Where to post startup jobs in India: an honest comparison

There's no single best place to post a startup role in India. Each channel has a different audience and a different cost of noise.

Your own careers page (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby)

Non-negotiable. It's the canonical listing every other channel should link to, it feeds Google for Jobs if the structured data is right, and it's what aggregators pull from. Free or cheap.

LinkedIn

Largest reach, most noise. Good for senior and non-engineering roles, and for roles where the employer brand matters. Paid promotion helps; "Easy Apply" floods you with unqualified applicants unless you add screening questions.

Naukri

Highest volume, skewed toward services-company candidates and non-tech roles. Useful for operations, sales and support hiring at scale; low signal for product engineering.

Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent)

Startup-native audience, decent for early-stage engineering and product roles, especially remote. Quality varies; the free tier gets buried.

Cutshort, Instahyre and similar

Curated candidate pools with some matching; work best for mid-level engineering hiring at funded companies. Paid.

Referrals and direct outreach

Still the highest-quality channel for the first 20 hires. Slow and doesn't scale, but the offer-acceptance rate is unmatched.

A ranked, transparent board (this one)

A daily audience of active startup job seekers, a stated-salary requirement that pre-filters for serious companies, and public, bot-filtered view and click counts so you can see whether the channel works for your role. Placement is by boost amount with a public decay formula, ₹99–₹500 per boost. Read how it works.

How to combine them

Careers page first, always. Then the two channels that match the role's seniority and function. Then referrals, personally, every week. Measure applicants-per-channel and quality-per-channel after 30 days and drop what isn't working.