How Crypto Careers Survived a Google Wipeout — and What Every Job Board Can Learn

Introduction

Building a job board is hard. Building one in a niche like crypto? Even harder. Now try surviving a Google Jobs wipeout and bouncing back stronger.

In this episode of the JBoard Interview Series, we sat down with Alexander Chukovski, founder of Crypto Careers and long-time consultant to some of the biggest job boards out there.

From early SEO experiments gone wrong, to building powerful scraping and enrichment tools, to smart monetization beyond job posts — this is a goldmine of lessons for anyone growing (or rebuilding) a job board.

Watch the Full Interview

5 Key Takeaways for Job Board Builders

1.Don’t rely on Google Jobs traffic — build a long-tail moat

Alexander’s job board was wiped off Google Jobs for months. The lesson? Diversify traffic. He now focuses heavily on long-tail SEO — creating job category and search pages based on how actual job seekers search (e.g., “Remote Solidity Developer Jobs”).

“Most job boards don’t slice and dice their content enough. That’s where the opportunity is.”

2.Placements can make 10x more than job posts

Crypto Careers made 10x more money from placements than job postings — with far fewer clients. They pre-vetted candidates, submitted them to clients, and charged fixed fees.

“If you’re in a niche, consider spinning up a recruiting or staffing arm — it works.”

3.Scraping + job enrichment = massive competitive edge

Alexander built an internal scraping operation that pulled job data from crypto company career pages, enriched it with structured metadata, and funneled it into smart job classifications.

“The more metadata you have, the better your SEO. That’s been the foundation of my business.”

4.AI is a powerful tool — and a serious risk

From job classification to content generation, AI is part of his daily stack. But AI-generated applications are becoming a major problem — especially for job boards hosting apply flows.

“If your platform facilitates apply buttons, AI-generated spam is coming for you.”

5.Start with SaaS, not custom builds

Alexander’s top advice? Don’t build your own job board from scratch just to validate the idea. Use SaaS to move fast, validate quickly, and avoid the SEO pitfalls of amateur dev work.

“Don’t waste 100 hours building it. Spend $200/month, validate, then scale.”

Full Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:01)

Alexander, thank you so much for joining me today.

Alexander (00:04)

Thanks for having me.

Martyn Redstone (00:06)

Absolute pleasure. Absolute pleasure. So let's jump straight into it and let's talk about your professional background and how you came to to starting and founding Crypto Careers.

Alexander (00:20)

So yeah, it's an interesting question because I was never originally planning to go in online recruiting, to be honest. I studied finance. And my dream back when I was young was to work in Goldman Sachs or one of the other investment banks. Thank God that didn't happen. But I landed up in a startup in Germany that was something like The Leathers in the US, so like a paid job board.

And then I got introduced to the whole job board environment in industry. And then in 2019, I left my job. I started a crypto job board called Crypto Careers, which was kind of one of the biggest hype cycles of crypto. It's that time when Bitcoin went to 20,000 for the first time.

Back then, were not a lot of players on the market. So I said, okay, let's just do it. And it was a fun project. I got to learn a lot. The job board is still operational. It gets about 500,000 visitors a year combined with the other property we have, because we have crypto careers and then we have WebTree jobs, because WebTree came in as a term and then it's really hard to rank with crypto careers for WebTree.

So we had to set up a second domain. I think now we have about 200,000 applications recorded since the start of the job board. But in a world of AI applies, applications don't matter anymore. So that's the high level story.

Martyn Redstone (02:08)

No, that's great. Thank you so much. And so you've been running crypto careers for what, five years now, coming up to six years, is that right?

Alexander (02:17)

Yeah, pretty much getting into the sixth year. Yeah, lots of experiments. We tried all kinds of stuff.

Martyn Redstone (02:24)

And I I love the thought of kind of, you know, trying lots of different experiments. What stands out as some of the kind of more successful or even unsuccessful experiments that you've played around with?

Alexander (02:38)

So successful for sure is placements. We dived into placements in 2022 and 2023. We actually managed to make over, I think, 12 placements. basically, we did the candidate pre-vetting on CryptoCareers and then submitted the profiles to customers. And that was a very good...

Number, very good experience for us. Of course, 95 % of these companies being encrypted now don't exist. And the industry changed significantly after I would say the crash of 2023. So we stopped doing placements as a business and we just do now job postings, more or less like the classical model and wait for the market to rebound and then we'll start doing the placements again. So I was like,

I think that made probably 10 times the money than what we did with job postings because placement fees are significantly higher. And I think that's a huge opportunity for job board owners, especially if you're in a niche and you want to go into recruiting. We didn't came up with this idea, right? There are quite a lot of examples in the industry where people have a job board and then they operate a recruiting arm on top of it or a staffing arm.

