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http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/3/26/when-jonny-met-stevie

by Peroni • 14 years ago

61 58 14 years ago

hackerjobs.co.uk

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

I haven't received my email to tell me that, are they going to be sent out?

Peroni19• 14 years ago

They are being sent as we speak

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

Got it, sorry for being impatient ;-)

ilcavero• 14 years ago

So what is really different compared to other job boards besides the good will of the admins to keep it clean of recruiters spam?

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Right now? Not a whole lot being honest. We have plenty of plans and features in the pipeline but the initial plan is to fill out our currently minimal feature set with what you'd expect a decent board to have, then add some more that we think are missing and can improve on what previous boards have done.

We're doing lots of offline work to make sure we get a good calibre of user, candidates and advertisers alike. we're not going to just throw money at PPC campaign, we want to build a good brand by going out and getting engaged in the community (we do it already, after all).

boothead2• 14 years ago

One of the jobs posted says "we pay in kit, holidays and (a little) cash".

That screams the complete opposite of a good calibre of advertiser to me I'm afraid. Which is a real shame because everything you've written in the past about the London recruitment scene is correct and I'd love to see some real changes in the industry!

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

Keeping a job board free of recruiters is quite hard. That's why for http://jobs.usethesource.com/ I made posting rights be based on your Hacker News karma. Be part of this community and you can post jobs on UseTheSource.

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Not so difficult when you used to be one yourself! Also, a blanket ban on recruiters is counter-productive as we have established that there clearly are a tiny percentage of decent recruiters, those are the ones we are happy to allow access to.

koopajah3• 14 years ago

There is a button for job offer "remote friendly" but no "tag" associated in the posting. And when reading the offer nothing indicates that the offer is really "remote friendly". Is it a hidden field selected by the recruiter when posting the offer? Are the tags added by you?

Peroni19• 14 years ago

When the employer fills out the job form they have the option to select remote friendly if they are willing to consider remote workers.

koopajah3• 14 years ago

For now, there is not a lot of offers as the site just launched but will you add the possibility to filter by experience and salary too ? Another important thing for me as I'm planning to move to London soon is the geographic location of the company as it may mean having 1.5hours of transport instead of 20 minutes each morning/evening.

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Yep. All in good time. As the jobs list grow, the search functionality will grow to match.

inm• 14 years ago

To follow up on this and what Steve's mentioned elsehwere, the locaation stuff is a prime example of the kind of thing we have in mind for future developments where we feel other sites lack.

Right now though this is just a minimal feature set. At midnight last night when I looked at 'add filtering to the search options' on my todo list I decided that with only a handful of jobs on launch day, this can wait. I guarantee though there will be better search filtering by the time the number of jobs has grown enough to warrant that.

ed209• 14 years ago

I don't care who the job comes via, as long as it's fair salary and a role I'm interested in. I've never used a recruiter so I can't comment on whether they'd get me a good job or not.

However, looking at the board there is a senior UX job for 6 weeks that is offering just £80 per day for a 9 hour day! http://hackerjobs.co.uk/jobs/2012/3/26/mid-senior-ux-designe...

If it's about the quality of jobs then surely this one falls short?

I would love to see a jobs board where salary is a mandatory field because calling a position Mid, Senior, Lead etc means something different at every company.

Peroni19• 14 years ago

When we originally received that post I was under the impression that the amount was per week. Turns out it's the total amount.

In fact, I'm going to pull that one now.

ianpri2• 14 years ago

Also agree with a mandatory salary field which is tied to an actual monetary amount. 'Negotiable' doesn't mean anything without some sort of range, surely every salary/perk is negotiable?

zerostar07• 14 years ago

Off topic, is "Hacker" the new trend? Like we 'll see hacker food, hacker cars, hacker pillows etc?

Akram• 14 years ago

I don't think so. If there are only programming and tech jobs on the site then the name is perfect.

ianpri2• 14 years ago

If a posting is marked as being contract and permanent such as http://hackerjobs.co.uk/jobs/2012/3/26/javascript-applicatio... perhaps have the ability for the advertiser to add seperate salaries for both? It reminds me of my daily CWjobs jobs alert offering roles for £50,000 per hour :)

davedx• 14 years ago

I had a similar idea for a startup, so I find it really interesting to see what you've done. My biggest question is:

How do you plan to monetize it?

Really nice looking site!

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Thanks!

Monetization: Charge for job postings further down the line once the site gets a bit of traction and regular traffic.

dancesdrunk3• 14 years ago

Have you considered doing the opposite - charging applicants a minor fee per application?

estel• 14 years ago

Any chance of having a mailing list for new job postings at some point? Looks like a sweet board though!

