
Show HN: TrueJob – OkCupid for Jobs - eggbrain
https://www.truejob.com/
======
timcederman
A head's up for Hacker News folks - this is entirely for jobs in Detroit.

Some other feedback:

\- Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying
"whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form

\- Building powerful filters won't help most job seekers. Most job seekers
keep the net wide because it's hard to predict what the perfect job is going
to have as a keyword in it. (I helped build trovix.com, acquired by Monster,
and ran dozens of user research sessions)

\- Your tour is way, way too long. At the end, there's a next button that
doesn't do anything

\- Why can't I upload my resume? I have to cut and paste everything in to your
fields?

\- I have a 13" Macbook Pro, and the site doesn't even come close to fitting
in the horizontal width of my browser

\- green/red/blue buttons are ugly

\- There are numerous z-index problems around the site

\- the video, particularly of the mouse moving back and forth over the star
ratings, is super distracting

\+ a lot more issues - you guys should spend some time dogfooding this.

~~~
keithwarren
This is a little tone deaf and lacking deeper thought. Surface level stuff
like x color buttons are ugly is not really helpful. Telling a guy who has
been focused on this for months he should spend more time dogfooding - again,
not helpful.

What really got me though was complaining that you could not upload a resume.
Seriously, give it some thought. Parsing non-structured data in an accurate
way is a very hard problem and I would venture getting highly accurate results
on 80% of resumes would take hundreds or even thousands of man hours to build
a system, getting it on 90% or more could be exponentially more difficult. It
simply is not worth the investment of time unless you have a breakthrough
technique, and if you have that - well that is your startup, not a job site.

Feedback is awesome, but not everything that crosses your mind is worth
sharing.

~~~
timcederman
I've given it three years of thought, particularly on the resume parser. It's
not tone deaf either. Do we want to give everyone who has built something a
pat on the back, or do we want to help them build something awesome?

Also, you complain about that my feedback is too hard to address, but then
simple stuff like non-ugly buttons is unhelpful?

re: dogfooding - often folks will build something and then not holistically
test it. You don't need a user study to try something from end to end and
pretend to be a user. Just a helpful reminder to do the simple stuff to make
something great.

~~~
keithwarren
I don't think patting people on the back is useful but if you really want to
help him build something awesome, be specific.

Your buttons are ugly because they are too small, the text is hard to read and
the back button is actually slightly wider than the next button, even though
they are joined together. Back is also red which tends to denote a destructive
action that cannot be undone, a yellow might be better.

^ that is feedback. Saying your buttons are ugly is not helpful feedback.

------
jackmaney
There's a lot to like here and a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I buy the
"OkCupid for Jobs" description. OkCupid matches people up based on answers to
(multiple choice) questions (along with how important you think a prospective
match's answer is to the given question). I'm not seeing anything like that
here...

But I like the filtering features, and I'm definitely interested in seeing
where this goes. Well done!

------
keithwarren
I went to Startup School in SV this year and must have met 3 dozen startups
but the only one I kept thinking about was this one. Scott is brilliant and is
thinking about this space in a refreshing way. I am actually a bit blown away
TrueJob is not in the W15 batch - SamA and team often say they mess up and
miss big things, if any partners read this - please take another look, he is
the real deal.

~~~
scobar
I met him the same weekend, and remember him vividly because of his "throwing
star" business cards. Unfortunately, we didn't discuss our startups, but I'm
very glad to learn of his here and now. I'm very passionate about this domain
too. Hiring needs so much improvement, and there's a lot of people trying to
find the best solution. I wish Scott the best of luck.

I'll be providing some more thorough feedback to Scott, but at a glance, one
thing I really think is great is the JobStats feature. Being rejected with
feedback like, "We found someone better for the position," doesn't help
struggling job seekers identify areas they should focus on improving.

------
posnet
There is a memory leak or some ridiculous sized photos on the site, it ate
1.5G of my system memory in 30s of use.

~~~
mercnet
Same here, memory drastically increased as page was left open and eventually
went to swap. Linux 3.17.3-1-ARCH with Chromium 38.0.2125.122 (290379)
(64-bit).

~~~
eggbrain
Sorry about this, my guess is it's the slideshow on the homepage -- there's
about 30MB of gifs in that slideshow (terrible, I know), and it should be
"lazily loading" them in, but it looks like there might be a bug with either
the slider code or the way I'm doing it because it keeps taking up more memory
the longer you have the homepage open. It's on my bug list.

------
hazelnut
30mb for the first page? That's kind of big.

