What is MinneJobs?
In the spring of 2018, I was working at When I Work, a scheduling and time tracking platform for hourly workers, and the company wanted to expand its product suite to become a workforce management tool used by micro and SMBs. This meant solving hiring and onboarding problems in addition to the scheduling and time tracking problems it was already solving.
We did a ton of research (talking to customers, looking at competitors, looking at analog companies, etc) and had honed in on this problem specifically:
As a business that hires hourly workers, its difficult to organize and track applications
Our hypothesis was that many of our micro and SMB customers were using a manual process to track applicants.
To de-risk this hypothesis, we decided to build a functional prototype with a goal to help one customer hire an applicant to prove that we could at least solve this once and it was worth investing more engineering time in it. Enter Minnejobs.
About Minnejobs.com
- Stood up a WordPress site to host the job description that our customer would send Indeed traffic to
- An applicant would fill out the embedded Wufoo form to apply
- Once an applicant applied, I would enter the information into a separate card on a shared Trello board and notify our customer
- Our customer would then move the applicant through the various stages until they were hired!
Paul Graham says do things that don’t scale to prove out new ideas. Minnejobs definitely did not scale.
Why was it awesome?
We ended up successfully helping our customer hire two candidates, which saved him a ton of time. This gave us the confidence to actually build it into the When I Work product suite, which we called Hire.
What challenges did we encounter and what did we learn?
Our customer was a small coffee shop in northern Minnesota. We ended up getting over 30 applicants over a short period of time, which was a lot of manual work on my part.
I was doing this on the side of my normal day job so there were several late nights to make sure the Trello board was updated so my customer was getting the latest stream of applicants.
This taught us a couple things that we ultimately built into the product:
- Even very small customers can get a ton of applicants so we had to make it easy to screen applicants out
- We made sure the applicant board was able to display 30+ applicants at once
- We ended up setting up automated emails to the applicant to let them know their application was received and what they can expect next in case our customers weren’t able to reply right away