Yeah. So I was a good one. That was a good one.

Martyn Redstone (04:04)

Yeah, and.

Yeah, and just to clarify, the monetization around placements is usually a percentage of the annual salary when you put somebody into a job.

Alexander (04:17)

Yeah, exactly.

And we had very fixed levels. So to make it simpler, was just like fixed fee for an engineer and fixed fee for non-engineer. And that was it.

Martyn Redstone (04:30)

Yeah, yeah. And clients like simplicity rather than working out percentages and all those kind of things. So I totally get that. And so what are some of the experiments that you've run that didn't work but were great learning opportunities?

Alexander (04:37)

Absolutely.

I mean, I guess all the experiments that we did on SEO early on, which were a bit risky. So we'll talk about it later, but I do consulting for job boards and SEO is one of my kind of strategy, like consulting area. And of course I have to try a lot of things that I consult. So some of the risky things I try on my own job boards or some of the other brands that are not public, you have to keep these things non-public because, know,

There are funny ways of Google figuring out what you do and then tying it all back to all of your other properties. We learned this during the AI content explosion of 2024. So I would say I experimented a lot with what kind of strategies work on getting more traffic from Google jobs.

Martyn Redstone (05:28)

Yeah.

Alexander (05:42)

Not going to lie, there were some times where we were completely wiped out of Google jobs. So for months, we would not get any traffic because Google didn't like what we write. I learned to not do these experiments anymore on these sites. So I'm a bit more careful now. But yeah, that was pretty cool stuff, I would say.

Martyn Redstone (05:52)

Mmm.

Cool, so I'm quite interested in understanding. You mentioned it a few times around driving traffic and getting traffic from Google jobs and what have you. One of the things that I was thinking about before this was that you started crypto careers back in 2019 when we kind of started to see a surge of interest in crypto and like you said, Web3 and what have you.

But obviously now we've gone through so many hype cycles with that that there must be dozens, if not hundreds of job boards that are niche in that area. How do you maintain and retain, you know, kind of being the top niche job board in that space? How do you deal with competition?

Alexander (06:44)

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not in the top because to be honest, was never a goal. You have to invest a lot more time if you want to own the first pages on the SERP. My investment was mostly optimizing Google jobs and finding long tail content and getting traffic from there.

And we still have a very extensive scraping operation that runs in the background that is capable of finding new career pages of crypto companies, kind of preventing them. is a real crypto company or not. It's just someone looking to hire a blockchain developer for something. So that was kind of our, I would say, differentiation strategy early on. Later on when I got that.

more into SEO and I understood how the whole search volume on job seekers models. And then we actually started targeting more long tail keywords. And of course our competitors are also doing that, but they don't go that much into the long tail. They go more into content. So they write blog posts, which is not a bad strategy. It's just a different strategy. And that's how we kind of always get to stay in this top three.

position. We said that there are probably hundreds of or thousands of job boards. That's true. So with every cycle, you get 10, 20, 30 new competitors and the end of the cycle, they die, more or less. So the only crypto job boards that are still around are the same ones that started with us back in 2019, 2018. And they're still online. So that's kind of where the market is. And again, crypto hiring is not

that crazy anymore because it's like this really weird cycle right now. So the competition of new job boards coming into the scene is virtually non-existent, right?

Martyn Redstone (08:51)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, interesting, fantastic, thank you. And you mentioned things like different strategies around SEO and Google jobs. You were referring to this long tail piece. Do you mind kind of focusing down on what you mean by long tail and how you take advantage of that?

Alexander (09:26)

Yeah, so job seekers usually, so as a job board, right, there are two ways to get traffic organically. So you can write blog articles and then hopefully these visitors will then use your job search and land on jobs. So that's one way to do it. In this section, which I briefly call content, you also have all programmatic pages that you might create something like salary reports or

best employers to work in, because it's static content. for me, it's the same category. Doesn't matter if you do it programmatically or with AI or just write the articles. And then there are two categories, or Google jobs and then search pages. So search pages are basically the main driver of organic traffic for job boards if they are set up properly. And the idea behind it is very simple.

