Our local jobs board works better now.

We built a job board for the Coastal Bend thinking it would work like job boards in big cities. It doesn't.

In Austin or Houston, there are thousands of job listings. People search by job title or keyword and find what they want. Here there are maybe fifty active posts on a good week. People don't search. They scroll through everything. They know half the employers already. What they want is to see what's new and get hired by someone they trust.

We also put in too many filter options at first. Nobody cared about sorting by seniority level or job type. They cared about whether it's full-time, how much it pays, and whether they can start next week. We removed the rest.

The other surprise was Spanish. We didn't plan for it. Three weeks in, a business owner in Robstown asked if he could post in Spanish because half his crew doesn't read English well. We said yes. Now about thirty percent of job posts are bilingual or Spanish-only.

Small-town job boards are different from big-city ones. They're not just marketplaces. They're community tools. We're still learning what that means.