It was remiss of us not to quickly follow up on a discussion back in early January over at Eirepreneur about the difficulties faced by both job seekers and start-ups in finding each other. The job-seekers have no easy way to identify which start-ups are looking for people whilst start-ups like ourselves find the cost of advertising nationally on a regular basis prohibitive.

Our comment to James was that we found the costs too high and the results to be mediocre in using both Monster.ie and The Irish Examiner. The cost of The Irish Times was unacceptable and we figure there is not much difference between Monster, IrishJobs and RecruitIreland apart from cost.

The reality is that the services offered by the online job sites are simply overkill for companies such as ourselves. All we want is somewhere to post basic job descriptions and receive CVs in return for a minimal fee.

James jumped on this and came up with a great solution:

Therefore I’ve created a new sub-node called Startup Jobs & Applicants under the Business & Economy -> Employment & Recruitment node of the Open Irish Directory. I hope this will serve double duty in providing a ‘reading list’ (dynamic OPML file) of bloggers who seek startup employment, along with a reading list of Irish startups seeking to fill positions.

I’ve also setup a QuickTopic message board to which any startup company can post positions. Those with blogs can alternatively filter postings to those blogs about new positions to an aggregate feed by Technorati tagging them OIDsjp. I’ll splice the QuickTopic and Technorati feeds together using a service like Feeddigest as soon as we’ve got a few in there.

And jobseekers can then subscribe to that feed or give a quick scan by browing the OID through Taskable.

This is really impressive. No need for over-priced over-featured services. The only drawback in the short term is building some momentum behind it so that more and more “seekers” and “offerers” know about it and use it. As soon as we go for our next bit of hiring, we’ll be making full use of it and shouting about it to the hill-tops!

If all of the detailed description lost you, here is a simplified summary:

Job posters from start-ups should either do the job ad as a blog entry and add the Technorati tag OIDsjp or do a simple manual posting to QuickTopic.

Job seekers should just subscribe to the following RSS feed: Startup Roles in Ireland

It would be great if as many bloggers as possible link over to Eirepreneur on this topic - particularly those connected to Third-Level Education and those running their own start-ups.

[tags]Jobs, Job-seekers, Employment, Cork, Eirepreneur, OPML, OIDsjp[/tags]