This past week, we launched our new Job Board. This is a place on CodePen where people can post jobs to find great developers.

Our New Job Board

1:10 We’re trying to have a successful business. To do that, you need to make money. One of the ways we make money is with subscription revenue (PRO accounts), and now we’re expanding into a job board.

2:30 Our job board are a natural extension of CodePen. CodePen is a great way for our users to show off awesome work and get hired because of it.

3:15 People have told us that they got their job because of CodePen. That’s a great feeling for us. That was part of the inspiration for our job board. We often look to Dribbble for inspiration, and they’ve done really well with their job board; it’s a major part of their business model.

A job board is a great way to monetize a business that is essentially a developer community.

4:55 Will this be a huge game changer for us? We’ll see. But we’ll be happy if even just a few jobs get posted a week. Even a few jobs per week will still be a great thing for our business. Our Team feature took awhile to build momentum, but it’s now clear that it was a good time investment.

6:34 It’s not we’re setting a low bar for success, it’s more that we run a pretty tight ship financially, and the income level we need to support CodePen is fairly low. We don’t spend a lot of money on offices or huge marketing campaigns. It’s really just three developer salaries and server costs.

Planning and Execution

7:30 We’ve been thinking about our job board for over a year. We talked about it back in episode 21, three months ago. Our job board is 100% home-brewed. We built it ourselves.

There are a lot of other job boards. They sustain a lot of businesses. We wanted to create something that was unique, and unique to CodePen. We didn’t just want to get a plugin, we wanted to create a job board that would be valuable to our users and for people looking to hire great developers.

11:20 We were able to reuse some of the back and front-end code, which saved us some development time. While we did create a new billing system for this, we used our previous experience with building a billing system as a blueprint.

12:14 We planned it out and figured out which features we wanted, then as we got into it actually writing the code, we figured out what we were going to keep, and what we were going to put on the back burner.

14:24 Most of the job postings are just links out to another company’s job posting page, but some of them are just markdown inside of CodePen. We wanted to lower the resistance for a recruiter posting a job.

15:14 Let’s say you’re a recruiter. Right now, there isn’t a good way to find CodePen users that would be a good fit for their job (it’s like a reverse job board). We’d like to make that a feature in the future sometime. We also wanted to include a job search by location, but we didn’t know if we would have the volume necessary for that feature for it to be valuable at lunch. These are features we could do, and if they prove to be useful in the future, we’ll probably build them into our version 2 release.

17:16 We were planning the launch even back when we were still planning features. We knew we’d have a soft launch (we didn’t make a big fuss about the launch so we could test it live before announcing to our whole user base). We do this for a lot of new features; we’ll take them live and spend time testing and bug fixing before we announce them publicly.

Tim even built a feature that let us check our billing system to make sure that the process went smoothly for someone purchasing a job posting.

Job Board Pricing

18:54 Pricing: a recurring job posting is $249. A standard job posting is $299 for 30 days.We charge this much because we have a niche job board, and good developers are hard to find and hire.

21:05 The type of developer that comes on CodePen tends to be very progressive about what they’re doing and learning.

CodePen users are high quality, so we wanted to attract high quality companies that know the value of a good developer.

We are offering a couple of up-sells. You can purchase a featured listing that has a more unique visual look. You can also purchase a mention on the Shoptalk Podcast. Again, we’re running a business, and trying to charge money for things that are valuable. Also, when you buy a job posting on CodePen, your posting will be cross-posted on the Shoptalk and CSS-Tricks job boards as well.

25:06 Other thing we offer to add value: you automatically get a PRO account when you purchase a job listing, so you can also use Collab mode (a PRO feature) to interview someone. What better way to interview a developer than to watch them solve some coding problems?

Making Some Noise (Launch Week)

27:04 So we did a soft launch, fixed a couple errors, and then announced it to our users. We wrote a blog post about why we decided to create it, we tweeted about it from the twitter account, and we recorded this podcast episode about it. We basically wanted to stretch the launch out and make it more effective.

30:08 It felt really good to release the job board. We’ve talked about it for a long time, and it was one of our big goals when we decided to go full time to work on CodePen.

Don’t forget to tell your recruiting office about CodePen Jobs! If you are looking for some help with your business, try it out for yourself! It’s the perfect way to find great talent.

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