

Show HN: My idea to help job searchers. Link inside. - cmontgomeryb

Good evening HN.<p>I have been building a service for a few weeks in Rails, partly to gain familiarity with Ruby on Rails, but mostly as it's the service I was looking for a few weeks ago and couldn't find. Some days I think it's a fantastic idea; it would have solved my problem a few weeks ago, so surely other would like it! On other days it feels pointless. I'm looking for advice and opinion from HN before I sink too much time into this.<p>A bit of background: I have just got a new job. I already had a job, so I was in no rush to make a bad decision. When trawling the various job sites and careers pages of companies I was interested in, the problem for me wasn't finding job that I was interested in. Rather it was narrowing down to the ones that I wanted to apply for.<p>I had (still have!) a huge mess of bookmarked jobs.
I tried to enter the job details into a spreadsheet to compare them side by side (salary/bonus/skills etc). This doesn't work.
I create a directory for each company that I like, which will contain:
 - Any info from the company (PDFs detailing the job, assessment work they ask me to complete)
 - CV, tailored for that position
 - Cover letter, again tailored for that position
 - Notes, detailing any contact with the company and anything that enters my head (I usually end up with a good list of questions for interviews this way)<p>This was the most frustrating part of the job search for me; I found it hard to organize digitally.<p>My idea is to simplify this process by allowing the user to give my site a URL (in most cases from a job site such as monster) and my site goes away and grabs all the data it can about the job. The user collects jobs painlessly this way, and can then examine them at their leisure - something I'm very much still working on. I used a very early version of my site during the last week or so of my job search, and found it to be extremely useful.<p>To illustrate my idea, I have put online a VERY scrappy version. In the future when the site is 'finished', most of the ongoing development would be in writing and maintaining the interfaces to the various job sites. At the moment they aren't my focus as I have a decent base of data to work with; as such they have fallen into a state of... disrepair. As such I have only uploaded the monster.co.uk interface, and it isn't in that great condition. The following link is worth copying, if you paste it into my app it will serve as a good example, though feel free to play with any other links!<p>http://jobview.monster.co.uk/Social-Media-Assistant-Graduate-Online-Marketing-Executive-%E2%80%93-2-1-or-above-exceptional-graduate-Job-London-London-UK-97033328.aspx<p>Again, this isn't supposed to be an MVP! I am simply offering a peek into my idea! Is it worth pursuing further? I hope I explained it well, I'm no writer :)<p>The site is at: http://mycalling.co.uk (clickable link in comments)<p>Thanks for your time.
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cmontgomeryb
If anybody reads this: I think I have made 2 primary mistakes.

1) In this post, I was much too verbose and a lot of it wasn't relevant or
interesting to anybody who isn't already interested in the idea. I probably
did more to turn you off, than on to the idea. I will bear this in mind for
the "Show HN: MyCalling is live" announcement :)

2) I have overcomplicated what is a simple idea. To remedy this I have started
the web app again, and am focusing on a CLEAN and SIMPLE UI. More of a
Google/StackOverflow than a Yahoo! When the website in it's simplest form is
complete, I will shift focus to developing the interfaces to other websites.

Cheers to the 24 people who played with MyCalling, and especially to you
hobonumber1 for your comments.

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hobonumber1
Hey! I definitely think what you are trying to do is useful - the idea to
"compare positions across various aspects" seems like a worthy goal. I dont
think that your current UI facilitates this. I think that you should clearly
state what the app is for (which in my view is to compare various positions)
and work around that.

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cmontgomeryb
> I don't think that your current UI facilitates this

I completely agree and this is the thing that I am spending time trying to
work properly at the moment. The tabular view that you get at the moment is
more for demonstration purposes. The intention is to allow a more 'at-a-
glance' view of each job, as close to side-by-side as is possible, and to
allow the user to filter through the jobs.

I have a few ideas for this as I think that is what will make the difference
between the tool being useful or not, but thus far they are mainly implemented
in static HTML with dummy data, or only on paper.

Thanks a lot for your feedback :)

~~~
hobonumber1
I like the "automatically generate information from URL" aspect of your app a
lot. If users have to input stuff into fields, they will be less likely to use
the app, so I think that feature is really key. Good job, and good luck!

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cmontgomeryb
Clickable link: <http://mycalling.co.uk>

