

Show HN: HireMyFriend – Get your friends to help you find a new job - cooop
http://hiremyfriend.io

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falk
The biggest problem I have with this is that it attaches you to your friend's
profile and whatever he does online. So, for example, what if a buddy of mine
posts that he just smoked a joint, and then he endorses me for a job.
Unfortunately most employers will likely draw certain conclusions from that,
"He hangs out with those kinds of people? I'm not hiring him." It could be
much subtler, like your friend posts "I love Bob Marley."

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jongold
Absolutely agree — I think that's the most important thing we want to test
with this iteration :)

I'd _think_ that people would choose the professional connections they trust
rather than their stoner roommate from college, but there's only so much
hypothesising we can do without real people trying it out!

I'm not a huge fan of Bob Marley either, but I know what you mean. It could be
your friend who is, say, a prominent Rubyist tweeting a joke about PHP as
you're applying to Facebook. We'll see how that plays out, but I'd think that
an 'old school' job reference would have the same risks.

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falk
Awesome, I'm glad your really thinking everything over. To be honest, it
wasn't entirely clear to be that you can pick the friends you want to tweet
about you. I guess now looking at it that seems rather obvious, haha. It would
be really cool to see a recommendation engine, for example, "We think you
should ask your friend John Doe to endorse you because he has a massive
Twitter following, speaks regularly to companies X, Y, and Z, whom are all
hiring. We've analyzed his profile and it looks pretty non-controversial."
It's good to see you guys are making use of Twitter and not Facebook. That's a
huge selling point for me. Good luck to you guys.

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jongold
The first few very, very early prototypes were built because I, then my
girlfriend, then some of my closest friends were in the situation where they
needed something like this - so I'm quite passionate about making it work :)

That's an amazing idea — we hadn't thought that far ahead yet in terms of NLP
stuff, but we can definitely do some amalgamation of Twitter and, say, GitHub
data to help you know who to target :)

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hardwaresofton
As everyone has said, good idea, but I see one big pitfall.

Don't become LinkedIn's "endorsement" system. I'm not an employer, but I think
it has ended up losing it's meaning (people just endorse each other willy
nilly or a scratch-my-back-and-I-will-scratch-yours kind of thing) -

I'm thinking one way to escape this whole is finding a way to
enforce/emphasize talking up friends that you have personally WORKED with for
extended periods of time, to get more honesty

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metahipster
Having been to the HN London and heard the talk from Makeshift, I hope this
doesn't disappear in 3 months! As a dev in London looking for a job, i'll give
it a go. Good luck.

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dmitri1981
What kind of work are you looking for?

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metahipster
Looking to move into a position as a Python developer, with a mix of front and
backend work.

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jongold
I know EDITD are looking for talented people — [http://editd.com/jobs/senior-
software-engineer/](http://editd.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer/)

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metahipster
Great, will take a look thanks.

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mcos
I'd like to give this a go, but I don't have a twitter account. How do you see
this working for those developers without a social media presence?

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jongold
We've been using Twitter auth for all of our apps at @makeshiftHQ just out of
convenience; some rely on it for core functionality more than others.

In the case of HireMyFriend we put in Twitter auth as a precursor to building
a 'secretly DM your friends' feature that hasn't shipped yet.

That said - with an app based around _your_ anonymity but the social presence
of your friends & professional contacts I think this would work well for a
developer without a social media presence. We'll consider adding
email/password sign up in the coming weeks — I'm sure you appreciate how busy
launches are :)

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benjamincburns
Have you considered integrating with LinkedIn as well?

As a complete tangent I'm presently looking for jobs literally on the other
side of the world, in a country where I know nobody (so I guess I'm not your
target market?). The site used most often there is SEEK. On their own I doubt
services like yours would integrate with SEEK or similar smaller international
jobs sites. However I'd love to see some kind of social networking standard
take off where once you've integrated with say LinkedIn, integrating with
someone like SEEK would literally be as simple as swapping a couple of API
keys. It'd be even better if the integration could be bidirectional. That is,
SEEK could decide to integrate with HMF or vice-versa and whatever features
would just "magically" show up on both sites so long as both approved the
integration.

