

EmployIQ – a slightly smarter job search engine - briholt
https://www.employiq.com/jobs

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briholt
Creator here. I previously posted EmployIQ here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8282180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8282180)
but thought it was appropriate for a redux post - partly about EmployIQ
improvements, partly about taking feedback.

On the previous post, I’d say 1/2 of the comments were critical. It’s easy to
dismiss criticism. It’s also easy to get discouraged by it. But neither of
these options are productive as a creator. In my experience the most important
thing you can do for a product is really listen to negative comments, even if
they aren’t constructive, and try to parse out the real problem.

For EmployIQ, I could quickly tell the problem was category discovery. The
secret sauce that makes EmployIQ different is that we smartly group similar
jobs even if they have different titles (like “software engineer” and “web
developer”) into relevant categories. Previously, users selected their
appropriate category by scrolling through a select box that was about 70 lines
long. Obviously, this wasn’t very user-friendly – is “software engineer” under
“S” for software? Or “I” for IT? Or “E” for “Engineering”? Who knows.

All of the negative comments revolved around category discovery. I was aware
the select box was a little annoying, but I thought I could get away with it.
The alternative would be to build a whole open search box system that would
have to match any word a user types with the appropriate category, which would
be very time consuming. This is where denial kicks in – you can accept the
feedback and spends weeks of difficult development work, or you can ignore the
feedback and lazily delude yourself that your product is perfect and everyone
is dumb. I chose to accept the feedback and get to work, which I’d like to
share with you now. Now when you go to the site, you get an open search field
that you can put in almost any reasonable job title into and it will match you
with a reasonable category. It’s not quite perfect because our human job
naming schemes are imperfect, for example if a user enters “analyst” do they
mean a “business analyst” or an “IT systems analyst”? In these cases the
system just picks the its best guess. Any search term that the system does not
recognize get stored for later review and discovery.

I invite you to give it a shot and let me know what you think.
info@employiq.com