Peroni19• 14 years ago

It's on the list. It's down the line but it's on there!

latch• 14 years ago

- In the main job list, clicking anywhere in the cell should bring you to the job (since it does highlight the cell), not just clicking on the job title.

- Maybe this is a decimal vs space vs coma thing, but one just has a salary of "42.000" EUR while the other is "EUR 45000". The system should be able to make this consistent. Does the currency come before or after? And, FWIW, I read the first one as paying $42.

- As a foreigner, it's always nice to know any language expectation (I assume english, but that isn't always the case), as well as if they assist with relocation. I realize that's up to them to put in the description, but some hand holding would be nice.

- Qubit's salary of "£50k + bonus + shares + insurance + free food + the rest!" is lame..it expands the UI unecessarily. I'd put a lenght limit (and again, structure salary better overall)

- RSS? Most boards have it (or, I find a better structured json feed much better)

Peroni19• 14 years ago

In the main job list, clicking anywhere in the cell should bring you to the job (since it does highlight the cell), not just clicking on the job title.

Not sure I agree with you on this one mate but I'll keep it in mind.

Maybe this is a decimal vs space vs coma thing, but one just has a salary of "42.000" EUR while the other is "EUR 45000". The system should be able to make this consistent. Does the currency come before or after? And, FWIW, I read the first one as paying $42.

Salaries are entered in a freetext box currently. That will change down the line. Just trying to get a feel for what works at the moment.

Qubit's salary of "£50k + bonus + shares + insurance + free food + the rest!" is lame..it expands the UI unecessarily. I'd put a lenght limit (and again, structure salary better overall)

As above

RSS

Really high on the priority list.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

Re RSS, please let people create their own custom RSS feeds. Eg, I might only want to see opportunities within 50 miles of Nottingham above 30 grand:

http://hackerjobs.co.uk/rss/search?location=Nottingham&r...

Most of the listed jobs will end up being in London and there are a lot of developers (like me) who don't want to work there.

gitarr• 14 years ago

There is no good way of "drilling down" when browsing the jobs. Meaning I cannot look for existing locations and then by language etc.

Also, where are all the tags? I can see the popular ones, but none of the others.

These are the major problems that I see standing out.

Personally I really hate these "follow us on twitter and like us on facebook" kind of things. Be your own company.

If you ever implement a login system do not make it "connect with facebook" or similar, as people looking for or posting jobs deserve their privacy.

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Also, where are all the tags? I can see the popular ones, but none of the others.

The search functionality will improve over time and the tags are intended as a secondary measure of searching. They are more of a guide than anything else. If you want to find a Ruby related role simply stick Ruby into the search box.

Personally I really hate these "follow us on twitter and like us on facebook" kind of things. Be your own company.

We've been incredibly light on the social media links compared to every other job site out there. Regardless of whether you like them or not, gaining a following on popular social media sites is integral to getting your name out there.

If you ever implement a login system do not make it "connect with facebook" or similar, as people looking for or posting jobs deserve their privacy.

We will implement a login system but forcing people to connect to any other account will not be mandatory as I also feel like it's just overdone.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I really dislike using Facebook for login and always look for an alternative (and even cancelled my premium Spotify when they tried to ram it down our throats), but the bottom line is that in a lot of markets this is a killer feature. Facebook Connect and social widgets are successful because they work so well. If you want to take a moral stand against them, more power to you, but I don't think it's a smart business move.

nodemaker• 14 years ago

It would be nice if the interface to signing up for hacker jobs and looking at available jobs be only through the command line.

jawr• 14 years ago

Nice, looks great. There's a bug though; when you post a job with the same title on the same day, the slug is the same which obviously causes issues.

Peroni19• 14 years ago

You're right. We spotted that bug a bit too late last night (3am to be precise) and implemented an ugly work-around.

Jon (my co-founder and lead dev on the site) will be tackling that particular issue this evening.

lzy2• 14 years ago

Care to share how did you guys get started with a whole bunch of job listings? Contacting tech companies to provide free listings on your job board? Employers actually discovering your site and posting their jobs? Thanks!

I'm currently working on a job board in an entire different niche so I'd really appreciate your comments!

Peroni19• 14 years ago

I used to be a Tech Recruiter so as you can imagine I had quite a few contacts. That coupled with my involvement with Hacker News London, posting a notice on relevant sites like HN & Hackful got us enough jobs to kick the site off.

dancesdrunk3• 14 years ago

Also to add to Peroni - you can scrape recruitment sites (monster, gumtree, craigslist), get in touch with the relevant company asking if you can copy the job over to your site.

