Job-seekers have options with Open Source job boards

If you’re looking for a job working on an Open Source project, the number of places you can look has recently expanded. A handful of online job boards focused on Open Source have either opened for business recently or are launching soon.

A couple Open Source sites have long featured jobs as part of their package, including Linux Today and Linux.com (a sister site of NewsForge’s), and some of the big online job sites also include jobs with Open Source companies. The jobs sections of both Linux Today and Linux.com feature dozens of listings, making them the heavyweights in the market so far.

Lolix.org opens U.S. site

Challengers are plentiful, however. In early September, French Free Software job site Lolix.org announced it was launching a U.S. site. While the U.S. version has just a couple of listings so far, the company has a track record of many listings on its French site, open since January. “We’ll keep on with what made us grow in France — “free (job) posting, free resume posting,” said Lolix CEO Rodolphe Quiédeville in a press release. “For the moment everything is free, including all the value-added services we provide. We do not want to make people pay a predefined price for the service we offer, however they use it. That’s why we’ll try the ‘contribute’ system. If companies using our recruiting tool like it, they can contribute to our project.”

Mojolin launches

Also launching this month is Mojolin, which was MonsterLinux.com in its pre-launch stage, before Monster.com caught wind of the name. Done with the name hassle, Mojolin founder Dan Barber plans to keep the service free for job-seekers and job-posters.

“I started using Linux in 1995, when everything was free,” he says. “That’s changed a lot these days, and I kind of wanted to bring that back. I wanted to give back to the community in that way.” His goal is to support himself with the site. His plan for making money with the site is sponsorships.

A week after launch, Mojolin had more than 40 registered job-seekers and more than 100 registered companies. One job-seeker wrote: “I have to admit that this site of yours is doing a pretty good job. I have been bothered constantly about jobs since I posted. Some of them have looked REALLY interesting … I think this is a good and very valuable service.”

On the other side of the coin, many recruiters seem desperate to find good candidates, Barber says. “The recruiters absolutely love this; they’ve been sending me all kinds of kudos by email,” Barber adds. “Anything that does this kind of thing fills a need.”

HotLinuxJobs.com: Recruiting company

Taking a different approach is HotLinuxJobs.com, a recruiting company specializing in Linux that launched its Web site last spring. Founder Rob Jones agrees that companies are working hard to find candidates with good Linux experience.

“It’s hard — Linux candidates are scarce,” says Jones, who founded HotLinuxJobs as a division of his small technology business in Savannah, Ga. “We’re actively out recruiting every day. We have a couple of open invitations with some clients. They say, ‘If you get anyone who has these skills, we want to talk to them.’ “

In fact, Jones isn’t actively looking for clients at this point; he’s looking for candidates. “We’re trying to fill what we have and keep our clients happy,” he says. “We’ve got a nice little market, and we want to be the No. 1 provider of Linux people for companies.”

HotLinuxJobs, which is confidential to both clients and job-seekers, offers some of the same services as a traditional job board, including emails alerting you when the site has a job that matches your skills. “We’re trying to be as proactive as we can,” Jones says.

GNUJobs.com: Launching soon

Mark Nielsen, founder of GNUJobs.com plans to launch this fall, with a working site scheduled to be online Oct. 1.

Nielsen has worked with SalesJobs.com, and had the idea for the GNUJobs site after talking to people in the Open Source community. Nielsen found most large job boards “extremely annoying to find jobs at.”

He plans a largely customizable site and feature-laden, and his goal is to “make it so that a geek can appreciate the Web site.” He adds: “People will be about to just turn off all the crap and see what they want to see.”

Nielsen says he’s not worried about making money with the site; his other business interests keep food on the table. “If things happen the way I want them, then I’m not going to have to worry about numbers,” he says. “I just want to get it working the way people like it, and worry about the money issues later.”

Nielsen acknowledges there’s some competition out there, but in the Open Source spirit, he says he’s willing to work with other job sites. He also plans to Open Source his entire business plan at some point. “If [other sites] can do it better, I’ll move on to something else,” he says.