Every post I've written here about a Maladeta Studio product has followed roughly the same shape: we saw a problem, we built something, here's what it does. This one is different. I want to write about a problem we've been circling for months — hiring people for rural, seasonal work — and a piece of software we've started building around it, without pretending we've solved anything. The project's internal name is Plataforma de Talent Rural. The README opens with a comment that says, literally, "find a better name pls." That should tell you exactly where we are.
1. A hiring problem we know from both sides
I've written before about what it's like to run a software studio from a valley of about ten thousand people, boxed in by mountains on three sides, where Aranese is still spoken in daily life. The talent pool here is small, and it stays small no matter how good your job description is. When we need to hire, we're not choosing between five strong local candidates — we're often convincing one person to consider moving here, or accepting that the role stays open for months.
We assumed for a while that this was just our problem, specific to running a tech company in a place tech companies don't usually go. Then we started paying closer attention to Lueira's own customers — the ski schools, dive centers, rental shops and surf camps we build software for — and realized they were fighting the same fight, just on a much tighter clock. A ski school in Baqueira doesn't need an instructor in general; it needs a certified instructor, available for one specific winter, willing to live somewhere he's never been for four months, speaking Spanish, French or English depending on who walks through the door that week. A dive center on the coast has the same problem in July instead of January. These aren't office jobs with remote flexibility. They're short, seasonal, location-locked contracts that require someone to physically relocate for a defined stretch of time, often with housing thrown in as part of the deal.
Seen from the inside of our own hiring struggles, and from the outside through Lueira's customer base, the shape of the problem started to look consistent enough to be worth naming on its own: rural and seasonal employers need to match with people willing to relocate temporarily, and that's a distinct problem from general recruitment.
2. Why generic job boards don't fit rural, seasonal work
LinkedIn, Indeed, and most job boards were built around a specific default: permanent roles, in or near cities, filled by people who already live within commuting distance or are willing to make a permanent move. Almost every filter, every ranking signal, every part of the UX assumes that shape. None of it asks the questions that actually decide whether a rural or seasonal hire works out: is this person willing to relocate for four months instead of forever, do they hold the specific certification the role legally requires, is housing part of the deal, which languages do they actually need to speak in a valley or coastal town where three languages might show up at the front desk in the same afternoon.
You can bend a generic job board to handle some of this with enough manual filtering on both sides, and that's exactly what's happening today — ski schools and dive centers post on generic boards or lean on word of mouth, and sift through candidates who were never going to be a fit for a seasonal, relocate-required role. It works, in the sense that people do get hired eventually. It's just slow, and it puts the matching work entirely on the employer, who is usually a small business without a recruiting team.
3. What we don't know yet
Here's the honest part. Unlike Lueira, MeteoTrail or NaturPark, there's no live site to link to here, no screenshot to show, no feature list I can walk you through. What exists is an early, unpolished Next.js app, built around the idea I've described above, still figuring out what it actually needs to do. We don't have a name we're happy with. We don't have a customer using it yet.
And there are real open questions we haven't answered. Is this actually a distinct market, or just a problem that two businesses we happen to be close to — our own studio and Lueira's customers — both happen to share, which wouldn't be enough to justify a separate product? Should this live as its own thing at all, or is it really a feature that belongs inside Lueira itself, something ski schools and dive centers use for their own seasonal hiring the same way they already use Lueira for bookings? We genuinely don't know yet.
I'm writing this now, while it's still unresolved, because I'd rather be honest about where an idea sits than wait until it's polished enough to look confident. If you run a rural or seasonal business and this problem sounds familiar, I'd like to hear about it — that's more useful to us right now than anything we could build in isolation.