Shit, that's kind of like a meta-friend request. "Hey there! My social network
wants to be friends with your social network!" Weird.

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apinstein
This is really a great idea. It has the potential to offer a practical end-run
around recruiters for potential employees in this situation.

As an employer, I'd love to be able to sign up and have your system DM me any
time there's someone in my area looking for a job. Heck I'd even pay a small
fee for the service!

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mr_luc
Great idea, pretty site.

Very minor concern: I see "Hu" instead of "Hi" in 'Hire', because of the
script. I didn't see it on first glance, but when I navigated to the demo
profile I did, and now I see the U shape much more strongly than the I or R,
and it's bugging me. :)

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jongold
Thanks — we'll take another pass at the logo this sprint :)

btw if you're interested in that kinda thing the logo is based on a heavily
reworked Candy Script by the amazing Sudtipos
[http://sudtipos.com/fonts/94](http://sudtipos.com/fonts/94)

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cyphersanctus
It would be great if profiles could be searchable through the three hashtags
one can use on the profile. That way one would not necessarily only rely on
sending an email, but would always be available to the pool of hiremyfriend
users who are looking for growth hackers or ruby devs, etc.

~~~
jongold
That's a really great idea, thanks :)

This has been a crazy rush to get the product launched as-is (and there's a
whole bunch of hypotheses we want to validate right now anyway), but working
more on the employer side is definitely something that we're excited to
explore in the very near future :)

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paulmiwatson
Interesting approach to a real problem.

Talking out of my arse but could you use the list of "friends" to get a rough
idea of who the candidate is? Amongst a given set of friends there may only be
one Rubyist with JavaScript and Karate skills...

~~~
jongold
Good point - quite possibly, depending on the mix of how you describe yourself
(e.g. if you just copy your Twitter bio), the sum of the people you choose to
endorse you, and the density of the people with your skillset in your social
graph/geographic location.

Selfishly, I've always worked in London/San Francisco where almost everyone I
know is either a designer, front-ender, Rubyist, or an awkward mix of the
above, and everyone knows each other.

I'm not sure how this would work out in more specialised disciplines, other
industries or other locations, but the only way to find out is to see how
people use it :)

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tenso
I like the idea a lot but when I go to the demo profile, I can highlight the
redacted text with my mouse and see the person's name. Is that intentional??

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MattBearman
If you hover your mouse over the name the title is "Give us some credit, we
did think about this - this is a randomly generated name. Reload the page!"

I tried reloading and it was indeed a random name. Although, not sure why they
did this, people could very easily be turned off from using this because they
didn't see the hover text.

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jongold
It's a hangover from a previous iteration of the design - we were generating
names with ffaker and then doing a strikethrough, but in reality it was
confusing users rather than being a funny aesthetic touch.

In the interests of getting this thing shipped we decided to hide the text
with CSS, but replacing it with an SVG is at the top of our priority list :)

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fennecfoxen
Amusingly enough, my friend is upstairs in an interview busy getting hired
RIGHT NOW. Alas! Too late!

Maybe next time, though? :)

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jongold
Beaten by the buzzer! Congratulations to your friend; if you feel like kicking
the tires and looking for a new job we'd love to have you sign up!

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dorfsmay
"Sign in with twitter". Don't have an account, don't need one right now.
Thanks and bye.

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twentyfourseven
Twitter is a lot better than Facebook IMO, and a Twitter account is easy to
set up and easy to delete.

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dorfsmay
Why not implement your own as well, for people who do not want to connect to
another account?

What about google?

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scottmagdalein
FWIW, I like this idea.

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jongold
Thanks Scott :)

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jongold
btw not sure if anyone spotted it, but we came up with a high-tech solution
for keeping out recruiter spam (god forbid this turns into the LRUG mailing
list…). What do you reckon?

[http://c.jon.gd/image/1u013o34073u](http://c.jon.gd/image/1u013o34073u)

~~~
benjamincburns
Bravo, sir... _bravo_!

