An ongoing theme throughout our start-up process has been the struggle to clearly articulate what we’re trying to do. We’re big believers in clarity, but Jobyssey has a lot of unique features that make it a challenge to spit out a phrase or two that leads to a lightbulb moment for the listener. Worse, people continually misunderstand and believe we’re a job board, or worse, a recruitment agency (this probably shouldn’t be a surprise since recruiters do spend quite a bit of time dissembling to get past gatekeepers). So, we try to explain that we’re a job and CV database, but that it’s our searching system that’s really unique, but also our attention to soft skills characteristics (especially for software jobs…), and that we have really high confidentiality standards, and no headhunters, and….suddenly everyone is nodding and smiling they way they do when Great Uncle Rufus starts in with the war stories again.

I feel like this is the critical challenge for us on the non-technical side of things, but unfortunately I haven’t had a lightbulb moment myself yet. Hopefully one day we’ll start explaining and see someone’s eyes light up right away, and we’ll know we’ve hit the nail on the head at last.