In conjunction with the launch of the website, I’m also writing the first blog on Josh’s Water Jobs.
This website is going to be an entirely new endeavor for me (and Hank, JWJ’s technical co-founder), taking what has been a labor of love of the last five years in the form of a water jobs listserv and formalizing it into a website.
The backstory is that, as for most of us, I would get an email from time to time from a colleague asking me to forward along a job opening to my network. After this happened a few times in one month, I put together a list of emails of people who I would regularly forward these jobs to. At some point, I decided to start seeking out jobs and putting them into a list to send out to this group. From there, the frequency of the lists and the jobs in them grew until, as of last month, I was averaging around 60-70 jobs in my now weekly emails. The list of people receiving the emails also grew, solely by word of mouth. After a certain point, it made sense to expand the listserv into a website and where we find ourselves today.
As I wrote above, it’s been a labor of love. It would take me a few hours every week to put the list together, but it was totally worth it when I would get an email once in a while saying that someone had gotten a job, because of the list. I sometimes feel I make more of a difference in the water community doing the water jobs list than my actual water work.
The list is more than just a catalogue of job openings for the jobseeker or an opportunity for an employer to find a new hire. The list is information. You can see who is hiring and who is not. What level organizations are hiring at. You can follow hiring trends. It gives you an inside view into what is happening in the water community.
Once the website has been established and a certain volume of visitors becomes regular to the site, we are planning on expanding the services it provides. This will depend on the demand of the users, but through querying the listserv in preparation for this launch, increased user interface through profiles and other functionality can be expected down the road.
Each Tuesday, as with the old listserv, I will send an email with the past week’s posted jobs. The format of the email will come in a digest with all jobs listed in the email itself with direct links to their posts on this website. If you wish to subscribe to the mailing list, please fill out the short form under “Join Our Mailing List” on the right-hand side of the page. You must confirm your subscription via an email sent to your account.
This blog will be a regular aspect of the website right from… now. Every week or two, I will write about a facet of career development that I would hope will prove useful for the jobseeker. I will also invite guest bloggers from the water community, experts and human resources staff alike, to contribute to the blog. If there are topic areas that you believe you’d be interested in hearing about, please provide suggestions through the Contact (“General Inquiry”) link above.
A quick note in that Hank and I are doing this with our own time and resources, so if you’d like to make a contribution to sustain Josh’s Water Jobs, you can do so via this page. Any support is appreciated.
If you have any other questions or feedback, please submit inquiries through the Contact page and we will get back to you as soon as possible. If you would like to post an open job, please go to the Post a Job link above.
Thanks for visiting Josh’s Water Jobs and we look forward to seeing you here in the future.
Josh
