
Show HN: TrueJob 1.0 – Pandora for jobs and data for everyone - eggbrain
https://www.truejob.com/?release=1.0
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jabberwocky923
How is this similar to Pandora?

In Pandora you specify one song/band you're interested in, and it shows you a
list of similar things.

Can I say that I work at Microsoft, and have it show me a list of jobs that
are super comparable to my current position? This would be great for pivoting
out of a stagnant job...not something I need now, but I've been there in the
past.

I see an incredible amount of voting, highlighting, keywording, etc. Maybe I'm
missing it.

I'm almost certainly being nitpicky about how you invoke Pandora.

~~~
eggbrain
Our tagline has always been a bit of a struggle -- we originally said OkCupid
for jobs, and then tried (briefly) doing Tinder for Jobs, but none of it felt
really "close" to what we were going for.

The idea behind using the Pandora analogy was: when you start a new station on
Pandora, you input something you want to listen to, and it starts playing
music, at which point you can "like" or "dislike" the song to get Pandora to
"learn" what type of music you like.

In that same way, you can "like" or "dislike" a lot of things about a job
posting, and then we can give job recommendations will try to find jobs that
fit you based on that.

But even outside that, we also allow you to filter through a bunch of other
things, so the Pandora analogy breaks down somewhat fast about that time. If
people have thoughts as to how we can describe this differently, we're all for
it :)

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ryanSrich
Why are you trying to force yourself as a comparison to other companies? In
certain cases it makes complete sense and from a brand building perspective
can work wonders, but it doesn't always work. I would focus more on describing
the value of the product in a clear and concise way.

~~~
eggbrain
I agree, I've never been a fan of "X for Y" type of analogies, but our
service/services is hard to describe succinctly -- we want to get across that
we are a "smart" job search company, and we have the thumbs up and thumbs down
like Pandora, but also that we are more than that, including giving analytics
that end up being very useful.

We've thrown around "Data driven startup job search" and "Recommendation based
job search engine", but those are pretty vague and don't feel quite right
either.

To be honest, we're so close to this, that we would love an outsiders take on
us -- if you had to describe us, what would you call us? Maybe we just always
overthink it and someone will have the perfect way to describe us :)

~~~
melicerte
Jobs you like

~~~
adunsmoor
Jobs like you

~~~
cjslep
You like Jobs

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enahs-sf
Having spent the last few years working on the jobs industry/problem, I wish
you the best. Most of the major players function on antiquated business models
that have carried over from the newspaper days. Measuring success is still
done on a pay-per-click basis, which in the scope of hiring really makes no
sense. I hope you can move the needle forward!

~~~
IndianAstronaut
This is the number one issue people who post jobs on job sites have. Too many
useless clicks and completely unqualified applicants such as plumbers applying
to programming jobs.

~~~
enahs-sf
I think a cost per application system makes much more sense in terms of
measuring ROI and trying to solve for cost per hire.

The hard part of creating a matching algorithm for jobs is dealing with people
who are looking to change careers. For example the plumber who has been
reading up on algorithms and learning C++ in her spare time. Your algorithm
would likely classify this person to a plumber career track based on her
experience, but struggle to show this person jobs in programming. On the flip
side of your marketplace, you would likely screen this persons application
from ever going to this employer for just the same reason. The experience on
their resume is irrelevant for a programming job. This in my experience is the
crux of the job industry problem today.

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anaolykarpov
Looks interesting. Some possible improvements:

* add salary info (where that's available) * offer the possibility to search for remote jobs

~~~
eggbrain
Remote jobs has been one of the most requested filters from the feedback we've
gotten, so we're definitely looking into that. Salaries are harder (since we
gather jobs directly from company websites and salaries are rarely listed),
but in the future the hope would be to use the salary data we do have to at
least suggest what salaries are for comparable jobs. Stay tuned!

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donretag
Cannot right-click or shift-click to open a job in a new tab. I do not want to
click the back button when browsing a list. I want to open each item in a new
tab.

~~~
mwkling
That makes sense. We'll look at making an update so that works.

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eggbrain
Hey Guys,

It's been 2 years since I first submitted a side project I was working on to
Hacker News
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644172)),
and so much has changed since then (including our tagline). We've done a major
overhaul on so many systems that I wanted to let you guys know what we've been
up to, how we've changed, and get feedback to let us know we are still on the
right path.

The idea with TrueJob was that we want to help job seekers find employers and
vice versa, while giving analytics to both sides to help them improve as well.
We allow job seekers to like or dislike almost anything about a job posting
(location, company, random words or phrases in the job description), and then
employers can see that data on the other side:

[https://gfycat.com/HarmfulSizzlingKitty](https://gfycat.com/HarmfulSizzlingKitty)
[https://gfycat.com/UntidyMagnificentKodiakbear](https://gfycat.com/UntidyMagnificentKodiakbear)

We want to improve job search -- we know how hard it is to hire as a startup,
and we know how hard job seekers have it trying to search for jobs. We want to
give data that helps both sides improve, and we think we've done it in quite a
cool way.

So, what's happened since our last posting?

* I quit my job and focused solely on TrueJob

* TrueJob was setup as an official business, incorporating in Deleware, setting up business accounts and getting a good "base" for the business

* I started building a lot more features into the product, and also working on a lot of the bugs, errors, and performance issues that people had mentioned in the comments

* I built out the entire other side of the platform (employer side), and added in a bunch of support to setup organizations

* TrueJob became a team of two in October 2015 when my coufounder, Michael Kling, joined onboard, and has really helped flesh out a ton of code and build up the product even more

* We built out a custom scraping solution that scrapes company websites to find job postings, and keeps track of how many jobs a company has, what system they use to post those jobs, and how those jobs change over time -- Here's a snippet from AirBNB for example: [http://i.imgur.com/FjPL8UB.png](http://i.imgur.com/FjPL8UB.png)

* We've interviewed startups on how they hire, like FarmLogs and TentCraft, Arbor Networks and more ([https://blog.truejob.com/](https://blog.truejob.com/))

* We've become the second biggest listing of startup jobs in the United States, outside of AngelList (mostly from our scraping processes)

* We've created a custom tool to embed a company's job postings into any page (which we've used with Michigan tech communities like the TechBrewery, TC New Tech, and other Michigan businesses)

* We've added in a lot more ways to filter for jobs and get information about companies, like our new tooltips or filtering

* We've built out job recommendations based on things you like/dislike/etc

* We interviewed with Sid of Gitlab here: [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/03/yc-application-office-ho...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/03/yc-application-office-hours/), where we talked about our YC app and more

