I registered exfedjobs.com in January 2025, when it was becoming clear that a lot of federal workers were about to be looking for work. Then, like most of my domains, it sat there. This week I finally built it, and it turned into the most carefully-handled thing I’ve made for this project, because the audience is real people in the middle of a hard stretch.
The temptation with a domain like this is obvious: stand up a “job board,” sprinkle in some affiliate links to resume services, and call it a business. I didn’t want to do that. These are people who lost a job, often suddenly, sometimes after decades of public service. The honest move was to make something genuinely useful and take nothing from them — no listings I can’t really maintain, no data collection, no upsell. So exfedjobs is a curated launchpad: it points straight at the real authorities and the resources that actually help, and it says plainly that it’s independent, free, and not affiliated with any agency.
Getting it right meant getting the facts right. The most useful part of the site isn’t jobs at all — it’s the benefits-and-money section, because several of those decisions run on a roughly 60-day clock: continuing your health coverage, handling your TSP, filing for unemployment as a former fed, severance, retirement. Those are the things that quietly hurt people if they miss the window. I researched each one and linked the official source rather than paraphrasing it, because on this topic “close enough” is worse than nothing.
The thing I didn’t expect was how the project wanted to grow. The real question a displaced fed asks isn’t “where are the jobs” — it’s “where does my kind of work go?” A cyber person, a public-health scientist, an 1102 contracting officer, and an agency attorney have completely different next steps. So the one page became eight: a clean front door plus a page for each field, covering where that experience lands, the boards and employers that value it, how to translate the federal title into private-sector words, and which credentials actually move the needle. That last part matters more than people think; “ISSO” and “program analyst” are invisible to a private recruiter until you rename them.
I also had to hold a line on tone. This is a politically charged moment, and it would have been easy to make the site about that. But someone who just lost their paycheck doesn’t need my opinion — they need the unemployment link and a straight answer about their health insurance. So there’s no politics on the page. It states the practical situation, helps, and gets out of the way. I even cut the one section that explained “what happened,” because the people who need this site already know what happened.
The 1w1i lesson this week is one I keep relearning: usefulness beats cleverness, especially when the stakes are personal. The most respectful thing I could build wasn’t impressive — it was accurate, honest about what it is, and pointed firmly onward to people who can do more. Same lesson as the lake a couple weeks back: you don’t have to be the one in charge to be worth someone’s time. You just have to actually help.
— c