You have to map the search volume of job seekers, so how people search for jobs. And you have to bring them to your pages. So essentially, just to quote someone from LinkedIn, Ken, who also writes a little bit about Google jobs, pretty cool guy. I've got the family name, but ping me later. We can share his profile on LinkedIn.

So he says as a job board, know, your responsibility is to slice and dice your content in the best possible way so that people can find it. So in the most simple example, if I have a job, is called Solidity Developer, and I have a job called Blockchain Developer, can I put those two jobs under engineering? Sure, I can, but you know, the amount of people that search for engineering jobs on Google is very high, but also the competition is very high.

So like Indeed is on the first spot. LinkedIn is on the second spot. don't know, like CareerBuilder is on the third spot or Talent.Com or any of the other large vendors, ZipRecruiter. So it's really hard to compete with these guys for these generic keyword terms. But what I can do is I can create blockchain developer jobs, so I can create like Solidity developer jobs, and then I can go into like...

remote solidity developer jobs, and so on and so on. However, that's not a strategy that you can just multiply A by B. There has to be some kind of strategy behind it. You have to actually look what people search for. And this also changes. Then you have, once you take your term, it can expand into all kinds of directions, because you have employment type.

You have locations, have remote type, you have contract types, right? You have like shifts. If we go outside of the whole crypto world, right? If you go into nursing, there's a lot of search volume related to shifts. So it all comes down to understanding how job seekers in your niche search. That's the key ingredient. So if you understand how this works, then you're like already 50 %

more successful than the majority of the job board operators out there.

Martyn Redstone (12:44)

Interesting, really interesting. And this takes us really quite nicely into the other world that you live in, is consulting for job boards. Be interesting to understand, first of all, what services you offer to other job boards, but also some of the interesting work that you've done over the past however many months and years, in

the kind of more current times. So tell me a little bit more about your consulting work.

Alexander (13:20)

All right, so I have to make

sure that it doesn't sound like a bitch, right? Because people get get bored. So let's throw in some knowledge pieces here and there. Originally, the way I decided to build my business was around building

job classification technology. So as a job board owner, you know, the problem of, Hey, I get a million jobs from my feet, which was actually relevant for me, right. And the ones that are relevant for me, how can I decide that this is a blockchain developer or a solidity developer? I'm sure you can do a lot by the job title, but actually the majority of the information is in job description.

Martyn Redstone (14:02)

Mm-hmm.

Alexander (14:03)

And early in my career in this German job board, had the opportunity to work in 2014. What I'm kind of pretty much sure that it's just like the first ever machine learning implementation for job classification that actually went in a production environment. So we had a machine learning algorithm that was able to take a job description, right? And then first decide, Hey, is this a white collar job?

Uh, because this was the niche that we were operating called the white core jobs. So is the white core job or is it non white core? And then if it's a white core, which one of the 600 industries are best fitting for this job? What is the, uh, career level out of fate to different career levels? What is the job function? Right? Is it sales is marketing, is it IT? Uh, and what is the location? And I manage a team of about a hundred people that did this.

manually, curating these jobs. And by the end of the project, would say that the team was about maybe 20 people left. And they were mostly working on either managing the whole infrastructure behind it or fine tuning the models, helping fine tune the models. And then I said, OK, you know what? There has to be a huge demand on the market. And this is how I kind of started building my business.

So this is still a segment of what my company does. We do, on the one hand, job scraping, then we do the whole enrichment and declassification for you. So we built the data pipeline for your jobs, a job data pipeline. And I'm pretty sure that no one else is doing this on the market because it's very specific and very niche thing. And somewhere along the way,

Martyn Redstone (15:55)

Yeah.

Alexander (15:58)

because I worked on projects as a freelancer. I had the opportunity to work alongside Alex Murphy, who comes from beyond. had a couple of job boards. He's now the CEO and founder of JobSync, where I also had the opportunity to work for a while. And he had a job board called EmployeeZone, which I don't think it exists anymore, but EmployeeZone was pulling about, I'd say a million unique visitors per month. And it was only from Organic, only SEO.

And yeah, I kind of started learning, started reverse engineering what others do. And at some point I made this connection. know, the more metadata I have on the job, the better I can actually structure my site and build kind of my SEO around it. And then the SEO consulting and the Google jobs optimization kind of naturally started, started happening and people started reaching out. And I guess that's like the second part of the business.

But if you merge everything together, I help job boards, HR tech companies or aggregators in kind of either automating some parts of their job processing, candidate matching, anything that happens along this value chain, or I help them with the SEO or I just help them build the job boards from scratch.

