I started my #jukesiejobs side project 10 years ago this weekend with a thread on Twitter (or it might have been next weekend – I am not 100% sure and I have long since deleted my Twitter account) of vacancies I had spotted with a couple of roles I was trying to fill myself at ONS hidden amongst them – like hiding meds for dogs in cheese.

I did the Twitter thread for a few weeks and then moved to Medium on the 12th July. In these early days I tried to provide a narrative of why I thought the role was interesting and occasionally links to supporting blogposts etc to support why I thought these might be good places to work. There were fewer interesting roles back then and – as is still the case – public service jobs struggled to get eyeballs and salaries were less attractive so you had to work hard to attract good candidates.

The switch from #jukesiejobs to the Internet of Public Service Jobs was inspired by a talk I was working on at the time, though the phrase kind of became uncoupled from the talk and I couldn’t shake it.

I continued with a weekly (ish) post on Medium with no real consistent format and a small but dedicated audience until October 2017 when I decided to join the Republic of Newsletters (there are two kinds of people – Podcasters and Newsletter-ers!) and moved things to Tinyletter where I settled on the current meta-data-y format in August 2017 (a couple of attempts to return to a more narrative approach were met with disgust from subscribers!).

Things stayed pretty consistent for a few years – even during the dark lockdown days. The only change was I started regularly linking to both my own blogposts/weeknotes and other things I had been reading. Subscribers numbers slowly grew week on week – from a 100 or so at launch of the newsletter to 2069 at the end of 2023 when I had to leave Tinyletter when after years of neglect by Mailchimp it finally closed down.

Moving to Ghost has been pretty successful – albeit it is expensive. The migration was smooth, the editing interface is lovely and the analytics are really interesting after years of the very minimum with Tinyletter. The open rate has remained consistent at about 65% for years with 14% clickrate on links and as of today there are 2339 active subscribers (Tinyletter was carrying a lot of defunct emails it turned out).

A few attempts to sell sponsorship or encourage tips to cover the costs a little have had mixed results. People were initially interested in buying ads but it turned out nobody clicked them! So I wasn’t comfortable with that. A few folks were generous with tips – but I feel like it is the same folks time and again which doesn’t seem fair. 

The job descriptions are better than they were a decade ago but it has been slow going and things still are not great, jobs boards/pages remain regularly dreadful, there are still too many job ads without salaries and those salaries have stagnated. 

All attempts to automate some of my process have failed and the demise of Twitter almost brought the whole thing crashing down. Though the Civil Service Jobs Beta might do that instead.

Since it became a newsletter I have sent 417 emails – I guess the goal now is to try and reach 500?

My one regret though? I should have stuck with calling it #jukesiejobs – if it was good enough for Craig!