In August 2006 I realized that I was regularly getting two types of email requests:
- Companies looking to hire bloggers
- Bloggers looking to be hired by companies
As a result I decided to start a Job Board for Bloggers.
The concept was simple. Those looking to hire bloggers could place an ad for 30 days for $50. Those looking to find a blog job could subscribe to the job board RSS feed to be notified of new jobs.
It has been 34 months since I launched the job boards. In that time we’ve seen 720 paid listings for jobs on the board.
As I was doing some analysis of the job listings over this period I realized that the data might be interesting to others also as an indicator of how the current economic climate has impacted the job hiring scene.
While I wouldn’t read too much into the data as the sample size is relatively small I found the following chart interesting.
A few notes on the chart:
- the first month (Aug 06) was a partial month – we launched the job boards late that month
- the last month (May 09) is an estimate. We’re on track for 31 listings this month.
- the line is a moving average based upon the last 4 months/quarter of listings
A few observations:
- there are some definite cyclical trends to be observed – the most notable is that December has been a low month in each of the three years. November has also been a low month and October has been the highest month in each of the three years.
- looking at the moving average – the end of 2008 and start of 2009 saw a definite dip in job listings. Interestingly there’s been a definite upswing over the last 3 months with a new job being added each day.
- I don’t have a chart to show it but the RSS subscriber numbers for the job board are on the rise. The growth in those numbers has been quite steadily on the increase since the job board has been launched.
Again – I wouldn’t read too much into these figures due to the size of the sample and the natural growth of the site as it has become more well known but I do at least take a little comfort from the fact that there does seem to be hiring going on in the blogging industry despite what’s happening in the wider economy.