Martyn Redstone (17:19)

Mm-hmm.

Alexander (17:25)

This kind of became quite popular in the past two years, know, staffing agencies wants to build, want to build job boards. All job boards want to migrate to a new technology because their SEO suffered. B2C vendors decided to expand into building job boards. Like you and I read on LinkedIn all the time, resi, build a job board, right? For example, this resume writings. Yeah.

few, TOHQ has a job board. It absolutely makes sense for them because it's an acquisition channel, right? So they acquire users organically and then they monetize them with their B2C products. It absolutely makes sense. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (17:57)

Yes.

Interesting.

And I was going to ask you about trends that you're seeing as well in the industry. So, you know, are you seeing that happening more and more where B2C tools? Yeah, I mean, I know, you know, kind of TIL and Resy, are you seeing that more and more where B2C are looking at, you know, user acquisition strategies specifically around job boards? Is that a trend that you're seeing more and more now?

Alexander (18:32)

Yeah, absolutely. So the one hand of these B2C apply tools, let's just use this term, Just apply tools. They have discovered that paid traffic acquisition through display or social media

only scales up to a certain point, because you're also competing with Indeed on Google, essentially, on Google Display. So Indeed can pay some pre-intentioned CPCs that you cannot compete with, most likely. So organic is for them kind of a natural direction to go into, I would say. And for stuffing,

Martyn Redstone (18:58)

Mm-hmm.

sure.

Alexander (19:19)

right for them, it did became too expensive to get traffic, right? So why do you have to pay so much to a job board or an aggregator when you can actually invest this money and build your own job board if you have like a good brand behind it. So I'll say it's definitely a trend and it's not necessarily a bad one. The only thing that people need to consider is that ranking a job board today became a lot harder than it was.

maybe like two years ago, I would say.

Martyn Redstone (19:52)

Yeah, yeah, I get that. get that totally. And so obviously, your vast experience across the industry, and also your experience in building your own job board, but also the consulting piece was really interesting. So I wanted to really focus in on a subject that you and I are both very, very passionate about, which is AI, artificial intelligence. You know, we've seen this

explosion of interest in artificial intelligence across the industry. But for somebody that's been working in that field for, like you said, building that first kind of machine learning categorization piece, know, 11, 12 years ago, it'd be interesting to understand from your perspective, you know, with the kind of new wave of generative AI, and also, you know, the AI in general, how

What is the impact on running a job board when it comes to AI? Both from a positive and negative perspective, what are we seeing out there? As a job board owner, founder, builder, what's the impact of AI on a job board?

Alexander (21:10)

I guess positive for sure enables a lot of automation on manual tasks. And you and I were literally talking about one of these in the green room before the recording. So scraping and enriching jobs is something where AI can be very helpful.

My whole business is built around the notion that with AI you can structure data from jobs. And that has been the foundation of it. So that's very positive. would say on an SEO layer, quite a lot of opportunities around doing programmatic SEO or doing some not so nice things to your competitors if you want to grab their...

strategies, it's a lot easier to do it today. So that's definitely on the positive side. On the negative side, we have to talk about like AI applies at some point in time. Because if you are a job board, right? And it's not, this doesn't apply to everyone because if you are just redirecting applicants to the third party, you have

You don't have a lot of control over the quality, right? So you acquire traffic, you do your best to acquire job seekers, then you send them further to to the ATS. And that's not your responsibility, but if you are the one that actually hosts the application, or if you are someone who has a integration to ATS where you host the application form for your clients, you could

you know, become a target of AI applications. And they would use that to allow their customers, the job seekers to submit applications with very low effort in very high scale. And applications are problematic because they are perfectly tailored to job description. So they will pass the majority of filters on an ATS today as they're still keyword based. So if I have all the keywords from the job description, right.

There's nothing stopping me. And I think that's a problem in industry. Another one that I'm still kind of neutral to, but might become a problem is all of these tools that promise that they will do recruiting for you, right? So no need for a job board. Just give us a job title and we will go and find people. I'm a bit skeptical because all of these tools have one weakness right now, which is where do you get the candidates from?

And they all have to revert to using one of those three large LinkedIn database vendors out there. So I'm not that scared of them, but it's something that's kind of worth looking into. So that's also a byproduct of AI and I'll say, by coding in our industry.

Martyn Redstone (23:51)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. Very on vogue with the whole vibe coding thing. It's incredible the amount of terms that are coming out recently that we've never heard of before. And one of the other things, I suppose, when we talk about SEO and content and what have you, there's probably a lot of job board owners that are very, tempted to use AI to generate blog content or other content en masse.

