

Ask HN: Is HN the best place to be listing job posts? - phantom_oracle

I see that quite a few companies (big and small) post on the monthly &quot;Who is hiring?&quot;, but I&#x27;ve found that the so-called UX of browsing through this is quite discomforting.<p>Between the &quot;expired or unknown link&quot; issues and the blocks of text, is there a better way to do the monthly hiring thing?<p>Maybe someone is scraping HN to display the job posts in a more appealing way. If not, would anybody like to work with me to build something like that?<p>I could do it on my own, but I seem to find it more interesting to try building things in a remote, distributed team.<p>We can also open-source the code once we build it.
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tptacek
Until about a year ago, HN was our single best hiring vector. Some of the
smartest people at Matasano got to us through posts on hiring threads. So,
I'll go with "yes" on the headline.

On the other hand, I am always a little irritated when people scrape the
hiring threads and reframe them. When we've posted job ads on HN, we've done
it deliberately and with the expectation that those ads will be seen in the
proper context. You should get permission before you scrape content off HN and
reframe it.

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dharma1
what works better for you now?

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nickbarnwell
I'd hazard a guess that it's the effort they've invested in the Matsano
Challenges or their collaboration with Stripe during their last CTF

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necubi
I run [http://hnhiring.me](http://hnhiring.me), which scrapes the monthly
posts and presents them in a nicer format. I haven't had much time to work on
it lately, but the code is open at
[http://github.com/mwylde/hnhiring](http://github.com/mwylde/hnhiring) if
you'd like to contribute or use it as a starting point.

Also, personally I've found the posts to be very useful. I found my current
job from a post on the monthly thread.

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stormbrew
The only thing that bothers me about the format is that the jobs are almost
all always outside my area (and for a variety of personal reasons I'm not
interested in moving right now) and so the only ones I really want to look at
are the ones tagged remote, but so many postings mention that they're not
hiring remote that it makes it more difficult to find them with a simple text
search.

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rdl
In theory, but it seems like it's gotten substantially worse over the past
year or two.

The only ironclad hiring process I've ever had has been "work on non-
commercial/open source/fun project with someone, then hire that person". But
that doesn't scale at all.

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rpicard
Here's one site doing that, but I don't have a problem with the HN threads.

[http://curatedhnhiring.com/](http://curatedhnhiring.com/)

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e12e
No votes for
[http://careers.stackoverflow.com/](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/) ? While
I'm not quite looking for a job right now, that's been one of the most
interesting places for me (as a potential coder/system engineer) too look
(other than here on HN). UI is much better, and a lot of the positions look
interesting.

Any experience from the hiring side with stack overflow?

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mooreds
I was hiring a junior webdev in Boulder, CO and got some good candidates from
SO. About 300 bucks for one month lowest tier ad. It was useful because I felt
I had tapped out my network and the free sites.

Their UI is great, and the times (not many) I had to deal with sales they were
helpful.

Ended up making the hire from CL, though.

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phantom_oracle
I think this one is pretty okay to resolve some of the difficulties:

[http://curatedhnhiring.com/](http://curatedhnhiring.com/)

It seems to have filters in place to find the right type of work (like remote,
h1b, etc).

What I'm curious to know is whether we can get a hold of this guys code and
extend it even more (like use openstreetmap, etc.)

Okay the code is available!

[https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated-hn-
hiring](https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated-hn-hiring)

It looks to be written in Node and was last updated in November. A majority of
the work is done (scraping, etc.) so we could just build on top of it now.

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500and4
I built [http://www.zonino.co.uk](http://www.zonino.co.uk) with some pals to
try and scrape all the jobs available at tech startups in London. Works
reasonably well and doesn't look awful. We don't scrape HN for jobs and right
now we only have London companies. We're not making any money from it... is it
the kind of thing you've got in mind?

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IndieDevClub
I thought this post was going to ask... why are any of you looking for jobs?
Isn't HN for entrepreneurs and founders? Is everyone else too scared to live
in poverty until their ideas succeed?

That's what I think when I see "Who's Hiring" thread, but maybe I think
differently.

~~~
phantom_oracle
I think HN itself is meant more for people interested in technology.

I would go out on a limb and say that there are likely more workers here than
founders.

Also, somewhat ironically, very few "Who is hiring" posts are from startups
themselves, unless you broaden the definition of startup and consider
profitable young firms in there too.

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sunwooz
I started an HN scraper like necubi at
[http://hackerjob.herokuapp.com](http://hackerjob.herokuapp.com). It's nowhere
near done, but It's getting there! I'm a student at flatiron school in nyc and
this is my first side project.

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lsiebert
Heh, I don't have a website to reframe hn, just a command line tool I wrote
for my own use.

[http://github.com/gryftir/gutsy](http://github.com/gryftir/gutsy)

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lumens
Check out [https://www.mightyspring.com/](https://www.mightyspring.com/)

Job postings are easy to build from scratch and the candidate pool is strong.

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hphu
There is [http://hnhiring.me/](http://hnhiring.me/) but its in a similar
format, what would you change about the display?

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karangoeluw
I can help out. Message me so we can talk about it.

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hydralist
how about condensing those monthly threads into a monthly email digest?

