

Ask HN: How to do online jobs better? - albahk

I have had a long-simmering desire to create a new kind of website for job-seekers. It is due largely to my experience of how demoralising and ineffective traditional job sites feel.<p>I really want to avoid the existing model which has job seekers trawling pages and pages of jobs and then shooting off tons of CVs and flooding the job-posters with irrelevant candidates.<p>I am hesitant to just slap on a 'social' type interface where you can connect using linkedin/facebook and refer friends etc but I have hit a mental brick wall about what other options I can consider.<p>Would love to hear from HN'ers some new angles or approaches to consider.  Appreciate any and all input.
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ig1
Have a look at dating sites, there's much more innovation going on in that
space, and they're essentially having to deal with exactly the same matching
problem.

However one of the big issues with innovating in this space is that HR
departments are generally quite conservative so it's hard to sell innovative
products to them (look at the difficulty SnapTalent had with their initial
product).

You'll probably have more luck selling to third party recruiters who are more
risk tolerant.

There's about a dozen companies currently doing the whole social network
recruiting thing, but none of them has serious traction, and I'm not
personally convinced it's a model that will work.

I'm working on this problem by building a niche job site, it's not hugely
innovative technically, but it should help with the relevance problem and also
be traditional enough to appeal to HR departments.

One of the other ideas I had in this space was building a platform for
matching recruiters to candidates, so recruiters could send targeted messages
to candidates matching a set criteria (+using game mechanic techniques to stop
spamming). If you want to talk more about this idea feel free to drop me a
message.

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noahc
As a job Seeker, I'm looking for high quality jobs and low noise. What this
points out to me is that it needs to be a curated list. You could go with
letting users vote up good jobs and vote down bad jobs, but this creates an
incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already hoping no one else
applies.

One model might be a curated niche of job postings for whatever niche you
would understand the most. Then you need a way to reduce the talent pool the
HR department sees.

One way to do this is give the job applicant a way to do a 'quick pitch' and
the HR department can click a button called 'Tell me more' and the jobs
process can go from there if both parties are interested. Maybe you could
display stats as a way to incentive certain actions. If a job applicant has
applied to 300 job offers with a cut and past and has only got 3 tell me
mores, that would show to to the HR applicant. If however, a job applicant had
a 98% tell more more rating on 30 job applications that means he's probably
customizing it and the HR department can tell he probably has a pretty good
EQ.

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jamii
> this creates an incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already
> hoping no one else applies.

Should be fairly easy to solve this. You can only apply for jobs through a
form that appears once you vote up. Once you apply your vote is fixed.

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arethuza
Social filtering - pay people you trust to do the filtering of applications
for you.

Recruiters literally have _no_ idea of what makes a decent candidate so they
have to resort to simple (almost syntactic) measures - 6 years of C++, Oracle
etc. where they have no idea of what those terms actually mean or how useful
they are (what Oracle product - there are zillions of them).

I'd quite happily delegate filtering of candidates to people I trust and if
they get paid for doing it then it is a win-win situation. If you had a site
with effective workflow to manage each stage of the process then it could be
pretty slick.

[NB I spent quite some time on this idea a while back but parked it to work on
other ideas].

~~~
ig1
One problem with this approach is that recruitment agencies are paranoid about
control of their CV databases, those CVs are one of the main assets of the
company and they go to great lengths to restrict access to them.

Opening those databases up to third parties might be a risk many of them are
unwilling to take.

~~~
arethuza
I'm not sure the databases are that valuable - simply advertise the posts on
the site (or on other websites). Which is exactly what recruiters do.

~~~
ig1
Typically recruiters just use adverts to obtain CVs to put into their CRM
system and match them to a range of roles they have available. The specific
role you apply for isn't that important to the recruiter, as once they have
your details they'll try and match you to any job they have which they think
might be suitable.

The cost of advertising (which is high) is amortized by the long term value
created by the CV database. Giving third parties access to those CVs is
something I would imagine most recruiters would be reluctant to do.

~~~
arethuza
Just about every role I've sent to a recruiter appeared within a few hours on
the normal selection of websites - I'm not sure they ever had anyone "from
their database" although they claim that.

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jamii
I wrote my own job search engine after getting fed up of the existing crap. It
pulls in rss feeds and mailing lists and even does a bit of crawling via HN
and Reddit to find jobs. I used a trainable classifier to filter out most of
the dross.

