We just found out that we helped a founder hire a (natural language processing) developer. Woooo hooooooooooooo!

I was at the Geeks on a Boat party last week and Dennis, the co-founder of Yakr, ran up to me professing his undying love for our free startup classifieds service because he officially hired someone from a job listing he posted there.

For some context, Yakr is a small unfunded startup in Silicon Valley. Yakr is building a product to allow you to connect with others who are reading the same information on the web. For example, if you are making a purchasing decision for a 2009 Honda Civic, you can chat with others who are facing the same decision throughout the web, not bounded by a specific website or link. The big picture is that Yakr wants to allow advertisers to collect sales leads from customers in a purchasing decision, not through display ads alone.

As Dennis and his team built their product and thought about expanding their team, they were evaluating our classifieds against dice.com, craigslist, and StartUpHire but felt they were too expensive or not targeted enough for their needs.

They took a gamble and posted a listing on StartupDigest Classifieds for a “Chief computer scientist” to help with their natural language processing and paid $49 to distribute it to the Silicon Valley StartupDigest newsletter.

They didn’t get a lot of responses, but the few they did get were all highly targeted and pre-screened for startup people. In fact, Dennis didn’t even have to do a phone call with the StartupDigest candidates he received; he met with them all in person. He said the biggest benefit of our classifieds service is that everyone who responded understood startups and knew the upsides and downsides of working for one.

All in all, Yakr received candidates who were PHD’s, Stanford Grads, and a few others already working for startups. The candidates also wrote personalized cover letters, tweaked their resumes for the position, and all asked smart questions during the interview process. Yakr ended up hiring one of the Stanford students who wasn’t a PHD but showed great enthusiasm for the product and team.

Yakr will be hiring for more positions soon (you’ll find them on our startup classifieds) and you can learn more about them here.