note on why this profile is interesting or standout – often adding details that I assumed some recruiters could miss (such as open source contributions, mentoring outside of work, or interesting and relevant extracurricular activities that I found encouraging to see.)

I spent about 2-3 hours per week vetting inbound candidates. Over time, a friend started to help out with pre-vetting: they spent about 3-4 hours per week vetting, and I spent another ~1 hour per week going through candidates and tweaking comments.

Tech job boards are a dying breed

A few months after launching my job board, Stack Overflow Jobs – the most well-known software engineering jobs board – announced shutting down, with the effective date of 30 March 2022. As I analyzed this event in The Pragmatic Engineer:

Every hiring manager I talked with told me how Stack Overflow Jobs has been the place where job ads got good candidates. As I shared in November 2021, Stack Overflow is retiring this product, and the last day of operation will be 30 March 2022.

I asked Stack Overflow why the product is being shut down and had a long conversation with someone working on the product. The explanation was that this product doesn't make sense and Stack Overflow doesn't see a future in job boards. The nature of job boards is very transactional, and while job boards have been around forever, it's not a product that a VC-funded company can scale the way they want.

Closing this job board begs the question: where can you advertise positions, so that people see it and apply?

The reality is that there's no replacement for this job board. Hiring managers are having decent success with the likes of LinkedIn, AngelList and other, smaller job boards. There's even a site called Stack Overflow Job Alternatives which is a collection of dozens of smaller job boards.

At the time, I saw good traction with my job board just starting out, so I was surprised that Stack Overflow sees no real future in job boards?

Two years later, I now "get" why Stack Overflow shut down its jobs products. It was the same reason Pallet pivoted into Talent Collectives. Job boards are an "ok" small business to run on the side... but it's a very transactional product:

CompanyX has trouble getting enough qualified candidates: they tried referrals, and reaching out to possibly interested candidates on sites like LinkedIn. This usually means it's for a senior+ engineer position.
They post a job ad on a job board.
They get a large influx of inbound applications: most of them low quality, and create a lot more work for the company!
With some luck, the company will find a "hidden gem" candidate across the many unqualified applicants. Success!
Success means they stop advertising. They will come back with an even more challenging position for next time – if they even do!

My job board had an (initial) advantage of lots of qualified candidates applying. My job board was not a standalone board: but it was interesting tech jobs listed at the bottom of my blog and newsletter. As such, companies initially received lots of qualified candidates. The feedback I received was how my job board was far better in quality responses than when the same companies posted on sites like LinkedIn.

Still, the majority of companies working with me never posted a single job! They went for the Talent Collective instead and contacted vetted, senior+ engineers there instead. About 80% of my customers were like this.

I asked a couple of them: why this approach? The responses were typically:

Job listings attract too many unqualified candidates that is more work to go through than it's worth
They already have a job ad on their site: and they advertised it. They are unhappy with the results, and want to source directly
They get to qualified candidates a lot faster using the talent collective

From my perspective, I liked this setup. Companies stayed customers longer, as they were interested in having access to the "latest drops" in the talent collective. (A "drop" was a new batch of people admitted to this group, which I did every 2-3 weeks). It created a reason for them to be recurring customers, while receiving regular value. Did Pallet really crack the "what comes after job boards," after all? It looked like it, but only for a short while.

Pallet discontinues Talent Collectives (and Job Boards)

A few weeks ago, Pallet sent me a nice message in which they explained that after much internal deliberation, they have made the tough call to shut down talent collectives and job boards. Instead Pallet will focus on their contingency recruiting business, which has been much more promising, business-wise.

At first, I was surprised by this message. But as I reflected on it, I had to admit: I kind of saw this coming. Pallet is a VC-funded company that raised about $3.8M in seed funding. The company's mission is to "Allow businesses to tap into and hire the talent that hangs out natively in these internet [creator] communities."

Pallet's business model was simple: charge a 10% "cut" from the money that creators charged for companies hiring (or using the talent collective). Pallet later added an option to charge more for companies where they sourced the tech company, and the tech company decided to "tap into" a creator's Pallet.

