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Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

rolepad.com

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Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#51

Post by t0mas88 »

smusamashah wrote: post #48

This looks great I am very suspicious about the company and interview reviews part. Glassdoor destroyed trust by giving incentive to employers destroying trust in reviews. I have a first hand experience about reviews I posted, and the fake reviews and then deletion of bad reviews of a company I worked for. It seems like any product offering public ratings will end up having fake ratings. What have you considered to m…

Same here. Glassdoor keeps saying everywhere that companies have no influence on the reviews. But they absolutely allow removal of bad reviews, even going as far as contacting our HR team offering it as a paid service.

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#52

Post by lelanthran »

This looks good.

How does the email addresses work? When I foward to sales@rolepad.com (or no@rolepad.com), how does it know that the message came from me[1]? Do you send back a confirmation I need to click on? Do I need to include a secret key in the subject line/body?

[1] I assume that you already know that email from/reply-to headers are trivially spoofed (i.e. the email client will let anyone set any value for from or reply-to).

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#53

Post by iwonthecase »

androng wrote: post #38

sorry but I do not see this as useful. I just use a spreadsheet and that is good enough. The hard part of job interviewing is learning all the useless Leetcode and preparing the stories in "STAR format" and interviewing taking up 5 hours and the indefinite period of time for replies. Not the tracking.

Same, although I appreciate the work OP's putting into this, and would find value in the aggregated statistics (especially stats about the interview funnel.)

For me, I just have a big plain text file where I keep notes and stuff about companies once they get back to me after I send off a resume. I also have two email folders (one of all job search related stuff, the other for messages about upcoming or pending calls) and iCal.

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#54

Post by shinryuu »

So I assume that in the end employers will somehow pay for this product. I encourage you to think long and hard about the alignment problem.

If employers pay for this, when will the candidates experience suffer (and vice versa, the party that pays will always have priority though). How can you counteract this in the long-term?

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#55

Post by hubraumhugo »

Love the progress visualizations as sankey diagrams. Reminds me of the many posts on r/dataisbeautiful about job application progress, e.g.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/13if21g/oc...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vrdcfz/oc_...

You could build pretty cool statistics around this once you have enough data.

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#56

Post by romanhn »

lelanthran wrote: post #52

This looks good. How does the email addresses work? When I foward to sales@rolepad.com (or no@rolepad.com), how does it know that the message came from me[1]? Do you send back a confirmation I need to click on? Do I need to include a secret key in the subject line/body? [1] I assume that you already know that email from/reply-to headers are trivially spoofed (i.e. the email client will let anyone set any value for fr…

Yeah, this one I went back-and-forth a lot during initial implementation. It's not easy to find a balance between making it dead simple and preventing abuse. I kept it simple as far as forwarding goes - an account must exist for the sender address or else the email is not processed. For save@, I was mostly worried about covertly updating/creating opportunities based on emails alone, so there is a step where the user has to take a manual action to confirm the email note assignment. For no@, all the same outcomes, but also the sender is bcc'ed on the decline email.

In other words, theoretically spoofing could occur, but there are compensating controls in place to minimize any damage. Given a very low likelihood of an attack in this direction, that felt like a reasonable compromise. Would love to get feedback on that though!

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#57

Post by romanhn »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #55

Love the progress visualizations as sankey diagrams. Reminds me of the many posts on r/dataisbeautiful about job application progress, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/13if21g/oc... https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vrdcfz/oc_... You could build pretty cool statistics around this once you have enough data.

That's where I got my inspiration :)

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#58

Post by somsak2 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #51
smusamashah wrote: post #48

This looks great I am very suspicious about the company and interview reviews part. Glassdoor destroyed trust by giving incentive to employers destroying trust in reviews. I have a first hand experience about reviews I posted, and the fake reviews and then deletion of bad reviews of a company I worked for. It seems like any product offering public ratings will end up having fake ratings. What have you considered to m…

Same here. Glassdoor keeps saying everywhere that companies have no influence on the reviews. But they absolutely allow removal of bad reviews, even going as far as contacting our HR team offering it as a paid service.

What's funny is that these bad reviews actually do show up on the RSS feed, so you can read them even after they're removed.

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#59

Post by romanhn »

ickyforce wrote: post #42

Looks interesting, I'll probably try it. I think that the area where I'd love some tool to help me would be keeping track of phone calls - ideally even attaching recordings to a proper company, transcribing them and summarizing. It's easy to get back to an email because stored but in case of a phone call I need to make notes quickly. When I keep track of things in a text file or spreadsheet it's easy to get an overvi…

Some fantastic food for thought here, thank you!

Definitely will acknowledge that searching the provided data has room for improvement. Re: emails, it actually does have some rudimentary capability to detect which opportunity the email should be assigned to, based on a few factors - this too will be improved in the future. One workflow I've thought about was adding save@rolepad.com to cc/bcc on your outgoing emails to avoid the extra step. I have also kicked around the idea of creating custom Rolepad email addresses to use on outgoing resumes so that all communication is automatically captured in the system. Felt a bit fanciful at the time, curious if there's interest.

The multiple addresses is a doozy, will need to noodle on this. I guess easiest would be manually associating multiple emails with your account. Or the whole custom address thing...

Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

#60

Post by romanhn »

moneywoes wrote: post #50

May i ask what react tutorial you followed to make this? also, tools used

TBH, I just went through the official docs and that was sufficient - they are fantastic. I wrote a bit about my experience in the top comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35186812

Other tools? Have been using Visual Studio mostly (due to C#) until recently when I switched from a Windows laptop to a Macbook. Now all coding is in VS Code, which is ... good enough so far. Really the only other item worth mentioning is I bought the Tailwind UI component library early on. It's been a total lifesaver. Design does not come easy to me at all, and I was able to get started with semi-decent-looking UI from the get-go. It still requires a lot of effort to get things to where I like what I'm seeing, and there's still lots of iteration, but it was definitely the right move, and the cost was well worth it.

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