You should convert all your gifs to videos. Otherwise a lot of people will
drop cause their browsers crash. And don't think about people from mobile
devices. Sometimes they're about 50% of the traffic.

~~~
eggbrain
I completely agree. This was a struggle for me -- I wanted to show off
features on the homepage, but adding a Gif slideshow added a crap ton of load
to the page.

I wanted to create a video, but my video editing skills are pretty poor and I
wanted the experience to be great (even my gifs have a few bugs in them if you
look closely). I'll work on this for sure.

------
eggbrain
Greetings Hacker News!

Back in 2009 I graduated with a degree in Psychology into one of the worst job
markets in years. I was unemployed for about 6 months, during which I tried
every job website out there, and thought each one was terrible.

I had some programming experience, so I hacked up a demo that I tried to put
out there in 2010 called Scoople, but it was a single page php file that ran
horribly and was really bad code. Initially I looked for a technical
cofounder, but couldn't find anyone. So I decided to learn myself.

I've spent the last 4 years jumping from job to job, from IT Administrator to
Computer Consultant to Web Developer to finally Rails web developer, and now I
help build startups for a living. During the past 5 months I finally felt I
had enough experience to build the job website I always wanted, and so I built
TrueJob, which I'm calling OkCupid for Jobs.

I've made an imgur gif album of all the features here if you'd like to check
out that first (more features to come!):

[https://imgur.com/a/rDkaw#0](https://imgur.com/a/rDkaw#0)

The idea is that you sign up with just an email and password, and then fill
out your profile -- manually (one field at a time), by authenticating with
LinkedIn, pulling from JSONResume, etc.

It then gives you a base set of recommended jobs, which you can then start to
tweak by rating 1-5 stars a job posting, or favoriting/blocking certain
attributes about that job posting-- company name, job title, job description
keywords, etc.

My site then crunches the numbers, and reranks and reprioritizes the job
postings so the most relevant matches are always at the top.

Once you apply for a job, employers look at your resume, and favorite or block
things about it as well in order for them to get the best candidates -- but
not to fear! Once you apply for a few jobs, you'll get back analytics on why
someone didn't like your resume -- what keywords they hated, and which ones
they loved, so you know what to change before you apply to the next job.

Hate my site? You can at least take the information you put in your profile,
and convert it over to a hard copy PDF, with one of a few design styles. Take
it to another place, or just use it to get a job! I just want to help people
get into a job, whether they use my site or not -- job seekers too often get
kicked in the teeth as it is, I want to help them succeed :)

 __A few caveats! (PLEASE READ) __

* Right now, I haven 't seeded the database with that many jobs, only about 1000, and all from Michigan, so if you wonder why you keep getting suggested Detroit jobs, now you know why. This is my number one priority right now -- my biggest struggle is finding a source for jobs that doesn't anonymize a lot of the important data like employer name, salary, etc, so if anyone knows of a great source to pull structured job postings from where I can link back to the original employer company page, let me know.

* The profile to PDF feature isn't working _quite_ yet, so that will be my release next week along with creating scrapers that can get me a ton more job postings (or if you have any other ideas of how to get clean job postings, let me know). I'm also hoping it entices people to check back on the site every so often, in order to see the new stuff I'm planning!

This has been a labor of love for me guys -- I've been developing this app for
the past 5 months after spending 4 years trying to get the experience to build
it. I'm really hoping you guys like it, and give me any and all feedback and
critiques.

Thanks,

eggbrain (scott@truejob.com)

~~~
redmattred
AngelList's API or getting a feed from TheLadders.com is probably your best
bet for getting structured job data which includes salary data. There are
plenty of other options (indeed, simplyhired, monster, burning glass) if
salary data isn't a requirement.

I also have a job search tool I recently launched (aimed specifically at
software engineers) that I'm looking to get feedback on:
[http://www.codejobs.io/](http://www.codejobs.io/)

Any feedback/suggestions the HN community has would be really appreciated!

~Matt matt@codejobs.io

~~~
djokkataja
Should probably have a separate thread for your site, but it's broken in
latest Firefox on Windows:
[http://i.imgur.com/WNSca8S.png](http://i.imgur.com/WNSca8S.png)

~~~
redmattred
Ah, thank you for the heads up - should have caught that

------
justboxing
I love everything about your site, except the choice of background colors.

Why black / dark grey? It's really really hard on the eyes and I have seen
that dark theme used only for nightclub websites and boxing websites (and it
doesn't make sense even there.)

~~~
joshuak
Wow, this is very interesting. I find this an amazing comment. I'm curious
what the bias for white backgrounds is (or at least not 'dark' backgrounds).
It's very common in web design, yet relatively neutral for application and
other graphic design. Document based applications are usually white of course,
but games, content creation, utilities, and many other app types are not.

I have often wondered why white is so amazingly prevalent in web design. I'd
never have expected such a strong reaction, but more than one person has
commented on the background of this site.