This 10% cut-rate was a big reason I signed up for Pallet. It seemed like a reasonable price to charge for the infrastructure Pallet built. It's also the same take rate that Substack, my newsletter platform charges. So, for a company signing up for a $750/month package, I made $675, and Pallet made $75.

I observed two troubling trends, though.

#1: "Creators" stopped running their Pallet job boards and talent collectives. In early 2022, YouTubers and newsletter writers started to run their Pallet boards by the dozens. As I look back now, about 90% of the people I remembered having a Pallet stopped maintaining it and using it about a year ago.

The truth is: running a job board/talent collective involved recurring, nontrivial amount of work:

Sourcing companies who hire. Although my newsletter is one of the most-read software engineering ones (with more than 3M monthly impressions), I still "only" got about 3-4 inbound companies in most months. I can only assume that a newsletter or YouTuber with 1M views per month might have thus gotten one, or less!
Going through the talent collective, vetting companies candidates. This took about 3-6 hours per week, between myself and a friend.

#2: Interest in job boards/talent collectives declined, even as traffic displaying these offerings increased. Here are statistics on traffic that ended up on my job board (when people clicked through from my newsletters and blog): and how traffic across my newsletter and blog changed over the same time:

The number of visitors for the Job Board / Talent Collective; the newsletter; and the blog. Traffic to the newsletter increased; the blog stayed flat; but for the job board, it decreased

In what is surprising: despite my newsletter generating significantly more traffic (up from ~1M impressions per month to closer to 2.5M per month), and many of these impressions displaying job ads (at the bottom of free emails): the interest in the job board and talent collective decreased.

There was a similar trend in companies paying to access the talent collective and job board. This peaked in 2022, and it has been a slow, but steady decline all the way until now.

The "very best" applicants no longer applied to my talent collective

In late 2022 and early 2023, I had trouble believing the quantity and quality of candidates applying to the job board. These included:

Engineering directors at Big Tech with 20+ years of experience, with very impressive projects worked on.
Principal engineers at Big Tech with 25+ years of experience (several of them with 10+ years tenure, some with industry-wide-known projects shipped)
Multi-time founding engineers, with a track record of raising venture capital
Extremely motivated engineers with 10+ years of experience, based in the Bay Area, NYC, London and other tech hubs

The surprising part was that all of the above folks likely had an already strong network, and yet they were willing to give this talent collective a go. The reason? This was the period of "The Great Tech Layoffs" when:

Meta fired about a quarter of their staff in 6 months
Google, Amazon and Microsoft all laid experienced folks off
It was hard to find any venture-funded, late-stage scaleup that had not done at least 10% layoffs

This period passed – luckily for the industry, I'll add! Thankfully, we've not seen such a layoff streak since. At the same time, there are much fewer of the above profiles applying to the collective. And, to be fair: why would they do so?

The only reason these people did it in the first place was because they were just let go in mass cuts. In more "sane" times like today, these caliber people are happily employed. The way to get talking with them is through referrals, or sending cold LinkedIn messages, and hope that it catches them at the right time.

Looking ahead: AI spam makes job boards even more useless

I was lucky enough to run my job board before automated AI applications went mainstream. However, this is starting to happen already. Here's one of the many such startups offering to submit 150 automated applications per day for $99/month:

For candidates frustrated of not hearing back from job applications: it's a no-brainer to invest in such tools. Many will. For companies listing jobs on job boards: they will se a significant increase in noisy, and AI-generated applications.

Just as predictable is the response: with an increase in inbound applications, why not use AI to get through these much faster? There are also several such startups:

One of the several startups responding to a spike in inbound applications... also using AI! This one is called "Applicant AI"

As an aside, this dynamic is amusing:

AI-automated job applications increase inbound job ad applications by ~10x
AI-assisted tooling aims to partially automate screening of said applications, reducing time by 10x
... and we could see AI tools parsing the output of other AI tools!

This future sounds surreal, but we will surely see some of it! Should it happen, we can expect a form of "in-person screening" to return. Ironic, no?

All things point to the same: more demand for specialist job search firms and for direct sourcing

So far, what I've observed in the last 1.5 years of operating my job board and talent collective:

Companies are willing to pay more for the "talent collective" model much more than to post jobs
Interest from candidates is down from the early 2023 peak – despite traffic on my newsletter significantly up
The "very best" candiates no longer apply to my collective: most likely, because they do not have to!

Where does this leave a company that wants to hire standout senior+ software engineers, or engineering leaders? Two viable options:

Go direct, and source these folks on LinkedIn. A LinkedIn Recruiter seat costs $8,000+/month: but when you're serious about hiring, it gets superior results to what my $750/month talent collective did.
Hire a specialist tech search firm that you pay based on successful hires. This fee is usually 20-30% of the new hires's annual salary. While this might sound a lot: it can still be cheaper than just paying for 6 month's of LinkedIn's Recruiter package!

This is exactly what Pallet has pivoted to.

I've worked pretty closely with the team at Pallet, and they are a nimble team, aiming to predict where the market is headed: and they move there, before anyone else does. This is how they pivoted to "talent collectives," and they are now pivoted to being a standout search firm.

Goodbye, job boards and talent collectives

I now get it, why Pallet is retiring their platform and offering. If I was running Pallet, I would do the same. The tech industry is a fast-changing one: what works today might not work as well tomorrow. We are seeing this with job boards – and I predict that AI tools will quickly reduce the usefulness of this recruiting tool.

I expect the changes coming to result in these dynamics play out for the tech sector:

Somewhat increase the value of LinkedIn recruiter seats – as long as LinkedIn can put robust filters in-place to verify that an account is a human, and not AI generated. No wonder LinkedIn is rolling out verification of profiles – it will soon become table stakes for the platform to have these!
Significantly increase the demand for specialist search firms. Companies that sidestep the whole "AI-spam" problem by directly talking with experienced folks, and ones who have figured out how to contact these people outside of platforms like LinkedIn. Companies only pay on a successful hire, and do not have to deal with the increasingly noisy nature of
Could increase the demand for in-house recruiters. With more applications coming in (although more noisy ones) and the "best" candidates being the ones you need to contact, we could see more demand for in-house recruiters. Given that recruiters were laid off in large numbers in 2022-2023, this could be a welcome reversal: and plenty of great recruiters are, most likely, on the market, available to hire.

I've decided that my energy is better spent on other projects, And so I am not looking to relaunch my job board or the talent collective.

Looking back, the amount of time I spent with the job board and talent collective already felt too much. If I'm honest with myself: it was a distraction away from researching and writing The Pragmatic Engineer. And while doing deepdives into company engineering cultures, or uncovering interesting tech industry trends fill up my bucket: "rejecting" companies or candidates for the job board/talent collective; doing customer support for companies on the job board (such as doing full refunds whenever a company did not get a qualified candidate in a month): these were all draining it. If I'm honest with myself: I should have retired the job board/talent collective earlier than I've done so. And so, in a strange way, I'm grateful that Pallet made this decision for me and helped me re-evaluate where I really want to spend my time.

For everyone who has applied to the talent collective: I will ensure that your data is removed from Pallet's system, as my talent collective closes down. If you would like to get in touch with Pallet – to be considered for positions in their network – you can opt-in here.

For all the companies who trusted me to help with your hiring: thank you! Pallet has a different model, going forward. Try it out if you find it interesting (I have no affiliation with the company, beyond having been a happy customer for their previous product). Otherwise, I suggest experimenting with other job boards, or with solutions like LinkedIn, Gem, and others.

Statistics

In closing, here are statistics Pallet offered the job board and talent collective:

30 months and 13,000 job applications, 2,800 candidates in the collective, 3,600 intro requests from companies, and 1,300 of these accepted (turned into a conversation)

I hope you found this reflection useful!

Other, similar topics:

As a note: the job board and talent collective will shut down on 27 April 2024. After this, no job ads will be shown in the free issues of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. I offered to extend job ads for currently advertising companies on the blog for another month: these will be active in this blog until 27 May 2024.

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