Show HN: EmployIQ – A slightly smarter job search engine

https://www.employiq.com

by briholt • 12 years ago

39 25 12 years ago

briholt6• 12 years ago

Creator here. This is a little project I'm working on to apply some better natural language processing to job searching. As it stands now with most job search engines, a search for "software engineer" won't return jobs posted as "software developer" when obviously these jobs should appear in the same results. As such, I'm applying some machine learning/language processing to try and group relevant jobs together. The site currently has about 20,000 jobs and is adding about 3,000 per day - by no means comprehensive, but the list of sources is growing. About 80% of jobs found are tagged with a correct career tag. Take a look at some examples:

* https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/programming - contains all jobs relating to software development, even though they have a wide range of titles and descriptions.

* https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/mobile-app - dives further into software development for mobile apps, iOS, and Android

* https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/culinary - I'm not just focusing on tech jobs, I'm trying to categorize every common job in the USA.

Lots of little tweaks to make over the coming weeks, but I wanted to share what I've done so far and hear any feedback you all may have.

Edit: Email info@employiq.com to say hi.

iamshs• 12 years ago

Interesting. I like the simplicity. Is there any way to get in touch with you?

briholt6• 12 years ago

Sure, it's info@employiq.com

dang• 12 years ago

Stories without urls get penalized, so we added your site url to the post.

pibefision• 12 years ago

Nice experience. Are you spidering job sites to gather information or just have API's with some of them? Tks

briholt6• 12 years ago

A little of both - some sites (smartly) offer an API feed, some have easy-enough to scrape sites. Getting wide coverage will be an ongoing and difficult challenge.

palakchokshi2• 12 years ago

Ok from a positioning and marketing viewpoint don't share something that says it's a smarter job search engine if there is no freeform keyword search feature and it doesn't explain what makes it smarter on the website. This is basic stuff.

dalacv• 12 years ago

I searched for jobs in Dallas, TX and it showed me jobs for Virginia

briholt6• 12 years ago

Good find. It's confusing Arlington, TX with Arlington, VA. This is happening because "Arlington, VA" was listed as "Arlington, DC" because it's a suburb of DC and thus wasn't matching. Mutli-state regions like this are a tricky. I've updated it so new jobs will be categorized corretly and old jobs will be recategorized tonight.

joshuakarjala• 12 years ago

Same with https://www.employiq.com/jobs/springfield-mo/all

Showing from a bunch of other Springfields

arikrak• 12 years ago

You should let people type their location and maybe their job as well.

notastartup• 12 years ago

can you explain what makes it "smarter" ?

AznHisoka• 12 years ago

why won't it let me search for a keyword if it's a search engine?

Shad0w59• 12 years ago

I'm not in the US so don't have a use for this but I had to post to say I love the design and simplicity - makes a change from the cluttered crap/fluff I have seen in this sector.

spudlyo• 12 years ago

Lacking even a basic keyword search, I'm afraid this product falls well short of its tagline. Can you call it a search engine without a search feature? I do appreciate the ability to see jobs in a given category across all regions, but I was quickly frustrated by not being able to search.

palakchokshi2• 12 years ago

I have to second this. In what way is this smarter job search? Selecting a keyphrase from a drop down and a region does not make a job search engine smarter.

findjashua• 12 years ago

I like the clean and simple design. A couple of things:

1. I think some categories should be lumped into one, and be allowed as filters. Eg., I see Node.js, Perl, PHP programming etc, but I think adding a category for each language will make it too noisy. I'd lump all these into 'backend developer' and allow the user to filter by the specific language.

2. Users should have a way to suggest categories/filters. I do mainly Python and Javascript, and didn't see either on the list. So I searched for web developer, full-stack, backend, frontend, and didn't find any of those either. It'd be nice if users could suggest these.

briholt6• 12 years ago

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback.

On point 1, there is currently a category for "programming" which includes all languages (https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/programming) and on point 2 there is a "Python" category and for front-end JS there is a "UI/UX" category. So I think the bigger issue is how to better display the list of categories. This will be a trade off of specificity vs. simplicity. Ultimately the solution is to allow you to type a search term and then automatically translate that into the appropriate category. Several commentors have complained about not being able to free enter a search term - the reason this isn't there is I simply haven't built the search-term-to-category engine yet.

zura• 12 years ago

Could you please add "US-only" in your title? Thanks.

josephjrobison• 12 years ago

Housekeeping jobs, but no marketing or SEO related jobs. Looks like a good start though!

memonkey• 12 years ago

Love this. One kinda hard feature suggestion for the future is filtering out recruiters (when/if you implement an 'advanced' search).

abhimskywalker• 12 years ago

This seems interesting. Just a couple of suggestions:

1. Perhaps add an autocomplete for all the tags/tracks instead of a drop-down. An additional benefit of this text based search-box would be to see what all are people searching for which they can't get in autocomplete. These terms in descending order of frequency should give you a nice view of demand areas where your listings (or tagging) are not proving to be enough. (This should also address the many comments you are getting for no text-based search

2. The site looks minimal and nice, but you might also perhaps want to maybe consult a good designer for a nice color palette. The blue color of links to jobs (column "Position") kind of sticks out form rest of the theme of pages. Also with minimal amount of efforts the drop-downs(which you will hopefully soon convert to autocomplete boxes :) ) can be styled to look better. (Just my opinion.)

And I was also curious where are you sourcing these listings from?

Good work! Hope to see this project progress.

avinassh• 12 years ago

Why there is no 'Python Programming' in 'All Professions' :(

briholt6• 12 years ago

Good suggestion, adding that now.

Show HN: EmployIQ – A slightly smarter job search engine

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