~~~
memonkey
It's mostly aesthetic, but lighter visuals (dark text on light background) are
better on the eyes during the day and darker (vise versa) visuals are better
at night.

------
tmsh
Great to see another Reactjs app in the wild (I poked under the hood a bit). I
really like the use of animated gifs in a gallery. Very fast understanding for
me of how the site worked. Awesome!

------
azdle
This is a great idea. I was joking with my coworkers that job hunting is just
like dating. I had briefly considered setting up something like this before I
remembered that my project list was already too long.

I'm getting a: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the
application owner check the logs for more information." when I try to signup.

EDIT: Although it seems that it worked one of the times because I'm logged in
when I go back to the homepage.

EDIT2: Seems to be completely down now.

~~~
eggbrain
Sorry about that! Should be better now -- sign ups were going through the
roof, so I had to scale up. Hope it should be smoother now.

------
panon
Probably somebody is panicking over this, but I still thought I should share.

Love the concept.

"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."

~~~
eggbrain
Doh! This is what I get for falling asleep. I think I need to scale up again,
but I'll be watching the logs more carefully now that I'm up and about.

------
frontsideair
The homepage hogs my memory; but I think it's not your fault, opening the
imgur link also killed the Chrome tab. Maybe the images are too big?

------
ankurpatel
Nice build using Ruby on Rails
[https://www.truejob.com/500.html](https://www.truejob.com/500.html)

------
gabemart
Something is seriously wrong with the gif slider on the front page. It eats
unbelievable amounts of memory and makes my machine much less responsive. Are
you actually hiding the gifs properly when they're not the slide on display?
Are you doing opacity transforms on them? Whatever it is, it's extremely
noticeable.

Chrome 38.0.2125.111, Windows 8.1

------
astangl
Hi Scott,

Site looks good, but didn't bring in anything from LinkedIn. Also, the
"blocked" filtering doesn't seem to do anything, and I keep getting random
Server Errors when clicking on certain positions.

Do you support any kind of Markdown, or plan to, or to provide links to
resume, github, etc?

I look forward to seeing this take off.

Alex

------
anonfunction
Another site gone down after getting to the top of the HN.

Lesson to the wise: Use cloudflare if you are not prepared to scale up and
expecting a lot of traffic. It's saved me more than once.

------
tibbetts
I was hoping for support for ethically non-monogamous careers.

------
geogra4
Awesome. Great to see more good work out of Michigan!

Great idea as well

------
s_baby
I like the idea but it seems like a great way to make yourself liable to
discrimination laws.

~~~
eggbrain
No worries! I anonymize data before submitting to employers, meaning that name
and gender are removed. If I still do find employers who are blocking or
favoriting based on discriminatory criteria, I can find these employers more
easily so I can take action.

~~~
danso
A. Great idea, and thank you for the long explanatory comment...for you to be
a jobless psych grad in 2009 to be conceptualizing (and researching, and
building!) something like this is quite remarkable, and you should be very
proud of yourself.

B. This particular comment thread is so fascinating, it deserves its own blog
post someday. But I'll be flippant: if the idea of an OKCupid for Job Seekers
is viable...then maybe there could be a Tinder for Job Seekers? But instead of
the actual Tinder, the JobTinder omits the physical attributes (i.e. many of
the protected attributes under job discrimination law) of the user, and
instead, just shows important, "sexy" bullet points...like "Rails Dev, 4
years"...the Employer then does a swipe left/swipe right during their lunch
break, and at the end of the hour, has a small stack of candidates that may be
worth following up. Even having a better filter would be a win...and hell, if
you make it fun, in the same way that Tinder feels more fun than OKCupid, HR
people may just love it.

~~~
jaredsohn
Tinder for jobs:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261680)

------
saumil07
Holy Cow this is a very good idea.

------
iskander
I strongly recommend connecting profile pages to github and/or technical
blogs.

------
nether
Any effort on branching out to non-tech jobs?

------
slashnull
Did they just pull a _reverse_ xkcd 624?

------
patronagezero
Doesn't seem to be a workable way to override the geo-ip location settings. I
attempted to set the zipcode which just spins as in-progress indefinitely for
me. Finally managed to save the zipcode by hitting save but the listing still
shows the previous ip location.

I have to say as a tangent, I hate what the JS-dependent UI people are doing
to the internet. The experience sucks with only ghostery enabled and shows as
blocking analytics and relic. What happened to the top-shelf web designers
using javascript and a UX enrichment as opposed to a dependency?

