Ask HN: How to do online jobs better?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889720

by albahk • 16 years ago

14 19 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have had a long-simmering desire to create a new kind of website for job-seekers. It is due largely to my experience of how demoralising and ineffective traditional job sites feel.

I really want to avoid the existing model which has job seekers trawling pages and pages of jobs and then shooting off tons of CVs and flooding the job-posters with irrelevant candidates.

I am hesitant to just slap on a 'social' type interface where you can connect using linkedin/facebook and refer friends etc but I have hit a mental brick wall about what other options I can consider.

Would love to hear from HN'ers some new angles or approaches to consider. Appreciate any and all input.

scrrr• 16 years ago

Hm. I'd say that is not the easiest target audience to go after. I think you are very likely to fail, even if you produce something revolutionary. If it's that good there are probably hundreds of competitors of which some will be able to copy it quickly. Plus you have to solve the chicken and egg problem, of course.

ismarc• 16 years ago

I've given this a significant amount of thought, with the end result being that to make a better experience for the job seekers you need to improve the experience for those seeking applicants as well. My initial thoughts are detailed better over at http://ismarc.tumblr.com/post/1458764869/hacking-the-hiring-.... I don't have a solution, and may never, but hopefully it'll jog your brain in a direction I haven't thought yet.

Robin_Message2• 16 years ago

EDIT: TL;DR: I see the primary problem with recruitment being far too many applicants for each job, because applicants apply to many, many jobs. Incentivise applying to only a few jobs and the employer gets fewer, better applicants.

For job-seekers, the marginal cost of one more application is too low, so companies get too many applications. With too many applicants, filtering becomes more random, so the reward for applying for a job you are only tenuously qualified for increases. It's a classic hawks vs doves with a big payoff for being a hawk amongst mostly doves

So, make it more expensive to apply for a job. Two ways I can think of doing this:

1. Charge applicants ten bucks to apply for a job. Have companies report if they were good enough but they found someone better. In that case, give them a refund. In all other cases, keep the money. (EDIT: This may possibly be illegal in some jurisdictions, but there are doubtless ways around that.)

2. Show companies how many jobs the applicant has applied for recently (not necessarily where they have applied, but you could perhaps positions/business areas) and/or restrict applicants to N applications per month. Aggressively detect and ban sock-puppetting — perhaps you can require verified ID of the applicant's name and get companies to check that is the name of the person applying.

You could also make things less stressful by operating on a say weekly or monthly cycle. Jobs are posted at the beginning of the month, applicants choose which N jobs they want to apply for, applications go out, new cycle starts. This avoids stampedes and requires applicants to be discerning.

Robin_Message2• 16 years ago

I'm confused: do people think these are bad ideas? Or that they couldn't be implemented? Or unethical or something? Or just having a bad day? I don't mind being downvoted; but I do like to have some idea why.

zlopid• 16 years ago

Limiting how many jobs people can apply to on your website isn't going to stop people from applying to lots of places, it just means that they're not going to use your website that much. And people looking for a job aren't going to drop a lot of money to apply for jobs because they don't have a source of income, which also makes them want to avoid your website. Sure, you could overcome these things if you had an extremely high placement rate, but that's going to be very hard, especially in the beginning.

Your core idea might be a good one, but companies have better ways of making applying more expensive. They have puzzles and automated assessments. Some places basically only hire people who can network in, others require a specific certification, and many bias towards people who have some public work.

arethuza3• 16 years ago

Social filtering - pay people you trust to do the filtering of applications for you.

Recruiters literally have no idea of what makes a decent candidate so they have to resort to simple (almost syntactic) measures - 6 years of C++, Oracle etc. where they have no idea of what those terms actually mean or how useful they are (what Oracle product - there are zillions of them).

I'd quite happily delegate filtering of candidates to people I trust and if they get paid for doing it then it is a win-win situation. If you had a site with effective workflow to manage each stage of the process then it could be pretty slick.

[NB I spent quite some time on this idea a while back but parked it to work on other ideas].

ig13• 16 years ago

One problem with this approach is that recruitment agencies are paranoid about control of their CV databases, those CVs are one of the main assets of the company and they go to great lengths to restrict access to them.

