

Ask HN: Would you pay for this freelancer tool? - BjoernKW

Lately, I've been thinking about the freelance software developer market and the mess it is in. In my opinion, it boils down to:<p>- Freelancers mostly find jobs through recruiters. It's hard to find clients willing to deal with developers directly, especially in the enterprise market, which accounts for most of the job openings for freelancers.<p>- Freelancers are unhappy with how recruiters treat them.<p>- Some recruiters use shady methods and most of them act in an intransparent manner.<p>- For clients it seems to be very hard to find the right freelancers for a job.<p>While I applaud Geekli.st, Matchist, Hackerlist and the likes for trying to solve this problem I think they can't really scale to the freelancer market at large. They also seem to only appeal to a subset of developers and clients that doesn't necessarily intersect with where the biggest demand is. Most enterprise clients mostly will not even have heard about those services.<p>So, while I think there at least for now is no general solution to this problem I've been thinking about a product that might at least mitigate it from a freelancer's point of view. This product would be a web application roughly outlined as follows:<p>A freelancer clips job openings via a web clipper.
The application does named entity recognition and reduplication on those clips and displays related entities for a job posting (like recruiting company, client, contact data, required skills) in a Rapportive-like manner.
The skills for a job would be matched against the freelancer's skills, thereby ranking the openings.
Another interesting aspect could be that given enough users this product could be used to build a relevant database of job openings.<p>Basically, it would be CRM tuned to the needs of freelance software developers with the additional benefit of a potentially huge lead database.<p>Question is: Am I on the right track with this one? Would you or anyone else pay for this?
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gexla
I disagree. Developers find jobs, freelancers find clients. Developers may
find jobs through recruiters, but recruiters don't sell client work to
freelancers (sure, anyone can take a referral fee, but this isn't the
recruiters business model.)

I believe you're vocab is also a bit off. Clients don't look for freelancers,
they look for professional service providers.

A lot of these providers (those who are doing it right) also have resources
dedicated to sales and marketing and a lot of this happens locally. So, the
connection channels are often SEO (client Googling for local dev shops,) Ads
(local Adsense and other ad placements,) Networks (referrals,) and good old
fashioned cold calling.

I have already built my own application for what you are proposing (scraping a
clipping is pretty easy,) and I may not want for my sleuthing (I assume that's
where your related info would come from) to be thrown in a shark pool. So, no,
I wouldn't pay for something like this.

~~~
BjoernKW
Thanks for your input!

