Introducing Job Board Spotlight
A podcast by Artha • Hosted by Pankit Gami
There’s a moment—quiet but heavy—when you realize your community need more than content from you. They need a home. A place where they can find opportunity. A place where your niche is seen, served, and sustainable.
Job board Spotlight is our love letter to that moment.
Job board Spotlight is a podcast where Artha Job Board founder, Pankit Gami, sits down with a job board founder and talks through their real story—why they built their platform, how they shaped the niche, and what’s actually working as it grows.
We built this show for one reason: there are plenty of takes about “the job market,” but almost no honest conversations about operating a job board—the decisions, the trade-offs, the boring-but-powerful systems that turn a link into a living platform.
Think of this as founder to founder. No hype. No generic advice. Just the journey and the playbook: positioning, taxonomy, curation, distribution, monetization, and the tiny UX choices that make people come back.
Episode 1 — “Relevance Is the Product”
Guest: Prasad Tataverty, Founder of Analytics Hiring and DataJobs.com
Watch:
Chapters (so you can jump around)
00:00 — Welcome to job board Spotlight (why this show exists)
01:06 — Prasad’s background: from global TA leadership to owner
02:56 — The on-the-ground gap that sparked Analytics Hiring
06:04 — Choosing Data & AI; designing the right categories
08:43 — Quantifying the “irrelevant inflow” problem (real numbers)
11:20 — Niche-accurate insights (comp benchmarking, market intel)
12:50 — Building an ecosystem: jobs, validation, intelligence, community
13:40 — Launch challenges: switching inertia, trust, and value math
16:00 — Reach vs. relevance (picking a side)
24:00 — Growth engine: community, events, leader groups, validation
31:10 — The mistakes, reframed as owner lessons
35:00 — Where the mission is headed next
The moment it turned from noise to niche
Prasad spent years operating at the top of the game—building high-impact teams across 19 countries, working directly with CXOs, absorbing the pace and precision of real operators. Then the pattern became impossible to ignore:
- Generic portals were flooding every role with irrelevant inflow.
- Teams were losing months to screening noise.
- Big decisions were being made without niche-accurate insight.
Instead of adding to the chorus, he drew a line: build a home for Data & AI—where every category, filter, and feature says, you belong here. That became Analytics Hiring, and under it, DataJobs.com—a focused ecosystem designed for clarity, not clout.
“Once your niche is clear, everything downstream gets kinder—decisions, trade-offs, even what you ignore.”
The problem only owners count
Here’s the moment that hits you in the gut: 1,500 roles → 880,000 CVs on a generic board. That’s ~587 CVs per role. If 80% are off-signal and a screener gives each just 20 seconds, you’re staring at ~489 workdays—about 1.3 years—burned on irrelevance.
Now translate that into real life:
- That’s a year you didn’t spend tightening taxonomy, shipping better filters, or writing the “State of Skills” note your community would actually use.
- That’s a year of candidates feeling invisible because their relevant CV landed at #57 in a pile no human could thoughtfully review.
- That’s a year of trust quietly leaking from your brand because the experience says “noise,” not “home.”
- Most people feel the pain. Owners do the hard, unglamorous thing: they measure it, name it, and build against it—so no one in their niche has to drown in it again.
Why a niche platform won here
Signal > reach.
Prasad’s rule of thumb: 4,000 on-niche CVs ≈ 40,000 generic. Less fog, more fit. Your community doesn’t need a megaphone; it needs a map.
Taxonomy as strategy.
Categories and filters mirror how Data & AI people actually talk—Data Eng, ML Eng, Analytics, MLOps, levels, stacks. When the words feel right, the work feels lighter.
Credibility loops.
Short, repeatable insight—skills heat, tool trends, comp snapshots—turns a listing site into a habit. People open your emails on instinct because you keep small promises consistently.
Guardrails protect the brand.
Posting rules, verification, skill validation. Not gatekeeping—care-keeping. The promise stays tight, so trust can compound.
The early hard parts (and what solved them)
Switching inertia.
In India especially, moving people off generic portals requires focus + credibility. The bridge was lived expertise and a clean, on-niche experience that made “Why switch?” obvious.
Chicken-and-egg.
They seeded the first set of right-fit roles to teach the market what belongs. Curation wasn’t a delay; it was the onboarding.
Adoption inside companies.
Many teams lacked purchasing authority. The wedge was value math: relevancy %, time saved, first-level technical validation, niche-accurate intelligence. Numbers calm nerves.
Reach vs. relevance mindset.
They reframed the game: others sell reach; we deliver relevance. Once leaders saw fewer, better matches, the argument ended itself.
How they grew (quietly, on purpose)
Community first.
Years before the board, Prasad planted the seeds—India Analytics Network and later Data Professionals Network—with city meetups, roundtables, and real conversations. Trust arrived before features.
Earned distribution.
A combined team reach of ~200–300K on LinkedIn, plus leader groups and college partnerships. Not virality—velocity through relationships.
Value gifts.
Free skill-validation tests for juniors. Those small wins were screenshot-worthy and shareable—organic word of mouth that money can’t buy.
No heavy ad spend at the start.
They chose engagement over campaigns, then layered marketing later—after the promise and product were unmistakably on-niche.
A bigger mission.
From a careful start to a bold aim: 5 million Data & AI professionals in one trusted ecosystem. Not just traffic—a home with a memory.
Three mistakes Prasad wants you to skip
- A job board is a job list.” It isn’t. Owners win by shipping an ecosystem: jobs + validation + intelligence + community.
- One size fits all.” Being everything to everyone is a fast path to dilution. Specificity is care.
- More jobs = more value.” On-niche and interesting jobs beat volume every single time.
Conclusion
Job Board Spotlight isn’t just about job boards—it’s about the people who build them, the choices they make, and the communities they serve. Prasad’s story shows us that when you design for relevance over reach, you create real value that lasts. This is only the beginning—each episode will bring you closer to the playbook behind successful niche platforms.
Stay tuned, because the best way to learn this business is straight from the founders living it.