Opening those databases up to third parties might be a risk many of them are unwilling to take.

arethuza3• 16 years ago

I'm not sure the databases are that valuable - simply advertise the posts on the site (or on other websites). Which is exactly what recruiters do.

iworkforthem• 16 years ago

Er... Whose problems are you trying to solve? Job-seekers or recruiters?

ig13• 16 years ago

Have a look at dating sites, there's much more innovation going on in that space, and they're essentially having to deal with exactly the same matching problem.

However one of the big issues with innovating in this space is that HR departments are generally quite conservative so it's hard to sell innovative products to them (look at the difficulty SnapTalent had with their initial product).

You'll probably have more luck selling to third party recruiters who are more risk tolerant.

There's about a dozen companies currently doing the whole social network recruiting thing, but none of them has serious traction, and I'm not personally convinced it's a model that will work.

I'm working on this problem by building a niche job site, it's not hugely innovative technically, but it should help with the relevance problem and also be traditional enough to appeal to HR departments.

One of the other ideas I had in this space was building a platform for matching recruiters to candidates, so recruiters could send targeted messages to candidates matching a set criteria (+using game mechanic techniques to stop spamming). If you want to talk more about this idea feel free to drop me a message.

noahc• 16 years ago

As a job Seeker, I'm looking for high quality jobs and low noise. What this points out to me is that it needs to be a curated list. You could go with letting users vote up good jobs and vote down bad jobs, but this creates an incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already hoping no one else applies.

One model might be a curated niche of job postings for whatever niche you would understand the most. Then you need a way to reduce the talent pool the HR department sees.

One way to do this is give the job applicant a way to do a 'quick pitch' and the HR department can click a button called 'Tell me more' and the jobs process can go from there if both parties are interested. Maybe you could display stats as a way to incentive certain actions. If a job applicant has applied to 300 job offers with a cut and past and has only got 3 tell me mores, that would show to to the HR applicant. If however, a job applicant had a 98% tell more more rating on 30 job applications that means he's probably customizing it and the HR department can tell he probably has a pretty good EQ.

jamii3• 16 years ago

> this creates an incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already hoping no one else applies.

Should be fairly easy to solve this. You can only apply for jobs through a form that appears once you vote up. Once you apply your vote is fixed.

jamii3• 16 years ago

I wrote my own job search engine after getting fed up of the existing crap. It pulls in rss feeds and mailing lists and even does a bit of crawling via HN and Reddit to find jobs. I used a trainable classifier to filter out most of the dross.

The main problem with job sites is matching jobs to applicants. As far as I know noone has gone beyond simple keyword searching. If you had an actual userbase you could make use of collaborative filtering techniques (like Amazons recommendations) to provide a tailored service to each user. CVs, personal blogs and github accounts give you enough information to seed each users recommendations even before they start rating jobs.

lachyg• 16 years ago

This is what I'm trying to work on. How did you train your search engine?

What sort of collaborative filtering techniques? How would that work? I'm intrigued! Would love to chat further via email.

jamii3• 16 years ago

> How did you train your search engine?

I used some pretty simple techniques: one bayesian filter to filter jobs from other posts in mailing lists etc, one bayesian filter to score jobs based on keywords. Both filters were trained by feedback from the console ui. The main problem is excluding site-specific keywords that distort the scoring (eg if a site with mostly crappy jobs includes its own name in the listing then even the good jobs will score low by association). A lot of job sites have manky markup so I also had a different scraping script for each site to extract text. All in all its only a couple of hours work. I've been thinking recently about extending it and adding a simple web ui, since finding freelance work is pretty time consuming.

> What sort of collaborative filtering techniques?

I didn't have any specific in mind but there are plenty of good machine learning books that cover different tecniques. If you don't already have a background in maths then 'Programming Collective Intelligence' is a good book to start with. 'The Elements of Statistical Learning' goes into a lot more detail but requires some basic maths.

> Would love to chat further via email.

Email is in my profile.

jlovelass• 16 years ago

I agree that most of the existing job search engines are crap. Keyword searches aren't effective and everyone involed gets bombarded with irrelevant responses. Check out www.wyckwyre.com we created this because we were fed uo just as you are.

frobozz• 16 years ago

When using such sites, from a candidate's point of view, the two things that get on my nerves are:

a) Ads posted by Recruitment Agents giving me no idea who the actual employer might be.

b) Ads with no sensible salary hint.

On (b), I don't mind there being a wide band (e.g. 25-60K, depending on experience), as at least that is a hint. What I really hate is "£Competitive" or "£Neg+Bens" and other such non-information.

Ask HN: How to do online jobs better?

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