unusual jobs database

Existing employment matching systems (online databases, help-wanted advertisements, headhunter firms, etc.) work well for people whose skills and positions whose requirements can be summarized in a few words. If you need someone who can operate a well-known piece of software or equipment in the way it's normally operated, you can just search for that. If you need someone who can perform a well-defined role that has a name and training courses and certification exams and so on, you can search for that.

But if you're looking to build something that's never really been done or looking for people to help you do something that's uncommon, it's very difficult to find people. Similarly, if you would like to find such a position, it's difficult to look for. I've witnessed this problem from both sides and it really does exist. From the employer's point of view, you typically define your position by the closest well-known buzzword you can think of and then spend a lot of time sadly rejecting people who fit that buzzword really well but really aren't what you're looking for at all.

I propose here a job/candidate search engine that seeks to fill that specific niche. Jobs would be posted in much more detail than is usual. Candidates would be required to offer more job-specific information than is usual: Employers would be encouraged to supply hoops for candidates to pass through. "Write a 300 word essay on the advantages and disadvantages of load-balanced server clustering." "Write a program to efficiently solve the following problem." (As a candidate I like such things because they offer an opportunity for differentiation.)

This would certainly be a niche service that would have relatively few postings, but they would probably be fun to read. I'm obviously thinking about technical positions in software development, but I imagine the problem exists in other fields (and in fact the candidates and employers who would use such a site would tend toward cross-disciplinary work).