It is nice to see that you mention GDPR in your legal documents. Can you tell me can I export my data in some json, csv or some similar format?
Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
61–70 of 140 posts
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#62So 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?
I think I answered a very similar question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37797516. Believe me, I have been thinking hard about alignment, conflicts of interest, privacy implications, etc. Alienating the candidate side will basically nullify the core premise of the platform, so avoiding short-term thinking and bonehead decisions is top of mind.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#63This 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.
Somehow it could be possible to created a "trusted review" system, based on existing tools. See "Comments & reactions" on https://profiles.joblist.today/companies/, where login is made with Github, and peers can "upvote" comments with reactions.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly think you should aim to make jobseekers pay instead of the job offerers. The automation of job applications means that basically everyone tunes out when they hit 100+ CV's, go post a small wage globally remote job to test and you will see what I mean. A dollar here or there definitely means your clients will get actual people who are serious about wanting it rather than the current spray and pray system th…
> I honestly think you should aim to make jobseekers pay instead of the job offerers. If I was a job seeker, specially if I was out of a job, I would never ever spend a single cent on a job application service, particularly one that does not work as a job board. All job boards such as LinkedIn already support some job application tracker features, including through third-party services. If you have access to a text f…
> If I was a job seeker, specially if I was out of a job, I would never ever spend a single cent on a job application service
Find this very hard to believe. You really wouldn't spend $1 to submit a job application to a position that is your bread and butter while unemployed? Even if it meant there wasn't hundreds of others spamming the same endpoint? Taking such an ideological high ground over a few cents rarely works out well.
I've seen/been on both ends long before covid/wfh stuff and the worldwide remote market is a complete fucking mess today due to automation, it's bots all the way down and not a single bit closer to good client/contractor relationships, you really have to wade through the weeds to find anyone half decent.
Again, I ask you to post a job online and see the results for yourself then reconsider my comment.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#65This 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…
To be perfectly honest, I don't have a great answer here yet. While the US has the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Glassdoor lost an important court case that saw a US court force them to furnish reviewer info to a non-US entity (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...). Terrible precedent, IMO.
Some of the early thinking I've done is around the system being able to verify that a user did in fact apply to a company (assuming company is a customer of Rolepad). That provides some initial guarantees about the author of the data. With some ATS integration, there could be fairly concrete numbers on "how quickly did X happen" that don't even need to be sourced from the candidate. That said, there is always a bit of a "he said, she said" with reviews, and I haven't fully figured out an obvious way forward here. I think the general sentiment I've seen is that Glassdoor and Yelp reviews should be treated with a grain of salt, but they're still better than nothing.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#66It is nice to see that you mention GDPR in your legal documents. Can you tell me can I export my data in some json, csv or some similar format?
Not yet in an automated fashion. Interesting to see this request pop up a few times now today. I would attempt to provide this manually to comply with the spirit of GDPR data portability clause for now. Note that I don't claim GDPR compliance for Rolepad at this stage, but would do my best to ensure data privacy and security.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#67This 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…
> 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!
I don't have good recommendations right now[1], but I think not having a way to opt-out for those who are security conscious is a turn-off for some people. After all, having opt-out[2] doesn't impact the existing users who don't care (they won't even notice), while those who care can turn it off.
I mean, as a user I disagree with your assessment of the probability of an attack using this vector, but I don't want to argue with you about it, I just want to turn it off for my account.
After all, if I said something similar about an exploit in my product, I can expect to get roasted by the users. For example, if there is a well-known buffer-overflow in my product, and I said something like this:
"In other words, theoretically users could send a value for the 'email' field larger than 255 bytes and smash the stack, but there are compensating controls in place to minimize the damage from overwriting the return address. Given a very low likelihood of a user sending more than 255 bytes for an email address, it felt like a reasonable compromise."
With security you can't really tell in advance how an exploit might be escalated. The only damage you see from allowing spoofed emails is "attacker causes candidates to reject a position they don't want to reject". Could there be others?
Could a coworker who knows I am on the prowl send an email to no@ with my address set in the 'from:' field and his set in the "forwarded" email? At the very least this sounds like a leak of account email addresses.
Still, see my point [2] below - maybe the return on implementing controls for attack prevention won't help your product at this stage. It might make more business sense to rely on mitigating the damage than preventing it.
[1] Simple: Don't send anything, place it in an outbox that the user can review before hitting 'send all'. Complex: Require user to upload their public key and process messages signed with the private key. Neither of these are 'good' in the sense of frictionless management via email.
[2] It depends on how much time you have. If this is a thing that would take 4 hours to implement, test and document, maybe you product has more pressing issues that those 4 hours would be better spent on. You'll have to triage the feedback you get and determine which feedback would result in the most takeup. IME, people often don't care about security, so you might find that spending even 5m on this has less positive influence on the business than spending those 5m cold-calling customers.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly think you should aim to make jobseekers pay instead of the job offerers. The automation of job applications means that basically everyone tunes out when they hit 100+ CV's, go post a small wage globally remote job to test and you will see what I mean. A dollar here or there definitely means your clients will get actual people who are serious about wanting it rather than the current spray and pray system th…
As a currently not employed person, one interesting thing to note about me is that I have no income, which means not much money to pay for things.
I see this argument a lot, yet it falls apart upon closer inspection, I'm talking a few dollars a month to put your best foot forward at jobs that suit you rather than spray at basically every single open position and take whatever you can get.
Try to see this from the other side of the equation.
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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! I don't have good recommendations right now[1], but I think not having a way to opt-out for those who are security conscious is a turn-off for some people…
Just want to say I super appreciate your balanced perspective here. I'm not a security engineer by trade, so getting this sort of feedback is quite valuable.
The no@ scenario is an interesting one. The opt-out would certainly be one clean approach here. Going to give it some thought!
Re: Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which proves the point that Glassdoor is lying :-)