~~~
hariananth
Why is thus product focused on startups, and why is this better than angel
list?

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lgse
Just a few things that came up to mind when I first arrived on the website:

As a UI/UX perfectionist, the dark theme gives me a terrible vibe. It's just
not well executed. I think you guys would be much better off with a white
themed site. Look at inspiration from the new Stripe website!

I do believe that the splash page could be redesigned much better, it's very
dull and it doesn't really have a major call to action when I land. You should
make the signing up / searching more in your face.

Secondly, the tagline is horrible, not everyone is familiar with Pandora and
the concept of the station, etc.

Good place to iterate from though! Good luck!

~~~
mwkling
Thanks for your thoughts, appreciate the feedback! We've gotten lots of mixed
reactions on the dark theme (e.g. some people have said it stands out from
most current sites with white themes), but it's something we're thinking
about. Thanks also for your points on the home page - we're continuing to
iterate on that too.

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Lord_Zero
I noticed this job is under "Denver" but the posting itself says India.
[https://www.truejob.com/locations/denver-
colorado/jobs?sort=...](https://www.truejob.com/locations/denver-
colorado/jobs?sort=date&job=front-end-developer-34rmw)

~~~
mwkling
Ah, thanks for finding that, that's something for us to fix. As Scott said
below, we find most of the job postings direct from company websites. We do
different things to parse the locations when we're scraping, but it's not
perfect yet. We have a 'report' feature for cases like this, but right now
that only appears when you are logged in. Probably we'll add something like
that available to everyone.

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leblancfg
Anything outside the US?

~~~
mwkling
Hey - I'm Mike, the other cofounder of TrueJob. We're focused on just the US
right now (originally just Michigan), but once we get more resources we're
hoping to expand!

~~~
korijn
There's a lot of non-US devs on here; you might want to set up a mailing list
for them to sign up with. I'd like to hear again when you open up for the rest
of the world! (NL here)

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clt123456
Why does the location page for Charlotte, NC say "ANN ARBOR" in orange letters
in the top left?

[https://www.truejob.com/locations/charlotte](https://www.truejob.com/locations/charlotte)

~~~
eggbrain
Oof, good point. Looks like we had hardcoded in a variable for location
profiles that we meant to take out in the end. We're pushing up a fix now for
this.

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tcfunk
Can't sign up because they think my email address is fake.

Edit: They are fixing this, thanks!

~~~
eggbrain
Ah, I know we keep at least one spam email point open for people to register
under (letthemeatspam.com), which is a Mailinator alias. If that still doesn't
work, reach out to me at scott ~AT~ truejob.com and I'll get you sorted out.

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yoamro
Love the layout and design. Not sure if I missed this but is there a way to
specify all of California in the search function instead of just individual
cities? I think that would be useful for some people.

~~~
eggbrain
Thanks for the kind words! It's actually fairly easy for us to specify all of
California (it was actually part of our alpha release years ago), but we were
never quite happy with how the UX of it would work -- how do we break out
state vs city, or both combined?

We do want to make this happen though, and it shouldn't be too bad, but we
need to figure out a good way to show it to the user. Stay tuned!

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jeano
Congrats on starting to work on it full-time.

If you scrape the jobs from companies, what incentives do the companies have
to pay to post the jobs on TrueJob?

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vanrysss
Puppet Labs in Portland has two company entries, one with 36 jobs, the other
with 30.

~~~
eggbrain
You're right -- we scrape a good deal of startups, but sometimes we get
duplicates, and although we try to de-duplicate via a lot of different
methods, sometimes they sneak through.

This one should be fixed now, but there's probably some other examples people
will find as well, and we catch and fix them when we see them.

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gailees
Pricing page is on point

~~~
eggbrain
Thanks man! We thought it would be funny if it said $0 no matter what you
chose, because we were going to be free during beta.

Also, if you're back in Michigan sometime, let me buy you a beer.

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phaed
No jobs in Canada I see :/

~~~
michaelmior
There are some actually. You just can't search for them directly. A keyword
search for Toronto turned up a few. Unfortunately when you try to sign up,
there's a message that it's not available in Canada yet. Curious why if the
the OP is around.

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ebel
bug: your job post calculator = 0 all the time.

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smmnyc
Congrats guys!

