Accelerators
Job board software for accelerators
An accelerator job board has a shape no other use case shares: the audience turns over on a fixed cycle, and the companies need hiring help most in the months right after they stop being your day-to-day concern. A board built around the current cohort is empty for half the year and irrelevant for the other half.
From $79/month · 14-day free trial · No setup feesBuilt around the alumni base instead, it becomes the thing that keeps a founder engaged with the programme two years later, which is the harder problem the board is actually solving.
How the money works
A programme benefit, measured in founder engagement
Like a venture fund's talent network, this does not charge anyone. It is part of what a company gets for joining, and it is one of the few programme benefits that keeps delivering after the cohort ends.
Where it differs from a fund board is that it is also a marketing asset. Candidates who want to work at early-stage companies search for exactly this, and a board carrying every company you have ever backed is the most concrete possible demonstration of the programme's track record. It ends up doing recruitment for the programme as well as for the companies.
If you do want revenue from it, the version that works is sponsorship rather than listings: a recruiting tool, a payroll provider or a bank sponsoring the board that early-stage companies read. Charging your own companies to post undermines the benefit you sold them.
The question that decides it
“Our cohorts move on. Who maintains this after demo day?”
Nothing that requires founder action will survive the cohort ending, so the board has to run without them. This is the same constraint a venture fund has, with a sharper edge, because your relationship with the company gets weaker over time rather than stronger.
The answer is again automated imports, one source per company, pointed at their careers page or ATS feed. A company that keeps hiring keeps appearing. A company that stops, stops. Nobody logs in, nobody is chased, and the board stays honest without maintenance.
The one thing worth doing manually is pruning companies that have shut down. That is a quarterly job of a few minutes, and it is the difference between a board that reads as a living portfolio and one that reads as a graveyard.
A board of this shape
Y Combinator's Work at a Startup
The largest example of an accelerator treating hiring as core programme infrastructure rather than as a listings page. The transferable part is not the scale but the direction: it is built for the candidate, with profiles and matching, on the theory that the companies will always show up and the candidates are the scarce side. That is true for most accelerators at any size. Y Combinator's Work at a Startup Opens workatastartup.com in a new tab
Look at Y Combinator's Work at a Startup
Named as a reference point, not as a Kardow customer. It does not run on Kardow and we
have no relationship with it.
What maps to your workflow
The parts of Kardow that do this job
01
One import source per company
Each company's careers page or feed becomes a scheduled source. Roles appear when published and drop when filled, across every cohort, with no founder action required. 02
Company pages as a live portfolio
Every company gets a page with its roles, description, batch and links, which turns the board into the portfolio directory the programme site probably needs anyway. 03
Cohort as a filter, not a silo
Batch, year and programme are configurable fields that become filters, so a candidate can browse the current cohort or the whole alumni base on one board. 04
Unlimited jobs and candidates
An alumni base compounds. Ten cohorts of twenty companies is a lot of listings over time, and nothing here is capped on any plan. 05
Job alerts for the candidate side
Candidates who want early-stage roles subscribe by function or stage, which builds an audience the programme owns and can point at any company that is struggling to hire. The honest limit
Where Kardow is the wrong answer here
This is a job board with company pages, not a talent-matching platform. There are no candidate profiles that companies can search, no matching engine and no introductions workflow. If the thing you want is a two-sided talent marketplace for your alumni, that is a different product, and building it on top of the board would be a real engineering project even with the code in hand. Not sure which side you are on? Ask us.
Questions
What people ask before they build one.
- Should the board cover current cohorts only, or all alumni?
- All alumni, with the current cohort surfaced. A current-cohort-only board is empty between programmes and has almost no search visibility, because it never accumulates enough pages. An alumni board grows every cycle and is more useful to candidates, which is what makes it useful to the companies. Batch is a filter, not a wall.
- How do we get companies to keep their listings current?
- Do not rely on them. Any process that needs a founder to log in and update something will decay within one cycle. Import from their careers page instead, so the board reflects whatever they publish for themselves. The companies that most need hiring help are the ones with the least time to maintain a listing on your site.
- Can we run a separate board for a specific programme?
- Yes, up to three boards on the Scale plan. Worth doing when a programme serves a genuinely different candidate pool, for example a deep-tech track alongside a general one. Not worth doing to separate cohorts, since splitting the inventory costs you the search visibility that makes the board work.
Build it and see whether it works
Every plan includes a 14-day trial and there is no setup fee, so the cost of finding out is one month. Kardow starts at $79 a month. Closest to this one
All use cases VC firms A portfolio-wide talent network that makes no money on purpose, and is judged on founder outcomes instead. Communities Revenue that members welcome instead of tolerate, because the thing you are selling is access to them and they benefit from it. Education A careers service board where students are verified, employers are approved, and the outcome data belongs to the institution.