I've rebuilt Brave Clojure Jobs to make it effortless to advertise Clojure jobs. If you're hiring, I want you to be able to get a job listing in front of interested devs in less time than it takes you to sing Queen's We Are the Champions. Watch how easy it is to sign up and post a listing:
Here's what's new:
- It’s now freemium. You can post as many listings as you want without giving a credit card number. Charging per listing is nice for the job board's owner (me!), but I don't think it's the best model if the job board is to be as useful as possible. The most useful job board would include every available opening, so I've tried to remove barriers to that goal. At the same time, I do want to make money with this endeavor; I'll describe the paid benefits below.
- You can import listings. If you manage listings with Greenhouse, Workable, and similar services you can just paste a listing's URL to import it.
- You can duplicate listings. You can now create new listings from existing listings. The theme here is: make it super easy to create listings!
- Copy/paste preserves formatting. If you copy a listing you've created elsewhere and paste it in Brave Clojure Jobs, it will preserve the formatting, automatically converting it to markdown. I hope you'll find that this kind of attention to detail makes using Brave Clojure Jobs a great experience :D
- Companies are first-class. You can now create a company profile. Your profile page will include links to all your listings, and it will appear in the site's company directory.
- I've filled out your company profile for you. I have been creating profiles for dozens of companies looking for Clojure developers. Be on the lookout for a link from me which will allow you to easily create a Brave Clojure Jobs user account associated with your company. The video shows how this works. I really want to make it easy for you to connect with a large audience of Clojure developers.
If you go through the process of "sign up with pre-filled company profile then import listing" you could have a listing published in a minute or less.
Removing barriers to posting listings results in more listings. This makes Brave Clojure Jobs more valuable to developers, growing the site's audience, which in turn makes it more valuable to companies. It's a virtuous cycle. (Side note: I'm really patting myself on the back for using the term "virtuous cycle.")
I also want to help show that companies are hiring Clojure developers, now more than ever. In this way, I hope the site benefits the Clojure community as a whole by correcting the perception that not many places hire Clojure devs. I still see people ask, "Can I get paid to write Clojure?" It's a valid concern for anyone considering learning the language; it's a large time investment and people naturally want it to pay off. I want to show that the payoff is real.
Indeed, I've seen a considerable uptick in Clojure job postings in 2021. More and more companies want to hire people to write Clojure because they know doing so brings tangible benefits. This site will be the well-designed proof.
So, a secondary goal of this rewrite is to create a marketing tool for the community: I want something we can point to to show that if you learn Clojure won't just become a better programmer, you'll also gain access to expanded career opportunities. This will help grow the community, which in turn will help us continue taking over the programming world making the language an even more viable choice.
There are many more changes – the UI is leagues better, there's better integration with Stripe so you can manage payments without having to contact me, etc. etc. etc. The main point is that I want the site help us all as much as a job board possibly can. My hope is that this massive upgrade will be good for companies, good for developers, and good for the entire Clojure community.
Sponsorship benefits
There are three sponsorship levels available to companies: $75/month, $150/month, and $250/month. Paying for a sponsorship gives you greater exposure: paying companies are listed on the home page as "sponsors", and their listings are highlighted and placed higher. Sponsor companies will also have their jobs tweeted and sent to the Brave Clojure Jobs mailing list.
Over time I want to continue increasing sponsors' reach by placing listings in more channels. For example, on the public product roadmap, one of the first items is "post bi-weekly job roundup to reddit.", and it's just one idea for how I want to provide value.
Another idea is to include badges or some kind of flair for subscribing companies to help your company stand out. For example, I want to create a "conference sponsor" badge. Conference sponsors deserve public recognition, and I think highlighting such contributions is valuable for job seekers, as it's more appealing to work for companies that we know are giving back to the community.
If you have ideas for what you'd like included in a paid subscription, please let me know! You can reach me by email, daniel@braveclojure.com. You can also upvote items on the product roadmap if they strike your fancy.
The takeaway here is that there are currently some sponsor benefits focused on increasing your listings' reach, and there are some in the works.
Supporting Brave Clojure Jobs
At the same time, I have to be honest that I'm uncertain about the ROI for sponsoring. I believe that the benefits will provide real value, but right now I don't have the data to create a precision sales pitch for just how much better you'll do if your company becomes a sponsor.
Ultimately, I wanted to rebuild the site because I value generosity. Engaging with others from a spirit of generosity just feels better to me. I wanted to invest the effort to make improvements and switch to a freemium model because I believe it will help everybody. That is rewarding to me.
Still, switching to freemium feels a little risky: I may end up making less than before. You never know, right? But I want to try to contribute more to a community that has been so good to me. I think I've accomplished that. I also want to keep improving the site, and paid sponsorships help me do that.
My goal is to reach $2,000 a month in sponsorships. That level of support would would be huge for me, and it would make it viable for me to continue investing my time in the site, something I'm excited to do. If you believe that this is a worthwhile endeavor and that it will help everybody in the long run, including you and your company, then I hope your company will become a sponsor.
Thank you early sponsors!
In the seven weeks since I quietly re-launched the site on August 1st, six companies have already become sponsors! This is incredible to me, and I am very grateful to them:
Job Seekers
My aspiration for this site is that it will make it easier for you to find a Clojure job / gig / contract / bounty by gathering every opportunity in one place. The job board currently boasts more than double the number of listings the previous version ever displayed, and I only expect this to increase.
What other changes would be useful to you? Please feel free to email me at daniel@braveclojure.com to share your ideas!
A Personal Note
I believe that work should be as enjoyable as possible. Part of what makes work enjoyable is using expertly crafted tools, and that's why I continue to appreciate Clojure. Nearly a decade in I still love it, and I feel extremely lucky that I get paid to build stuff with it. I hope this site makes it possible for more people to do the same.
– Daniel Higginbotham