

Show HN: EmployIQ – A slightly smarter job search engine - briholt
https://www.employiq.com

======
briholt
Creator here. This is a little project I'm working on to apply some better
natural language processing to job searching. As it stands now with most job
search engines, a search for "software engineer" won't return jobs posted as
"software developer" when obviously these jobs should appear in the same
results. As such, I'm applying some machine learning/language processing to
try and group relevant jobs together. The site currently has about 20,000 jobs
and is adding about 3,000 per day - by no means comprehensive, but the list of
sources is growing. About 80% of jobs found are tagged with a correct career
tag. Take a look at some examples:

* [https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/programming](https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/programming) \- contains all jobs relating to software development, even though they have a wide range of titles and descriptions.

* [https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/mobile-app](https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/mobile-app) \- dives further into software development for mobile apps, iOS, and Android

* [https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/culinary](https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/culinary) \- I'm not just focusing on tech jobs, I'm trying to categorize every common job in the USA.

Lots of little tweaks to make over the coming weeks, but I wanted to share
what I've done so far and hear any feedback you all may have.

Edit: Email info@employiq.com to say hi.

~~~
iamshs
Interesting. I like the simplicity. Is there any way to get in touch with you?

~~~
briholt
Sure, it's info@employiq.com

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abhimskywalker
This seems interesting. Just a couple of suggestions:

1\. Perhaps add an autocomplete for all the tags/tracks instead of a drop-
down. An additional benefit of this text based search-box would be to see what
all are people searching for which they can't get in autocomplete. These terms
in descending order of frequency should give you a nice view of demand areas
where your listings (or tagging) are not proving to be enough. (This should
also address the many comments you are getting for no text-based search

2\. The site looks minimal and nice, but you might also perhaps want to maybe
consult a good designer for a nice color palette. The blue color of links to
jobs (column "Position") kind of sticks out form rest of the theme of pages.
Also with minimal amount of efforts the drop-downs(which you will hopefully
soon convert to autocomplete boxes :) ) can be styled to look better. (Just my
opinion.)

And I was also curious where are you sourcing these listings from?

Good work! Hope to see this project progress.

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findjashua
I like the clean and simple design. A couple of things:

1\. I think some categories should be lumped into one, and be allowed as
filters. Eg., I see Node.js, Perl, PHP programming etc, but I think adding a
category for each language will make it too noisy. I'd lump all these into
'backend developer' and allow the user to filter by the specific language.

2\. Users should have a way to suggest categories/filters. I do mainly Python
and Javascript, and didn't see either on the list. So I searched for web
developer, full-stack, backend, frontend, and didn't find any of those either.
It'd be nice if users could suggest these.

~~~
briholt
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback.

On point 1, there is currently a category for "programming" which includes all
languages
([https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/programming](https://www.employiq.com/jobs/all/programming))
and on point 2 there is a "Python" category and for front-end JS there is a
"UI/UX" category. So I think the bigger issue is how to better display the
list of categories. This will be a trade off of specificity vs. simplicity.
Ultimately the solution is to allow you to type a search term and then
automatically translate that into the appropriate category. Several commentors
have complained about not being able to free enter a search term - the reason
this isn't there is I simply haven't built the search-term-to-category engine
yet.

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spudlyo
Lacking even a basic keyword search, I'm afraid this product falls well short
of its tagline. Can you call it a search engine without a search feature? I do
appreciate the ability to see jobs in a given category across all regions, but
I was quickly frustrated by not being able to search.

~~~
palakchokshi
I have to second this. In what way is this smarter job search? Selecting a
keyphrase from a drop down and a region does not make a job search engine
smarter.

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Shad0w59
I'm not in the US so don't have a use for this but I had to post to say I love
the design and simplicity - makes a change from the cluttered crap/fluff I
have seen in this sector.

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zura
Could you please add "US-only" in your title? Thanks.

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memonkey
Love this. One kinda hard feature suggestion for the future is filtering out
recruiters (when/if you implement an 'advanced' search).

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josephjrobison
Housekeeping jobs, but no marketing or SEO related jobs. Looks like a good
start though!

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AznHisoka
why won't it let me search for a keyword if it's a search engine?

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arikrak
You should let people type their location and maybe their job as well.

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dalacv
I searched for jobs in Dallas, TX and it showed me jobs for Virginia

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briholt
Good find. It's confusing Arlington, TX with Arlington, VA. This is happening
because "Arlington, VA" was listed as "Arlington, DC" because it's a suburb of
DC and thus wasn't matching. Mutli-state regions like this are a tricky. I've
updated it so new jobs will be categorized corretly and old jobs will be
recategorized tonight.

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avinassh
Why there is no 'Python Programming' in 'All Professions' :(

~~~
briholt
Good suggestion, adding that now.

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notastartup
can you explain what makes it "smarter" ?

