In 2012, when I had been working full time in iOS development for 2 years, I used to frequently see tweets about companies looking for Apple developers. This is why I established the @XcodeJobs twitter account because I felt it would make most sense to retweet those job offers with a dedicated channel.
My thinking was that if you were looking for your next iOS gig you would just follow this channel and – once you found it – you could simply unfollow it. At the same time I wouldn’t spam people who are not looking for a job with these job offers.
The second philosophy behind this Twitter account was to filter out spam tweets by recruiters and other job platforms. All job postings were usually by either a company’s official twitter account or by somebody working for this company. I felt that this would make these requests more personable.
Feeling Like a Valuable Individual
For a while I even worked on a side project that would help me find iOS postings via the Twitter search feature, while removing these spam tweets by hiding tweets with Linked In, Bullhorn Reach, Jobvite and many more, particularly those from head hunters. My philosophy was to discarded everything where you would feel like you are within a mass of people inserted into a giant job website funnel.
And believe you me! There are literally dozens of websites competing for traffic and eyeballs. I wouldn’t ever want to directly compete with companies that make their money off companies backs who are desperately seeking to fill iOS and Mac development positions. Especially because my own best skill is to develop software for Apple platforms.
You should always do what you love and I love code: back then Objective-C, today mostly Swift. This is the main reason why you wouldn’t see anything exciting going on at XcodeJobs, the Twitter account and much less so on XcodeJobs.com. I didn’t have the time to keep publicizing this free service.
My thinking regarding the website was that you would usually link to a job description on your own company website for the details. For companies that didn’t have such a careers page, you could go to the Xcode Jobs website (then a WordPress blog) and post your job description there. Then a tweet would link to this new post as well.
A few companies posted something on there, but the website soon fell into oblivion.
Over the past 5 years the followers of this Twitter account grew to almost 3000. I began to retweet postings not of companies offering jobs, but also of people looking for work, mostly freelancers looking for opportunities to work on in the comfort of their own homes. I would retweet almost everything, except some spammy messages, where @xcodejobs was at-mentioned.
Once More With Feeling
After these several years of sleeping beauty-like slumber, I was ready to do something about it. My iOS development work caused me to meet and work with Lukas and Stefan who are now my partners in the new Xcode Jobs venture. Lukas is a great backend developer. Stefan is both great with design as well as marketing. And myself, I have a worldwide audience of developers on Apple platforms and a feeling that this is and can be a worthwhile service to offer.
For the past several months we have been secretly working on relaunching the XcodeJobs service. The website will now be the central place for companies to post their jobs and links to these jobs will then be tweeted and otherwise publicized. If you are looking for a job, you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter which aggregates the prior week’s job postings.
To keep things fresh and the website from turning stale we are going to take postings off after 30 days. And we have some more ideas how we can allow you to better filter jobs based on your interests or by geographic location. Or whether telecommuting (“remote ok?”) is acceptable. But before we start working on such enhancements we wanted to launch a minimum viable product to see if there is actually a market for it.
Initially it will be a free service, but we reserve the right to start charging a moderate fee for postings in a couple of months, provided that it takes off. We will personally check and approve each job posting. This fee might also serve to keep the quality of postings high and valuable of your time.
Call to Action
So, if you are looking for your next project or fixed staff position, head over to XcodeJobs.com and subscribe to the e-mail newsletter. If you use Twitter, then you should follow @xcodejobs.
If you are working for a company that is searching for developers on Apple platforms, then you should post your positions/projects on XcodeJobs. There is a simple questionnaire to fill out. A small price to pay for qualified applications as compared to what a head hunter would charge (typically 1-3 monthly salaries).
The underlying philosophy of XcodeJobs remains the same:
Helping Apple Enthusiasts do what they love, for fabulous companies, since 2012.
This new version that we launch today puts a new tool into your hands for this express purpose.
Also published on Medium.
Categories: Jobs
