Several weeks ago, we announced that we were launching a dedicated job board and issued a request for proposals. The idea for a job board came out of a community survey where we learned the community is highly interested in such a service. After careful consideration, we’ve made our vendor selection, and are pleased to announce that Cheeky Monkey Media will build our new job board!

We met with several fantastic companies and it was difficult to narrow it down. But throughout the selection process, Cheeky Monkey Media impressed us with their professionalism, their knowledge of all things Drupal, and their willingness to be partners with us in the project. They presented us with great examples of previous work, and demonstrated attention to the needs of the project and enthusiasm for working on it, and expressed passion to build something that the entire community will use.

Drupal Job Board: What to Expect

After thoughtful consideration and feedback from key community members, we’ve determined it makes the most sense to implement the job board on the association.drupal.org site. We’ve also determined the best course is for this job board to replace the current job board function on groups.drupal.org and then sunset the job board function on groups.drupal.org. There are several reasons for this. 

The feature, set up by Moshe Weitzman in 2007 and maintained by various people since then has served its purpose. But over the last few years a number of people in the community have expressed that the current job boards on groups.drupal.org do not mesh with the social and collaborative purpose of the site. Groups.drupal.org lacks the ability for users who are disinterested in jobs to hide job postings when they browse the site. As a result, some users complain that unwanted job listings clutter up their view. 

Second, hosting the site on association.drupal.org will make it easier to retain users’ privacy once advanced features are introduced. If an enhanced job board were to live on groups.drupal.org, the webmasters would have access to very personal information about job seekers. The Drupal Association staff is bound by confidentiality, and limited staff will have access to the data.

Lastly, the job board will generate revenue to help fund maintenance and improvements to Drupal.org through its paid and subscription capabilities. The association.drupal.org site already has the ability to accept payment, so that is one less hurdle to overcome to launch a revenue generating job board. It’s important to note, for job seekers the service will be free, and each Drupal.org will be able to post one free job listing per year*. While more robust features and functionalities will act as incentives to subscribe to the paid model, we want to make sure that, like Drupal, anyone is able to use it. For more detail on the functionality, you can review the RFP here.

Transition Plan

Our transition plan is to launch the job board and let it run simultaneously with the groups.drupal.org job board for a while. We then will remove the ability to post jobs on groups.drupal.org, and replace the jobs listing with a static page explaining the transition. Lastly, we’ll add a note to all historic “job” nodes encouraging people to go to the new job board to find the right position for them. We think this plan allows for the smoothest transition for everyone involved, and we are open to suggestions and refinements from the community on how to make the changeover as smooth as possible.

We’re excited to get to work on the job board, but are also always open to comments and concerns from the community. We’d like to take this opportunity to start a discussion on the new job board, so please feel free to share your opinion or ask questions in the comments section.

Image courtesy of vissago on Flickr.

*Clarification: This blog stated that employers would have free job posting functionality on Drupal Jobs. In fact, each Drupal.org user will receive one free job posting per year.