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Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

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Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#61

Post by hankchinaski »

I built https://golang.cafe as a niche curated job board and community for Go. I found myself jobs through it and so did many other Go engineers.

What is different to other boards:

- only job postings with clear salary ranges

- no recruiter spam, apply to companies directly

- hand curated and reviewed jobs

- open source

- filter by minimum salary

When I m not looking for a Go job I just go straight to LinkedIn

Also I know there was a curated list of job board alternatives here https://stackoverflowjobsalternatives.com/ still all very niche I think

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#62

Post by ineptech »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #28
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #18

Somebody please make OkCupid for Jobs. Both employers and applicants fill out questions that the community curates (so they can be job-specific, industry-specific, etc). Both employers and employees get matches via algorithm rather than receiving 100 random resumes or 100 random job suggestions that have nothing to do with you. Existing sites do this, but very poorly, because they only try to detect information out o…

Great idea. Being in the job board business for a decade, here's what I think would be the challenges: 1. Organizational structure mismatch: The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions. Outside of startups, job postings may be drafted by a manager, but a committee, legal, and/or HR has the final say on what's in the posting. An assistant or VA is often the POC when the job posting is…

4. As a hiring manager, I'd need different "profiles" for each team (one team mobs 24/7, another almost never mobs, etc)

5. What I would want as a candidate (a blunt and specific "warts and all" description of the team I'm joining) is not what employers would provide (vague, HR-y generalities like "we use cutting-edge technology" and "we prioritize work-life balance"). This was what turned me off from KeyValues.

But I hope these are tractable, because I very much like the OKCupid model and would use the product if these could be solved.

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#63

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

rglullis wrote: post #59
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #18

Somebody please make OkCupid for Jobs. Both employers and applicants fill out questions that the community curates (so they can be job-specific, industry-specific, etc). Both employers and employees get matches via algorithm rather than receiving 100 random resumes or 100 random job suggestions that have nothing to do with you. Existing sites do this, but very poorly, because they only try to detect information out o…

Oh, man. Where were you 15 years ago? Around 2007, when there was this wave of "37signals job board clones" and I was still living in Brazil, my friend and I started a job board focused on the Brazilian market (job4dev.com). It was free to post as long as the name of the company was provided and the contact was direct with someone from the team. No agencies and no clueless recruiters allowed. At first, there was very…

Maybe if somebody gets bored enough they'll start it as an open-source project, fund hosting via donations?

I think the key is the right vision to make it work. I see replies of "I did the same thing!" but they seem to be missing the killer feature: high-quality data. Good data (and lots of it) enables better algorithmic matching. To get the data, you need gamification. IIRC, OkCupid grew fast because bored people would fill out fun surveys, and that generated tons of data. So a big part of their site was probably just dedicated to "how can we convince people to answer all these questions and submit new ones?", and that's much harder than just creating a job board.

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#64

Post by hash872 »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #40
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #18

Somebody please make OkCupid for Jobs. Both employers and applicants fill out questions that the community curates (so they can be job-specific, industry-specific, etc). Both employers and employees get matches via algorithm rather than receiving 100 random resumes or 100 random job suggestions that have nothing to do with you. Existing sites do this, but very poorly, because they only try to detect information out o…

Shameless plug: I started Facet ( https://www.facet.net/passive-search ) to do just this. You set your preferences for jobs you'd be interested in (salary range, tech stack, location/remote, etc) and our algorithm matches you to jobs that fit your criteria as they come up. We're adding more and more criteria as we go to get the targeting super precise. I'm a software engineer and I noticed that LinkedIn's business mo…

I'd be interested to know what makes your business model different from Hired.com, which was basically the same thing, right? Just curious as someone who follows the space

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#65

Post by danielvaughn »

warrenm wrote: post #37
danielvaughn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd really love to see is a way to find candidates via their former employers. As a CTO who recruits in a specific industry, I need to find employees who used to work at companies A, B, C.

Doesn't LinkedIn search more-or-less accomplish this? Look for people who have worked for J, Q, and U companies?

maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I find it to be pretty difficult to search by that dimension

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#66

Post by rglullis »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #28
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #18

Somebody please make OkCupid for Jobs. Both employers and applicants fill out questions that the community curates (so they can be job-specific, industry-specific, etc). Both employers and employees get matches via algorithm rather than receiving 100 random resumes or 100 random job suggestions that have nothing to do with you. Existing sites do this, but very poorly, because they only try to detect information out o…

Great idea. Being in the job board business for a decade, here's what I think would be the challenges: 1. Organizational structure mismatch: The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions. Outside of startups, job postings may be drafted by a manager, but a committee, legal, and/or HR has the final say on what's in the posting. An assistant or VA is often the POC when the job posting is…

> The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions.

The questions should be answered by all the devs in the hiring team. You don't care about the compatibility between HR and employee, you care about compatibility between your peers and your direct boss.

> I can't think of any "normal" person I know that looks for jobs without some negative catalyst pushing them into it.

You can also solve it by making the match between team members. This way, companies could even ask their currently employees to participate, which means that people would be using the website even if they are not looking for a job directly.

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#68

Post by Oras »

I’m working on a search engine with TL;DR for the job posting.

You can read the job highlights in a snap and then decide to read the full description. You can also search as you type and filter jobs with salary or signup bonuses.

Still a work in progress, but you can take a look:

https://www.jobadsnow.com

edit: I forgot to mention that currently, it is US-only jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

#69

Post by inasmuch »

memling wrote: post #53
inasmuch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, please. I'd also like to see cover letters replaced by something more useful for both parties, like a small set of direct questions to answer. When an applicant applies for a job, she's left to make her best guess as to what information the company might find useful, and has to find a way to cram that into an awkward, stiff, rather bullshitty epistolary format. The hirer is then left to try to parse and interpre…

> I'd also like to see cover letters replaced by something more useful for both parties, like a small set of direct questions to answer. This "small set of direct questions," in my opinion, is implicit in the job description/duties and desired qualifications. Employers lately have had challenges in job definition, of course (they seem interested in advertising for the company rather than a job, and the job descriptio…

> prepend my resume with a table containing the job requirements vs. my experience

That's an interesting approach. But what I think gets somewhat lost in this, and why I don't quite think a job description serves as that set of questions, is that there's so much more color and character (culture?) that can come through if the questions are good.

For example, a bad question, or something that should satisfied by the JD and résumé, would be "Do you have experience doing X?" If that's important, just say so. A better question might be "Why are you interested in building X for Y industry?"

I think résumés and job descriptions as they're currently written do an okay job of checking off raw qualifications. What's missing is clarity and direction for the less quantifiable bits. Done right, it could be like a low-pressure, no-expectations first interview in lieu of a crap email that's tedious to write, tedious to read, and likely only helps a hirer understand whether the applicant can write a good cover letter.

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