Time flies. It’s already 4 weeks since we relaunched XcodeJobs.com on February 1st. At this point it is reasonable to inspect some of our metrics to determine how it is going so far.
XcodeJobs had a running start on Twitter because at the time of the relaunch we had already 2914 Followers. The reason for that is obvious: Twitter was our only channel and we had 5 years to reach this number.
The number of followers grew like a rocket during the first two weeks and returned to the previous solid growth. On average we gained around 7 new followers per day and – at the time of this writing – arrived at 3140.
Twitter Analytics tells us that our 79 Tweets during this period gained 200,000 Tweet-Impressions. We have no idea how this number is calculated, but it indicates that quite a few people see what we post.
The new philosophy of XcodeJobs.com is that we want great job descriptions that users can browse and filter. We didn’t have time yet to implement geographic filtering, but this is definitely on our roadmap. Also, to allow filtering by remote and/or onsite jobs.
How much traffic can you expect for your job post?
To answer this question we turn to Google Analytics. The following chart shows page view versus unique page views.
The initial peaks were a result of us drumming up interest in the relaunch by any means we could think of. The first two weeks surpassed everything the website had ever seen before. The second full week saw 4549 page views of which 3248 were unique.
While it was clear to us that we couldn’t ever hope for traffic to remain at this high level we are still pleased to have an average traffic of around a thousand unique users per week now.
Our make-or-break target for this number is to achieve 10k in one of the next few months. We are cautiously optimistic about that, since we are already almost half way there.
The 11 Most-Viewed Jobs in February
It’s probably a good case study for anybody writing job postings to look at these jobs which had seen the most traffic in our first month.
Congratulations to the Winners!
- Senior iOS Engineer at ezhome (365 views)
- Senior iOS Developer at Twitch (331 views)
- iOS Swift Developer at Utiful (242 views)
- Intern iOS Framework Developer at Airbyte (202 views)
- Senior iOS Engineer at Tooploox (196 views)
- iOS Developer at Toptal (192 views)
- Senior iOS Developer at Shopgate (192 views)
- iOS Developer at UnifyID (183 views)
- iOS Developer at Eversport (123 views)
- Junior iOS Engineer for Mindnode (122 views)
- iOS Mobile Developer at Tractive (115 views)
XcodeJobs.com was responsible for 100-300 additional views of your job offerings. Chances is high that this resulted in several applications that these jobs would not have gotten otherwise.
A Word on Philosophy
We had gotten some negative feedback about a few jobs. Most controversial was the following paragraph which you could find on any company that is owned by Amazon.com, in this case by the Twitch job ad:
“I understand and agree that if I am employed, I will be employed on an at-will basis. As an at-will employee, I understand and agree that either Amazon or I can terminate our employment relationship, at any time for any reason, with or without advance notice and with or without cause.”
Such clauses don’t shed a good light on a company and we can understand why people would not want to apply for such jobs. Having said that, Twitch still made it to second place.
We also were on the fence about whether or not we would want recruiting agencies to post jobs without mentioning which company applicants would end up working for. But – for the time being – we decided in favor of recruiters to see what kind of feedback we would get about those jobs.
However, we cannot afford to judge the merit of job postings or a company’s employment philosophy. Not yet. At this time we are happy about each and every job that is posted.
Jobs E-Mail Digest Every Friday
Since not everybody is on Twitter, we also added the possibility to subscribe to a weekly digest of new jobs. You can do so right on the home page of XcodeJobs.com.
When we asked people on which day of the week they would like to get their weekly jobs digest the overwhelming majority voted for Friday afternoon. Most often the reason given was that – I am paraphrasing – people are fed up enough at the end of the week to be looking at new opportunities on Friday and the weekend.
Let’s look at some numbers there…
- Week 1: 116 subscribers, 64% opening rate, 21.1% clicked on jobs
- Week 2: 138 subscribers, 67.4% opening rate, 10.1% clicked on jobs
- Week 3: 163 subscribers, 78,4% opening rate, 27.8% clicked on jobs
- Week 4: 167 subscribers, 66.9% opening rate, 25.9% clicked on jobs
We are pleased with the very high opening rate, which tells us that the content really interests subscribers. The clicking rate is also remarkable.
The growth in e-mail subscriptions compares quite favourably with new Twitter followers: 5 new subscribers versus 7 new Twitter followers, daily average growth. We are still a long way off our milestone goal of 1000 subscribers.
Which do you prefer? Twitter, E-Mail or maybe an entirely different means of learning about new job postings?
Conclusions
The jury is still out whether or not XcodeJobs will be a runaway success. We have seen an great initial interest in the first 2 weeks and have seen it drop to ok average numbers after that.
We launched a minimum viable product a mere month ago and so far the metrics seem to suggest that there is indeed a market and need for what we want to offer. But we will have to give it a few more months before we can decide its fate.
Our plans to monetize the service depend on us being able to achieve several important growth milestones within reasonable time. Because, it would be hubris to be asking anybody for paying for ads if we cannot provide their money’s worth.
Also published on Medium.
Categories: Jobs
News flash: Negative feedback about the “at-will” clause is uninformed and unfounded. All employees of all companies in Silicon Valley (and all of California and many other states in the US) are automatically, by law, “at-will”. The company in question should perhaps even get some credit for making sure applicants are aware of this fact.