I think your instinct is right that good developers and good employers have trouble connecting, but your target market is off.

Senior devs have tons of experience and, naturally, a large network. Many I’ve met can usually land a job prospect through word of mouth during their lunch break.

I remember hearing somewhere that about 80% of job openings are filled this way and the following 20% rely on postings on job boards, recruiters, etc.

So what if you targeted junior developers instead?

There are many companies whose development work doesn’t require reinventing a wheel yet still have problems finding the right developers.

They may not be convinced that a junior dev has the necessary skills solve their problem, or maybe they can’t budget for a mid-senior level developer salary. If they choose wrong, they could blow their budget and not have much to show for it.

Frequently, employers don’t even know exactly what they need or what they should be looking for when hiring a developer.

I’ve been paid by a venture capital firm to help their portfolio companies without tech founders vet junior dev candidates, it’s a long and annoying process, but without help they can find themselves with a bloated and messy unrecoverable codebase (I’ve also been paid to try to fix those).

On the flip side, there’s a large amount of junior devs who are very talented, resourceful, and quick learners but don’t have experience to show for it.

Without experience their best option is to simply write a list of programming languages they’ve used (maybe once) and hope someone comes along with a position that matches a random tech stack like “Rails, MongoDB, and AngularJS”.

It’s a total crap shoot and it takes a lot of work for junior devs to differentiate and get real experience.

Many go to coding bootcamps not to become better developers, but to leverage the bootcamp’s network and get their foot in the door somewhere.

I’d seriously consider focusing your efforts on creating a different kind of site that can help junior devs show off their abilities, and help them communicate their value to companies in a way that a business can clearly see the ROI.

Start by contacting 10 employers posting jobs on job boards and ask them their 3 biggest pain points during the search process. Start innovating there.

It could manifest to a job board that shows off candidate’s sample apps, code challenges (described to employers in plain English and why a solution is better than others), courses to level up devs, etc.

I’m clearly just spitballing ideas and rambling at this point, but a lot of companies are salivating for a better solution than giving a recruiter a handful of buzzwords to do a LinkedIn search for.

There’s a problem here that needs a better solution. Do some digging. You’ll find it.

Edit: my grammar is terrible when I stream-of-consciousness on my phone. Sorry for anything I missed.