When you submit an archaeology or anthropology teaching position or a cultural resource management job to ShovelBums you reach over 16,500 professional archaeologists immediately. It is easy (well, kind of). Read on, and be sure to read on for important information about the fees for posting, below.
What you need to do first is join the ShovelBums mailing list. To keep spam off the list, only members are able to post. The list now lives on Groups.io, which is a separate site from ShovelBums.org (where you are right now). So registering here does not register you to send out a job advertisement. You join the list over on Groups.io.
Nope. The name ShovelBums, which to make a long story short is what my mom tongue-in-cheek called my CRM buddies and me back in the day, refers just to the root level of a CRM career. Any archaeologist or CRMer in the modern generation who wants a broad experience base does a turn as a ShovelBum. Plenty of people who joined when ShovelBums was first founded are now Principal Investigators, owners of CRM firms, and PhDs teaching at universities.
So ShovelBums serves all levels of archaeology and CRM employment listings. Trust me, there are lots of senior level archaeologists who are members. ShovelBums also posts academic positions, so let anyone you know in academia know.
States? Oh, you miss the point. I don't do anything small. ShovelBums covers the entire world. 16,500+ members is a LOT of archaeologists and they won't all fit in the states. The advantage of posting on ShovelBums, with a clear subject line on your ad, is that with such a massive audience your message will saturate the area you need people from. Archaeology is such a small network that a ShovelBum in the southern UK may well know a buddy from field school who lives right outside Poughkeepsie, exactly where you need a Field Director ASAP.
What? I thought this was free?
Years ago it was. Since 2006 I have needed to charge for listings on ShovelBums (see below for why).
The bottom line: if you are a commercial entity making a profit, ShovelBums costs $100 per job category advertised, per location. Note: this is cheap. It is a quarter of the price of a job on Monster.com, and it is the only service that targets your intended audience so quickly.
You can post as many positions as you want in a single ad, though I recommend breaking ads into multiple emails if you are advertising different classes of jobs. It does not cost any more, and it makes it easier for people to sort through the messages.
ShovelBums is free to access. And if your company is in a hard spot, I will never deny you the chance to use it. If you aren't fielding a crew, you don't have money coming in, so you couldn't pay anyway. So the deal is this: you can use ShovelBums now, and when your company is back on its feet you settle up like everyone else. Bad business philosophy, good for the profession.
I am a nice guy. I want your company to succeed. If we work together on this, we can both survive.
ShovelBums is my job these days (besides raising three kids). It has over 16,500 members who joined at no cost. There are no sponsoring organizations, no outside funding, nada. That means all of the day-to-day operating costs, and the work of serving 16,500+ of your peers, are on me.
The bottom line is that ShovelBums is a professional service. I keep things casual, because none of us like stuffy, overly regulated things, but it is a professional service like no other in the world. Nothing else gets your ad for archaeologists and related CRM professionals in front of such a vast, targeted audience immediately. Other professional recruitment services are orders of magnitude more expensive, some charging a base fee calculated on the annual salary of each position filled. A hundred bucks a pop is a bargain. If your accounting office disagrees, have them drop me a note and I will gladly discuss it by email.
I am trying to make ShovelBums better known in academia and give departments a chance to discover what a massive, immediate resource it is.
There are anecdotal reports that using ShovelBums will increase your personal karma, restore lean muscle, and provide inner peace. No guarantees on that.
What I can guarantee is a great response. Just do the math. Your ad is sent immediately to 16,500+ members. Some won't be the right fit for your position, but it is likely they know someone who is and who is looking for work, and they will forward it on. ShovelBums also reaches well into universities, so there is a good chance your job gets posted and shared within relevant academic departments.
Other resources? You mean, like the competition? Hey, we are all in this together. I want you to fill your position and to succeed, so I am happy to point you to these unaffiliated resources where you can also post your job: