

 Feedback on my startup job aggregator - agotterer
http://www.startupshiring.com

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agotterer
Today I launched Startups Hiring. The idea is simple; eliminate recruiter
posts, noise and the need for startups to maintain and manage job postings on
third party job boards. I ended up building a curated list of companies that
are crawled for open positions directly from their career pages. Links are
fresh and updated daily. Clicking a link takes you directly to the job
description on the company website. The service is free and we are adding new
companies every day.

I would love to hear feedback from the HN community and suggestions on
possible ways to generate revenue outside of featured links (which I have).

~~~
grasshoper
First of all, let me say I think your site is exceptionally attractive. I am
immediately presented with the logos of scores of exciting startups. This
engages me right away. Although, at the moment the front page is a bunch of
Airbnb listings. I think the variety of logos does a lot for the site's first
impression, so you might want to make sure there aren't too many listings of a
single company on the front page. Also remember to add a favicon.

Featured links seems like a good way to go. Do you actually have companies
paying for featured links at the moment?

Edit: Oh, and your Adap.tv logo is broken.

~~~
agotterer
Thanks for the feedback. Currently when you add a new company it does the
initial crawl and brings in all of their listings. Future crawls only bring in
the new listings, keeping the cmpany variety good and mixed. I haven't come up
with a good way to get around the initial crawel yet, short of randomizing the
dates for launch.

All the logos are from crunchbase. I will shoot them a message.

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mmaunder
Grats! A few suggestions from the guy who ran WorkZoo.com - also a job
scraper, one of Time Mag's top 50 sites of 2005 - sold to Jobster in the same
year:

-Republish the jobs in a directory by location on your own domain. Big SEO win.

-Scrape the big boards but link to them (as you already are linking to the source). They won't mind and when we stopped scraping Careerbuilder they called us and asked why.

-Try solving the location problem by getting a list of the 5000 biggest cities in the US and parsing the content for those cities. Filter out common english words from the list of 5000 cities though. Make sure you store lat/lon once you've tagged a job with a city so you can do radius search.

-Forget categories for the UI. Users can just use search to find what they want. If you need categories for your directory then come up with a list of 100 search queries and use that to generate 100 "categories".

-This really needs to be a search engine so shove it into sphinx or a similar fulltext engine. I used to use swish-e which sucked so badly - I envy the options you have for fulltext these days.

-Not really sure why you're limiting yourself to startups, but if this is just a fun project or a way to contribute to the community then that's the way to go. If you want to earn $$ then I'd index everything or perhaps the most lucrative sectors.

If you're serious about this be sure to chat to Dave McClure who used to run
marketing for SimplyHired and take a look at simplyhired.com and indeed.com
for biz model and implementation ideas. I'm also happy to be an advisor if
this turns into a business.

Best of luck!!

~~~
tansey
I think the whole point is that some people want to go work for only startups.
By creating a site where you know those are the only jobs, you attract that
niche. The market for general developer job boards seems very saturated.

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joshwa
\- can't search by location (searching for "new york" has many false positives
and missing results)

\- need an option to flag a listing for incorrect information (e.g.
<http://www.dailymotion.com/us/about/jobs#ref05> comes up as being in Paris),
job no longer available, etc

\- would be nice to see some indication of _when_ a job was posted-- stale
listings have less value.

~~~
agotterer
Haven't actually added location search yet. Thats next. Its also really
difficult to determine the location because I'm working with limited data. The
idea was to use the headquarter data, especially since most startups don't
have multiple locations.

I will add the "discovery" date to give a bit better idea of when things were
found. But my crawler removes jobs that are no longer listed, so the results
should always be fresh within a day.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
huhtenberg
"Discovery" date is very useful for filtering out generic job postings that HR
sometimes keeps up just to collect the resumes. Not sure if this is at all
legal in the US, but in Canada this is a very common practice.

With regards to the location uncertainty - better not show anything in this
case. Until you said "headquarters" I didn't even bother to look at the name
of the column and assumed it was the location of the actual position.

Also the information on your site is not meant for pleasure reading, it is
meant for scanning. As such the list needs to be _much_ more compact. I'd take
the logotypes out, reduce the line-height as well as the width of the table.

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j_baker
Allow me to play devil's advocate. There are _plenty_ of job listings for all
kinds of companies including startups. Why do I want to use yours?

~~~
agotterer
You're right. The best startup job site in my opinion is startuply. The
problem is it's not every startup. They only have what a company willingly
goes and posts. Startups Hiring is in its infancy, so theres not a lot of
companies yet. But the end goal is the be the largest list of startup jobs. I
think the only way to attain this is be eliminating the requirement of a
company physically going and making a post.

~~~
wildmXranat
Coincidentally , startuply's main page is throwing this lovely error:
<http://pastebin.com/7pCDmJBS> .

In any case, location search should exist. It is one of the most important
requirements that a job seeker uses to filter desirable listings.

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kunjaan
This is a great idea. I am graduating soon and would love these kinds of
sites.

I wish there was an advanced search where I could at least search if the
company was looking for fresh graduates or senior engineers.

If you really want me to sign up, create a "favorite" button so that I can
look at the job later.

I also wish there was a time of the post or some indication of how old the job
posting is.

Thanks.

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webwright
Some sort of categorization might be worthwhile (and do-able, since you're
sticking in the startup vertical). Maybe tags/labels, given that your audience
is pretty geeky? i.e. "engineering, design, mobile, marketing, management",
etc. Browsing 600+ jobs is not just about good pagination controls.

+1 on the searchability issues. Should be able to search by city/region.

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rpledge
Location search (or at least sort) would be good. I'd love to see a set of
icons that give extended info for each job (i.e. willing to hire remote
workers, maybe funding stage or approximate company size)

~~~
shadowspar
Seconded on this, plus the ability to sort/filter on these criteria. For me,
the ability to search for "only telecommute jobs" is the make or break factor
on whether or not a job board is worth my while.

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Vistico
This is Great. I was going to ask what direction you were going to take this
in.. but it's interesting that you only have jobs listed for/at really startup
companies that most geeks want to work at. I'd say you should drive that point
home a little more if that is what your focusing on.

Otherwise, yeah dude take it to the next level. Keep reaching out to add more
of them.. I'm sure you can be well known for offering jobs in this space..
great quick clean idea!

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jonathanmarcus
Very cool Adam! Ive always wanted a site like this. Definitely keep it focused
exclusively on start-ups and never touch the Monsters of the world.

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mattthered
-I would build this on top of an existing job board platform. There are plenty out there, no need to reinvent the wheel.

-Include job description summaries on your site - use some kind of onmouseover div if you don't want to clutter the page.

-Have you considered scraping from other startup job boards out there?

-How are you planning on monetizing the site?

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matttah
It seems your search might not be working properly,
<http://www.startupshiring.com/search/PHP> brings back nothing, yet you have
at least one(the collegehumor PHP developer position).

~~~
agotterer
I think my fulltext search might be killing off words that are 3 letters or
under. Will have to look into that. Thanks.

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clutchski
This might seem crazy, but I keep reading the url as "startup shiring". Too
much LOTR, maybe.

~~~
bmm6o
That's how I read it too. I couldn't imagine the exact metaphor he was going
for (companies start in the shire before adventuring out into the world?), but
it's not off-putting, at least. It's no expertsexchange.

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noodle
thoughts:

it would be very useful to have the ability to filter/sort the listings based
on things like job types (developer, dba, sales, etc), posted time (if you
can), or location.

you've eliminated the recruiter posts/noise/etc., but in doing this, you've
become the new middleman. you might be able to contact the companies and find
out if you could negotiate any referral bonus if someone gets hired through
the use of your site. worth a shot, at least.

~~~
agotterer
I'm planning to add a tags system that will organize jobs and companies by
their type. Thats up next!

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known
May be you should tie-up with <http://www.linkup.com/>

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smokinn
It would nice to able to sort by those headings your have (Company and
location especially)

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tansey
Your search feature filters out #, so searching for "C#" yielded search
results for C.

~~~
agotterer
Sounds like theres a few problems with my fulltext search. Going to update it
sometime today to be more accurate. Thanks!

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cheriot
For startups, a categorization by stage of company would be usefull.

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Prathees
first rxn "wonderful!!!"

I like the idea and the simple design. hope you'll resolve the little problems
in search - eg: search on company name not returning any results

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yoseph
Agotterer,

I LOVE the simplicity of your design. Well done!

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jzting
looks good, though it's a bit strange that the "n results found" copy reflects
the results only on the current page, not all search results.

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rajatmehta1
how about putting the salary range as well if possible, something similar to
indeed.com.

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kloncks
Internships Support?

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fady
great job1

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giantfuzzypanda
I love how simple it is. In fact, this couldn't have taken more than 30
minutes to make. Not always a bad thing though.

Giving users the ability to find jobs where they live might be a good idea
right? Maybe. Who knows, maybe you prefer scrolling through 50 pages instead.

~~~
agotterer
Ha. The design took a few hours. Coding the site took a bit longer :)

~~~
LeBlanc
The simple and clean design is actually what I like best about the site. I'm
sure you've seen www.startuply.com (which is amazingly down right now because
of an asp.net web.config error, wow!) That might be a good source of job leads
for your crawler.

I also really like how you link to the companies website and not to some 3rd
party job posting. Have you thought about adding more info to the start-up
profile page on your site?

~~~
agotterer
Startuply has been down since last night :\

I'm pulling a lot of my company data from crunchbase. I plan on adding a full
profile in the next few weeks.