What are your thoughts on that?

Alexander (24:45)

So there are good ways to do it and there are bad ways to do it. I still remember, say maybe early 2024, there was this guy on Twitter who published that he scraped the site map of a competitor and just created blog articles.

for every URL in the site map. And some clients legitimately sent me this link and said, hey, can we do this too? I'm like, no, no, you can't. So my rules on this are as long as you give some input to the LLM that is in some way unique or it's good quality input, then you should be fine. and of course.

you edit the content that comes out of GPT. But if you are just mass producing content, pushing it to a site, I think you are probably going to nuke your domain in a very, very fast, very fast timeframe. Don't underestimate how good Google is at detecting these. And it doesn't have to do with the fact that they are able to detect AI generated content. That's very hard to do. I wouldn't go with impossible, but.

really, really hard to do. And they don't need to do it because they actually have the conversion rates on every page. They know when they send the user, what happens? Do they stay on this page? Do they interact with it? Do they bounce? That's more than enough signals to decide if this is AI content. Then of course, some other things like how often do you publish content and stuff like that. So if you are, if you had a job board and you posted

10 articles per year and then suddenly you post a thousand. Yeah. I mean, come on.

Martyn Redstone (26:44)

So if you are going to use AI, make sure you're not going crazy in terms of going from 10 articles to 1,000 articles. Make sure the quality of your input, of your prompts are good quality and create really original unique content that job seekers want to read, want to engage with, and want to continue their journey through the job board as well.

don't just paste up standard stuff that gets regurgitated out of ChatGPT. I think that's completely fair. So thank you for that. think we've covered a lot in a very, very short conversation and some really kind of interesting points I think that our viewers, our listeners can really take away. But as somebody who, as you said in your consultancy, helps

Alexander (27:17)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (27:40)

people build job boards from scratch. If somebody was thinking about starting a niche job board now, what would be your top three pieces of advice to those people?

Alexander (27:55)

First one, which is like the most important is

You need to figure out how you're going to make money. And this piece is very hard for a job board because trust me, you're not going to make calls to people selling job postings for 200 USD. That's not going to work. That's not going to scale.

You need to learn how people in this industry monetize. So there is B2B monetization, which is job postings or whatever else services you provide to recruiters or staffing firms. And then there's B2C monetization, where you can actually make a revenue selling services to job seekers. So understand how the industry works, understand where the money comes from and where it goes to.

and then figure out how you're going to monetize. Because people are not just going to come to your job board to post jobs. That's not going to work. It will take a lot of time to build this organically. Second advice, I guess, make sure that there is actual searches behind the niche that you are going to go after. And also make sure that there are no competitors that are extremely hard to beat. So I would never.

tell anyone to build a crypto job board or AI job board. AI because yes, there are lot of competitors, but also the amount of people that want to work in AI so high that the majority of companies are not going to pay for job posting, because they get anyway 10,000 applicants, right, from scratch. So search volume, right, very, very important stuff. maybe the last one is don't...

Go and build your own job board to validate your idea because you're going to get a lot of the basic SEO fundamentals wrong. You're way safer to go and buy a SaaS product. Test your idea, validate it. The SaaS product is going to cost you, I don't know, like $200, $300 per month tops. Do it for six months. You do a 2K invest.

when you multiply it by your hourly rate and the amount of time you spend building it from scratch with all these other tools, it's just really not worth it. Even if you go no code, you still won't be able to figure out the SEO part properly. So that's kind of my third advice. And yeah, we can name drop some stuff, we know who sponsored this. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (30:37)

Exactly,

you know, I wouldn't be contractually obliged to to say that you know if you are considering building a Job board off the back of a SAS product then feel free to check out JBoard link in the YouTube description So there we go Well, there we go testimonial right there by the the the godfather of Job boards right there

Alexander (30:51)

But I use them, I use them and I'm pretty happy and yeah, I can vouch for them.

Martyn Redstone (31:06)

Alexander, it's been an absolute pleasure. Fantastic to finish on those three top tips. think that they're key. Monetization, making sure that there's search traffic for your niche, and don't waste your time building from scratch. I think that those three pieces of advice are absolutely valuable and key. But Alexander, thank you so much for time today. And I look forward to...

to us catching up very, very soon.

Alexander (31:39)

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Martyn Redstone (31:41)

Absolute pleasure. Thank you.