Most don't mind, and some are even happy if they do get a good applicant through your website instead of wherever they had initially posted their vacancy.

Just make sure there's no effort on their part, nor any hidden fees and they aren't signed up to your newsletter unless they specifically asked to be.

A mixture of scraping and contacts got us around 500 vacancies to launch qreer.com.

lzy2• 14 years ago

Thank you Peroni, DancesDrunk. I did not come from a recruitment background so I'd really appreciate the suggestions.

aptwebapps• 14 years ago

Right now job at the top of the list has its location 'Anywhere', but if I click on the Remote Friendly tab it doesn't show up.

I see this sort of thing all the time on job boards. I'd love to trust the filters but somehow I have to look through all the ads to be sure.

So I looked at the posting form and location is one entry with a text input and three rows below it is the job type section with checkboxes, one of which is remote.

I think you need to constrain the inputs more. Make it harder for people to mess up. Or, in this particular case, maybe put the remote checkbox up in the location row?

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Yep. In this circumstance it appears they simply forgot to check the box which I've since updated.

We are looking at different methods for job posting so today is a big learning curve for us!

sequoia• 14 years ago

First of all let me say kudos on the launch; I'm giving this feedback because it was my reaction and others might have the same:

The two claims in your site header made me curious: "Dealing in only the finest jobs for the finest people in tech" and "Post a Job It's free and it only takes 5 minutes." This made me scratch my head... how are they offering only the best listings if I can post in 5 minutes? Does that mean anyone can post anything? Because that doesn't sound like it will be a collection of "the finest jobs."

I did a test[1][2] and sure enough, there is no process of vetting the jobs. This, to me, says that the site will have all the same issues as e.g. Craigslist; perhaps more because craigslist actually charges to post a job in Boston. Basically: another random assortment of good jobs, bad jobs, scams, and time wasters. If you are claiming that your site deals with "only the finest jobs," you need to back that up with some actual mechanism to filter out bad jobs.

To your credit: the posting has been removed in the time it took me to write this comment. :) (Unfortunately most spammy/scammy/crappy job listings aren't as obvious as mine.)

[1] http://hackerjobs.co.uk/jobs/2012/3/26/best [2: screenshot of 1] http://i.imgur.com/d0r7E.png

Peroni19• 14 years ago

We made the decision to keep job posting free for now purely to help drive content and to give people a reason to return. The off-shoot of that is that we are manually vetting every single ad that gets posted.

Your test ad wasn't removed by a spam filter, it was removed by either myself or Jon manually.

Eventually you will have to pay to post your job on our site as well as more secure email verification but for now, we are happy staying up all hours of the night making sure that the quality remains high.

motters• 14 years ago

Having had experience with recruiters who were either clueless or merely rude/unprofessional it is indeed a good idea to try to produce something aimed at hackers (or at least moderately intelligent people) which hopefully isn't completely lame.

However, a quick review of the site didn't uncover anything which I wouldn't find elsewhere. Describing it as a UK jobs site, then allowing postings for jobs in Germany seems off topic.

Why do job-related web sites often suck? Usually it's that the job descriptions are too vague, are ineptly categorized, don't describe what the application is, or are excessively wordy and packed with 'buzz' terms or other meaningless fluff. These descriptions are often asking for highly capable people, but seem to have been written by someone who is only semi-literate or who only has the vaguest idea of what they want.

madaxe2• 14 years ago

Nice work guys, but I have a bug for you - if two people list jobs with the same title on the same day, the URL is identical, and whichever one got there first gets the page - see the "blubolt" listings on http://hackerjobs.co.uk/jobs that link through to Blooie's listing.

madaxe2• 14 years ago

Oh, and I recommend making the preview page more obviously a preview page, as the "confirm and review" and the info text is below the fold, on a page that looks identical to a completed listing!

ropz2• 14 years ago

http://www.jobsmanifesto.com

... another new UK jobs site, over 25,000 jobs, exactly zero agencies/recruiters. Generic site, but over 1000 IT Jobs.

Disclaimer: I know the dev team.

Peroni19• 14 years ago

Not even remotely comparable. The site you mention is essentially a link aggregator.

ropz2• 14 years ago

I guess it is a link aggregator. But they've got 25000+ links to real jobs, with not an agency or recruiter in sight. What's wrong with it being a link aggregator? I'm no expert, but I've not seen any other UK site that advertises so many non-recruiter jobs.

leeny• 14 years ago

Steve, I think the idea is terrific and am a fan of yours. I'm a recruiter, but I'm very pro any solution that cuts the amount of noise in this industry. I recently posted about this problem here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771806

That said, what incentive do recruiters have to email you and justify their existence when there are no constraints on posting a job?

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