Think Global Act Local - Perl jobs

On one hand some companies have hard time finding good Perl developer, on the other hand some Perl community members complain that they can't find good jobs. I don't think there is an easy and quick solution to this but at least the situation can be slightly improved with a little work.

For example I heard that there are hardly any Perl jobs in Berlin, Germany posted on jobs.perl.org.

Part of the reason is that companies don't know about that resource.

We can - together - improve the situation by educating the companies. It would be impossible for one person to do that. If for nothing else because of the language barrier. OTOH it would be very little work if it was done by many Perl Mongers. People who speak the local language. German in the above case.

Spend 5 minutes a day looking for Perl jobs in the local resources (local job posting web sites). Find a contact person within the company. (e.g. ask around on the local Perl Monger list or look for employees of that company on LinkedIn (or Xing in case of Germany). Send a polite e-mail (or message via LinkedIn) to the person in charge. Explain that while you personally are not currently looking for that job, but you as a Perl Monger would like to help. Point them to jobs.perl.org, the central web site where Perl jobs are posted.

You can even offer to distribute their job offer (or a link to their jobs.perl.org posting) to the local Perl Monger list, if the list policy allows it.

The companies get some free promotion for their job offers. The local Perl Mongers and the people who read jobs.perl.org will see more job offers. That's what they call win-win.

I think we can safely assume that jobs.perl.org is known and used by people in the Perl community a lot more than by people who happen to use Perl but don't care much about it. The local Perl Monger lists are even more community centric. So your help will have a bias toward fellow Perl Mongers.

It won't have a dramatic and quick change but if you do this persistently for a few months we will see an increase in job posts.

You can even create a country specific version of jobs.perl.org by using a small Javascript snippet or you can use and integrate the rss feed directly.

Start today!