You might have noticed over the last few Sundays I have been playing around a little with the hashtag #jukesiejobs over on Twitter and elsewhere.

Basically after all my recent experiences trying to recruit for ONS and the constant difficulty we have had in getting on eye-balls on the job ads* I have been wondering if there is anyway to make that a little easier. If it was possible to build a community of sorts around job hunters and connectors interested in specific kinds of roles in a certain type of organisation.

So what I’ve been trying to experiment with is following the whole ‘Lean Startup’ approach to getting a ‘minimal viable product’ going for a different kind of jobs listing page. One that is ‘curated’ by me and where I try and add a little context to the roles. The types of jobs I’ve been tracking have tended to be in the ‘product’ or ‘data’ categories I guess – product managers, user researchers, data journalists, data science – with a smattering of things I just find interesting around the edges. I’ve tried to avoid development or design roles so far – mainly because I’m not sure I’d be best placed to evalulate them.

The kind of organisations I’ve been trying to spotlight are in what I refer to as the ‘public service internet’ family. Digital government, civic tech, museums, libraries, education, charities, open source companies and the odd quirky start-up.

I have all sorts of ideas I’d like to try out if there is enough interest – things like getting other people to guest ‘curate’ a weekly jobs list, a Hacker News type feature to allow jobs to be voted up or down, links to Glass Door / Twitter / Github for each job listing, set it up as a tinyLetter email newsletter (which I think might work better) and quite a few more.

I’ve no idea at the moment if it is something that is going to get sufficient interest to make it worthwhile continuing with longer term but the plan is to keep experimenting throughout the summer – if nothing else it gives me something to do on a Sunday until the football is back on!
*I know this is just the first part of the problem – we also need better job descriptions & titles, more competitive salaries and a more compelling proposition about why chose to work with us over a start-up, agency or big corporate.