How the Open Compute Project Foundation Connected Job Seekers with Employers Who Shared a Unique Set of Values


 

“I was looking for a tool that would allow us to start a career center for our Community without having to build one from scratch. SmartJobBoard has helped us add value to our Community and create greater long-term loyalty.”
—Dirk Van Slyke, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
The Open Compute Project Foundation

Dirk’s Mission: Add Concrete Value to a High-Concept Community

Dirk Van Slyke is on a mission. He is the Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation. In this role, he has three big responsibilities:

  1. Add value to the Foundation’s members
  2. Extend the organization’s branding to new assets
  3. Further build its Community of technology workers and employers

This is no simple task. The OCP is a niche, value-driven Foundation. It seeks to bring open-source and open-collaboration software principles to the world of hardware.

At its heart, the OCP connects people who are interested in these concepts. It organizes and hosts events. It incubates new open-source hardware projects. It collects designs, ideas, and IP and shares them online with its Community.

It’s Dirk’s job to constantly think up new ways to grow this Community, further connect its members, and add concrete value to this highly conceptual ecosystem. And recently, he launched a new project that checked each of these boxes for OCP.

Here’s what he did.



Dirk’s Project: A New Job Board for Open-Source Infrastructure Pros

Dirk is a seasoned executive with decades of experience growing and marketing technology groups. When he looked at the OCP’s service offerings, he immediately spotted a big gap — and he knew that filling it would achieve all of the Foundation’s aims.

You see, the OCP was composed of technology professionals who worked at a wide range of companies and all shared similar work, skills, and values. These members were all potential employers, employees, and colleagues for each other. And yet, the OCP was doing nothing to directly connect its members from a professional angle.

Dirk realized he could fill this gap in the OCP’s service offerings by creating a dedicated career center for the Foundation and its members. Doing so would:

  • Add concrete value to the Foundation’s members by connecting job seekers and employers in the same field who shared the same values about their work.
  • Create a new marketing asset that would carry the OCP’s brand and extend it into new corners of the market.
  • Attract new technology workers and employers into the OCP ecosystem and grow the Foundation’s Community.

However, building a career center from scratch would be challenging.

Dirk would be the only one working on the project. He would need to do everything himself — from building the board to maintaining and growing it — all while juggling his many other responsibilities at the OCP and his other ventures.

To bring the OCP’s new career center to life, Dirk needed to find the right tool.

That’s when he found SmartJobBoard.

Finding the Right Tool: How Dirk Chose SmartJobBoard

Before he began his search for the right job board tool, Dirk sat down and defined a few key criteria his ideal tool must have. He decided he needed a tool that was:

  • Simple: The tool would need to be able to quickly build a fully-branded job board — even when used by a non-technical professional such as himself.
  • Scalable: The tool would need to grow to handle hundreds or thousands of users, and to extend its functionality as Dirk’s needs and ambitions grew.
  • Easy to Manage: The tool would need to be lightweight, and require little-to-no day-to-day maintenance and management to run smoothly.

While Dirk looked at a wide range of job board tools, he ultimately chose SmartJobBoard. He saw that:

  • SmartJobBoard is Simple: The tool was built to minimize learning curves and help non-technical people rapidly create new, branded boards from scratch.
  • SmartJobBoard is Scalable: The tool is robust and flexible — it offers a full feature set and easily handles hundreds of thousands of posts and resumes.
  • SmartJobBoard is Easy to Manage: Once set up, the tool gives self-service tools to employers and job seekers and essentially runs on autopilot.

Dirk signed up for SmartJobBoard and launched the tool.

Here’s what happened next.

Big Benefits: How Dirk Delivered Rapid ROI with SmartJobBoard

Dirk quickly learned the SmartJobBoard platform, and used it to create a dedicated job board for the OCP — https://ocpcareercenter.mysmartjobboard.com/.

He began to promote the project through social media and email blasts, and linked to the board on both the OCP’s website and within the Foundation’s communications.

And his work has paid off. By creating and promoting this board, Dirk and the OCP have:

  • Generated Rapid User Adoption: Within two months of launch, they populated the board with hundreds of relevant jobs.
  • Added Immediate Value to OCP’s Audience: The OCP filled a big gap in their service offering and helped its members find value-driven employment.
  • Increased this Audience’s Long-Term Loyalty: The OCP extended its activities deeper into its members’ lives and solved more of their problems.

By deploying SmartJobBoard, Dirk was able to give new and concrete value to OCP’s audience, and to bring the Foundation’s mission deeper into the real world.

The Road Ahead: Take the Next Step with SmartJobBoard

Dirk has big plans for OCP’s job board. Over the coming year he will continue to market the board to new audiences, use the board to extend OCP’s Community to college age students, and grow the Foundation’s new asset.

In sum: OCP’s job board has extended the Foundation’s reach and value within a short period of time and with minimal effort — and SmartJobBoard can help you generate these same big benefits for your own organization.

To see if SmartJobBoard is right for you, take the next step.