In partnership with
Insideletter
Hi 👋🏻
Most successful businesspeople have invested in, or have a stake in, a talent pool platform.
Sahil Bloom has Landed, and he also launched The Bloomboard in 2021, a curated job board hosted on Substack.
Gergely Orosz, Lenny Rachitsky, and Packy McCormick all have their own job boards or are connected to talent platforms.
So, you can do the same, and I’ll show you how as well.
A Reverse Job Board (also known as a talent collective or talent database) completely flips the traditional hiring model upside down.
Instead of companies posting open jobs and waiting for candidates to apply, candidates post their profiles, and companies pay to browse and pitch them.
How it works
Let’s say you have a newsletter about HR, and your readers are aspiring HR professionals. You can create a reverse job board where they add their profiles, and your newsletter becomes the bridge between job seekers and companies looking to hire.
How to do it
Opt-In: You can add a link in your newsletter footer: ‘Looking for a new role? Join our private talent collective.’
Profile Creation: Candidates fill out a structured form detailing their experience, tech stack, desired salary, and whether they want their profile to be public or completely anonymous (to protect them from their current boss).
Paywall: Then you can pitch companies looking to hire your specific audience: ‘Stop spending months on LinkedIn. Pay £400/month to access our vetted database of 200 senior product designers.’
Match: Recruiters log in, filter by criteria, and click a button to request a ‘warm introduction’ to the candidate.
Why is it a massive newsletter monetisation hack
Passive talent goldmine: The best candidates are usually already employed and won’t browse traditional job boards. However, they will join an anonymous reverse job board to see what offers they can attract passively.
High recurring revenue (MRR): Instead of selling a single ad slot one week and starting from scratch the next, you charge companies a monthly SaaS-style fee to maintain access to your talent pool.
Corporate hiring budgets: Recruitment budgets are vastly larger than standard newsletter marketing budgets. It is much easier to secure spending from an HR department facing a significant hiring shortage.
Did you like it?
I came up with an idea that very few people like you are doing, so you should consider trying it.
Hope it was helpful! Thanks for reading! See you soon!
Anirban ‘Helping you with another monetisation hack’ Das
