Ed. Note: Drupal Jobs is available at https://jobs.drupal.org
As of 2014, it is the goal of the Drupal Association to grow Drupal from 3% to 10% of the web – and that cannot be done without all hands on deck.
One of the biggest challenges in growing the scope of the Drupal project is the challenge of matching Drupal talent to the right job opportunities.
On the one hand, plenty of employers want to hire Drupal developers, but say they aren’t able to find enough people who are the right fit in terms of skillset and experience: We hear it regularly from our organization members and partners, we hear it from recruiters, and we hear it from DrupalCon sponsors and exhibitors. In fact, at every DrupalCon, talent recruitment and retention is one of the most sought-after topics at Drupal business events.
On the other hand, we also hear from job seekers that finding the right opportunities can be a challenge, because employers may not offer the desired flexibility in terms of salary, ability to work remotely, or dedicated time to contribute to the project.
We want to help.
At Drupal.org we’re partnering with Cheeky Monkey Media to build a job board that will provide a great experience for job seekers, hiring companies, and recruiters alike. By matching up the right people with the right jobs, we plan to make things easier for businesses hiring Drupal experts, thereby helping our community of talented developers find jobs that will help build satisfying careers.
What’s Wrong With the Current Model?
The Drupal community offers a number of job boards run by various volunteers, but often postings for job applicants are intermingled with community conversation or social posts. So though there are a variety of sites, services, and social networks trying to match employers and recruiters with talent, they often serve a very broad audience or are very project-focused rather than career-oriented. Applicants lack a single, cohesive, Drupal-focused employment center, and employers confront a variety of possibly fruitless sources to find talent.
At the moment, the groups.drupal.org job board is functioning as the community’s main job listing aggregator. Set up in 2007, and maintained by various individuals since then, it has served its purpose well, but for various reasons it is no longer an ideal solution.
First, groups.drupal.org is fundamentally a social, collaborative environment; job boards are, by their very nature, the opposite of social or collaborative. There are many community members who believe it should be moved. With jobs cluttering up groups’ local pages the job search and candidate search experiences on groups.drupal.org are not equipped to help grow Drupal at the rate that is needed.
Additionally, groups.drupal.org is not set up with the kind of privacy controls needed for a job board, where job seekers can set up profiles, alerts, and other advanced features. If an enhanced job board were to live on groups.drupal.org, the webmasters would have access to very personal information from job seekers. With a job board residing on association.drupal.org, access will be limited to a small group of staff members and customer service representatives, all of whom are already bound by confidentiality.
What Will the Job Board Do?
At the Drupal Association, we’ve heard about all these problems from the community in various forums (surveys, issue queues, online comments) and, after careful research, we’ve decided to build a dedicated job board to be hosted on association.drupal.org. Our goals are to:
- ease the process of matching the right talent to the right opportunity;
- help companies and new hires be more productive by lessening the stress of finding a job and finding new talent;
- help solve the problems the community is currently facing with the groups.drupal.org job board and the variety of other options.
A dedicated job board will provide a single solution for hiring companies and job seekers alike, consolidating the separate experiences into one cohesive, standardized job board.
The job board will provide advanced features like dedicated portals for job seekers, employers, and recruiters. All three audiences will also have access to free functionality, though for employers and recruiters, premium features will be available via a paid model. The revenue generated from the job board will fund Drupal.org improvements – which will help the community be the best it can be. This will have the cyclical effect of increasing the knowledge and prowess of developers and job candidates. Commerce functionality is already enabled on association.drupal.org, so that will remove one hurdle to launching a revenue-generating job board.
A dedicated job board on association.drupal.org also will help remove a lot of uncertainty from the application process. Instead of sending resumes out into the vacuum of massive job boards to companies that may or may not understand what they’re looking for, job seekers will more easily be able to connect with companies that are focused on Drupal and know what to expect – and open positions will be filled by real Drupal experts who know their stuff.
It’s Going to Be Great
We’re looking forward to implementing the job board on the Drupal Association website and will have a transition plan to sunset the old groups.drupal.org job listing functionality. We firmly believe that everyone will benefit: job candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, and even the greater Drupal community. Job listings will be located in a dedicated area, away from unrelated content. And companies, recruiters, and job seekers looking to connect with each other will be able to better match up skills, expertise, and needs on the job board – letting everyone get to work on what matters most as soon as possible.