The world has opened up, location may no longer be the barrier to getting that dream job BUT something has stayed the same

looking for a job sucks

From the top

👋, My name is Adri Herdman (in the middle in the pic above and Truc, my wife ❤️, to the right of me), I’ve been in talent acquisition for 15+ years, always obsessed with improving, tweakin', learning and challenging the status quo. My business partner Chris Haslam (left above), the more technical of the two of us, is cut from the same cloth so we're a great team 💪. Together we started the talent consultancy,  ‘MOVE’, in 2017’ to help fast growing businesses recruit well at scale. We've helped soo many companies now, mainly startups, to set up, optimise and run their hiring functions 🚀.

🛑 The Problem / Le Problème / El Problema / Das Problem / Il Problema 🛑

Having helped countless startups procure the best (and avoid the worst) hiring tools and job boards, we've had the opportunity to try out a load of belters, as well as a fair share of duds. 

We gleaned the following from those years at the coalface

➡️For candidates the experience was generally:

• Location centric jobs
• Lack of representation of non-majority groups at companies
• Cumbersome sign ups making candidates jump through hoops
• Generic job specs that were largely ignored

➡️For businesses the experience was generally:

• Lack of diversity in the pipeline
• A fractured market - too much choice, not enough knowledge about it
• Market places as a front for old school recruitment services 
• CTOs often become a startups’ most expensive recruiter

‍

JSJ is a Curated global job board for makers

🎉 Our Solution 🎉

The problem on both sides of the fence, and often the elephant in the room when speaking with Founders and CEOs is their diversity issues, namely the lack of any.

The lack of diversity in tech has often been framed as a pipeline issue, not enough people coming in at the top to make any meaningful change. People from underrepresented backgrounds not choosing STEM subjects, according to one of many recent studies 12% of STEM students in the US are from underrepresented groups of women. This will knock onto the issues for a lot of companies and their lack of diversity. If people are not going into careers in programming, data, or design then solving the issues here will surely make a meaningful and visible impact on the face of companies.

With COVID bringing to the fore the inequalities in our society and with the Black Lives Matter movement keeping the focus rightly on this issue, we felt compelled to start being part of the solution in a meaningful, ‘sh*t or get off the pot’ way.

In our search for a cause to support, we thought to ourselves:

• What do we want to achieve?
• What's important to us? 
• What do we believe in and are passionate about? 
• What would have a realtime impact that we can see?

Partnerships

Our agenda became, 'let's try and nip this pipeline issue excuse in the bud'. With all data pointing toward issues the lack of accessibility to STEM education for underrepresented groups we wanted to find a cause thats mission is to solve this globally.

Step in the awesome Katherine Codlin, Head of Partnerships, at Raspberry Pi Foundation who pointed us to:

‍The CoderDojo movement believes that an understanding of programming languages is increasingly important in the modern world, that it’s both better and easier to learn these skills early, and that nobody should be denied the opportunity to do so. With this partnership, we hope, in our limited capacity, and by financial support, to shift the needle away from privilege in an industry that should be doing better.

It's too early to say what we'll be contributing to CoderDojo but we guarantee to donate money for each post that is created to this great cause. More on this by Oct 2020.

So, what is JSJ?

Short answer, for now, JSJ is a global jobs board for makers. We have 3 principles in mind; 

1. Speed 💨
2. Simplicity 😎
3. Be an agent for good 👏🏽

We’ve looked to combine these first two elements into the following features: 

• No gated sign up, unless you want more curation.
• Employers to provide mini Employer Value Propositions and client videos to convey the essence of roles  ‘the who, what, and why should I give a sh*t?’ of a role, so talent can make informed decisions quickly. 
• Move away from lengthy shopping list job specs.
• Apply on companies sites, not through ours where possible.
• Defining ‘startups’ as companies 'where your work makes an impact on the company'
  

JSJ is global so there are roles in awesome startups doing special things all over the world. We want to shout about these. As we develop, we’ll be looking to evolve the service and we can only do this by aggressively seeking feedback

As we kick off, you can list your jobs for free until October 2020.

Post your jobs here and to be part of the solution, you can reach us on hey@juststartupjobs.com

Let's shift the needle!!!