Here's what December at Himalayas looked like at a high-level:
- 🚦 Traffic: 13,358 users (down 25.7% MoM)
- 🌱 Organic traffic: 4,441 users (down 25.0% MoM)
- 📝 Job applications started: 2,475 (down 12.7% MoM)
- 💸 Revenue: $412.35 (up 508.7% MoM)
If you're unaware, Himalayas is a three-person bootstrapped team (Jack, Jordan, and Abi) building a remote job board.
The drop in traffic and job applications started is disappointing but expected.
December is a time when people slow down, spend more time with friends and family, and less time thinking about work.
It did highlight that we need to offer more to grow consistently month-over-month.
As we outline last month, Himalayas is an infrequent product.
The jobs to be done that we fulfill aren't daily, which makes it harder for people to build a habit with us. We also have built-in churn, the better job we do, the quicker people will stop using us.
The ICED theory offers a mental model to help address these challenges by improving the dimensions of an infrequent product:
- I = Degree of Infrequency
- C = Degree of Control Over the User Experience
- E = Degree of Engagement Before, After, and During The Transaction
- D = Distinctiveness of The Product
In December, we focused heavily on increasing frequency (I) by adding adjacent use cases.
Employee perks and benefits
When you use Himalayas, you form an experience, and if it’s a good one, you’ll come back if you need us. But only if you can remember!
The issue is, the more infrequent your usage, the less likely you'll remember.
You aren’t always looking for jobs and not everyone is in the market for a new job at the same time, reducing the likelihood that you will tell your friends about us even if we offer a great experience.
If your friend isn’t looking for a job, then we’re not relevant.
One way to reduce the risk of you forgetting us and increase the likelihood you’ll tell your friends is by solving adjacent use cases. Before December, we did this through our remote company profiles, tech stacks, and remote work blog.
In December, we added another adjacent use case: employee benefits and perks.
These pages make it easy to get a more complete picture of what it’s like to work at a company by showing whether they offer benefits like health insurance, flexible working hours, paid parental leave, four day workweeks, and more.
A big part of our thesis is that there is too much information asymmetry between job seekers and employers, which creates an imbalance of power. By adding employee benefits, we’re giving more power to the job seeker and hopefully reducing that imbalance.
It’s also good for companies. These pages can attract remote talent who are excited by the benefits you offer. By providing more information ahead of time, companies filter out candidates who aren't really interested and save time during the interview process.
We now have over 680 companies with employee benefits information and we’re hard at work gathering the rest.
If you’d like to see examples, check out the employee benefits and perks offered by Zapier, Percona, VEED.IO, Airteam, Remote, or Webflow.
If you’re a remote employer and want to attract more candidates, create a free remote company profile on Himalayas today and give job seekers insight into what it’s like to work at your company and what they’ll get beyond a paycheck.
New design for the blog
As we mentioned in our previous update, editorially generated and SEO-optimized content is a core part of our flywheel. It's another way for us to build a relationship with you even if you aren't looking for a job or actively hiring.
The best content strategy is one that prioritizes evergreen quality and depth over point-in-time volume and breadth. To make this worthwhile you need to be able to surface relevant content easily regardless of when it was posted.
Our old blog didn’t do this at all. It was a simple reverse-chronological feed that buried older content. While we were producing great content, it was hard to find pieces that were relevant to you unless it was recently posted.
Our new blog gives us control over how we present and organize articles, creates a more consistent user experience, and lays the groundwork for future improvements.
We’ve organized the content into audiences to help you during different stages of your professional life: job seekers, employees, managers, and employers. Tags also group the content: finding a job, succeeding at work, interview questions, work-life balance, and getting ahead.
The left-hand sidebar makes it simple to filter content based on what you care about, and each post now contains a table of contents that makes it easy to jump to the sections that matter most to you.
The reception we’ve had on the redesign, both qualitatively and quantitatively, has been great. People love the new design and organic traffic to the blog is up 43.6% MoM despite publishing less content.
In December, we published 43,780 words across 12 posts:
- 19 Work From Home Office Upgrades For Remote Work
- November 2021 Monthly Update
- How to Design Remotely: Tips, Tools, and How to Get a Remote Design Job
- How to Create a Remote Work Policy (Free Template)
- How to Answer "Where Do You See Yourself In 5 Years?"
- How to Answer "Tell Me About Yourself" (Sample Answers)
- How to Answer "What Makes You Unique?" (7 Sample Answers)
- How to Answer "What Are Your Career Goals?" (Sample Answers)
- How to Answer "Describe Your Work Ethic" (Sample Answers Included)
- How to Answer "When Can You Start" (7 Sample Answers)
- How to Answer "What Is Your Work Style?" (Sample Answers Included)
- How to Answer "How Do You Define Success?" (Sample Answers)
If you have any feedback about our new publication, please let us know.
Other fixes and improvements
- Fixed issue causing multiple tabs to open on Safari when Cmd+T was pressed
- Fixed bug where Read more buttons weren't working on some browsers
- Search filters now save after you view a job and press back
- Switched linter to Trunk to simplify checking, testing, and merging of code
- Added support for embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos in job descriptions and company profiles
- Dropdown menus now appear centered underneath their corresponding menu items
- Added gray background to advice homepage header
- Fixed issue causing OG images to not load properly on LinkedIn
- Improved the relevance of featured blog posts
- Modified sorting algorithm of our top companies list to include only active jobs
- Updated padding on home page
- Fixed issue causing incorrect heights on h1s, h2s, and h3s
- Added a hover state to badges
- Reduced lag on transition animations
- Significantly improved rendering speed of HTML loaded via AJAX
- Fixed issue causing perks icon to not update when editing a perk
- Fixed styling bug of breadcrumbs on mobile devices
- Limited perk descriptions to 200 characters
- Noindexed query pages
- Updated Ruby to v3
Find your next remote job or hire your next remote employee on Himalayas
Himalayas is the best place to find remote jobs and hire remote employees. We’re focused on providing a job search and hiring experience that has great UX focused on speed and efficiency.
If you're a job seeker: Apply privately to 2,000+ remote jobs and discover 1,400+ remote companies. We make it easy to filter by time zone, visa restrictions, and roles so you can easily find remote companies that want to hire you based on where you live and the role you're looking for.
If you're a remote company: Create a free company profile. Tell your story, build up your remote brand, and recruit the best. Share your culture, tech stack, and get seen by remote candidates looking to make a move. Then post a job and use our sophisticated job listings to specify time zone or visa requirements and rest easy knowing that qualified candidates will see your job listings.
We'd also love for you to join our free remote work community.
