The starting point
The HoReCa sector (hotels, restaurants, cafés) in Moldova has constant staffing needs, but the large, generic job boards represent this niche poorly: listings for waiters, cooks, or baristas get buried among thousands of other industries. On top of that, the labor market is trilingual — Romanian, Russian, and increasingly English — which makes generic job boards even less effective here.
HorecaJob.md was built to close exactly that gap: a focused platform, exclusively for the HoReCa industry, in all three relevant languages.
The approach
The project was built solo — from data modeling to deployment. Key decisions:
Trilingual from day one, not bolted on later. Instead of building one language and translating afterward, the routing and content system was designed for RO/RU/EN from the start. That avoids the typical rework that retrofitted internationalization usually requires.
Over 40 SEO landing pages, generated programmatically. Instead of a single generic "jobs" page, landing pages were built specifically for concrete search queries — combining job category (waiter, cook, barista) with location. That's the lever that makes organic search traffic possible at all for a new, unknown platform.
A full application flow, not just listings. Employers can post jobs, candidates can apply directly through the platform — no detour through external emails or forms.
Technical stack
Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Prisma, and PostgreSQL. The combination of server-side rendering (important for SEO on the landing pages) and a relational database for listings, applications, and user accounts was the obvious choice here — no overengineering, no microservices for a project of this size.
Result
144 commits, built solo in three weeks from the first line of code to launch. The platform runs in production at horecajob.md.
Have a similar niche idea, or need a multilingual platform? Let's talk.