I was so thrilled to be asked to become a UK partner for Authentic Jobs UK, along with friends Elliot Jay Stocks and Jon Hicks (who, as a side note, were the first ever people I did a conference with back in 2008).
I’ve been a long standing fan of Authentic Jobs, the calibre of the jobs on site has always been high – the site itself has always looked sharp and slick, which is no wonder with the super talented Cameron Moll at the helm, so when Cameron asked me to become part of the Authentic Jobs UK network, I knew it would be a site I would be more than happy to have on here and You Know Who.
When I was starting out back in January 2003, as many of you are aware, I got my first jobs through eBay (I know, weird huh!) it provided a great source of starter work for me, however, I then quickly moved onto various job boards in the UK which created a pool of great clients and kept You Know Who going from strength to strength over the years. Job boards, like Authentic Jobs, are fantastic for a number of reasons, but the main benefit I found was the consistency of knowing when you’re coming to the end of a project, you could tout for new business, and have a damn good chance of winning it, from the freelance job postings. I dedicated 1 hour per day to scouring the available freelance jobs, writing introduction emails and ensuring my portfolio was bang up to date. Nowadays there’s all sorts of whizz bangs available to help you achieve this, and TextExpander would help with this process immeasurably, if you’ve not read it Elliot has a great post on how to use TextExpander.
So the new UK version of Authentic Jobs, it’s beautiful, it has great versions for smart phones and tablet devices, and it’s ultra slick looking. The guys at Neutron Creations have been working hard on the functionality of the site and it’s definitely paid off, little details sprinkled to just make for a much nicer browsing experience. Another thing that struck me was the typography choices, the smaller font used on the site is really clean and clear – I’ve been told it’s using Kievit, a wonderful change to the same fonts that seem to be bounding around the interwebs at the moment.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the UK Authentic Jobs grow as big as its US counterpart. If you’ve got a job that you want to advertise I believe they are dropping the listing price for a short time and I can’t think of a better place to get the right calibre of people.