The main problem with job sites is matching jobs to applicants. As far as I
know noone has gone beyond simple keyword searching. If you had an actual
userbase you could make use of collaborative filtering techniques (like
Amazons recommendations) to provide a tailored service to each user. CVs,
personal blogs and github accounts give you enough information to seed each
users recommendations even before they start rating jobs.

~~~
lachyg
This is what I'm trying to work on. How did you train your search engine?

What sort of collaborative filtering techniques? How would that work? I'm
intrigued! Would love to chat further via email.

~~~
jamii
> How did you train your search engine?

I used some pretty simple techniques: one bayesian filter to filter jobs from
other posts in mailing lists etc, one bayesian filter to score jobs based on
keywords. Both filters were trained by feedback from the console ui. The main
problem is excluding site-specific keywords that distort the scoring (eg if a
site with mostly crappy jobs includes its own name in the listing then even
the good jobs will score low by association). A lot of job sites have manky
markup so I also had a different scraping script for each site to extract
text. All in all its only a couple of hours work. I've been thinking recently
about extending it and adding a simple web ui, since finding freelance work is
pretty time consuming.

> What sort of collaborative filtering techniques?

I didn't have any specific in mind but there are plenty of good machine
learning books that cover different tecniques. If you don't already have a
background in maths then 'Programming Collective Intelligence' is a good book
to start with. 'The Elements of Statistical Learning' goes into a lot more
detail but requires some basic maths.

> Would love to chat further via email.

Email is in my profile.

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ismarc
I've given this a significant amount of thought, with the end result being
that to make a better experience for the job seekers you need to improve the
experience for those seeking applicants as well. My initial thoughts are
detailed better over at [http://ismarc.tumblr.com/post/1458764869/hacking-the-
hiring-...](http://ismarc.tumblr.com/post/1458764869/hacking-the-hiring-
process). I don't have a solution, and may never, but hopefully it'll jog your
brain in a direction I haven't thought yet.

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Robin_Message
EDIT: TL;DR: I see the primary problem with recruitment being far too many
applicants for each job, because applicants apply to many, many jobs.
Incentivise applying to only a few jobs and the employer gets fewer, better
applicants.

For job-seekers, the marginal cost of one more application is too low, so
companies get too many applications. With too many applicants, filtering
becomes more random, so the reward for applying for a job you are only
tenuously qualified for increases. It's a classic hawks vs doves with a big
payoff for being a hawk amongst mostly doves

So, make it more expensive to apply for a job. Two ways I can think of doing
this:

1\. Charge applicants ten bucks to apply for a job. Have companies report if
they were good enough but they found someone better. In that case, give them a
refund. In all other cases, keep the money. (EDIT: This may possibly be
illegal in some jurisdictions, but there are doubtless ways around that.)

2\. Show companies how many jobs the applicant has applied for recently (not
necessarily where they have applied, but you could perhaps positions/business
areas) and/or restrict applicants to N applications per month. Aggressively
detect and ban sock-puppetting — perhaps you can require verified ID of the
applicant's name and get companies to check that is the name of the person
applying.

You could also make things less stressful by operating on a say weekly or
monthly cycle. Jobs are posted at the beginning of the month, applicants
choose which N jobs they want to apply for, applications go out, new cycle
starts. This avoids stampedes and requires applicants to be discerning.

~~~
Robin_Message
I'm confused: do people think these are bad ideas? Or that they couldn't be
implemented? Or unethical or something? Or just having a bad day? I don't mind
being downvoted; but I do like to have some idea why.

~~~
zlopid
Limiting how many jobs people can apply to on your website isn't going to stop
people from applying to lots of places, it just means that they're not going
to use your website that much. And people looking for a job aren't going to
drop a lot of money to apply for jobs because they don't have a source of
income, which also makes them want to avoid your website. Sure, you could
overcome these things if you had an extremely high placement rate, but that's
going to be very hard, especially in the beginning.

Your core idea might be a good one, but companies have better ways of making
applying more expensive. They have puzzles and automated assessments. Some
places basically only hire people who can network in, others require a
specific certification, and many bias towards people who have some public
work.

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frobozz
When using such sites, from a candidate's point of view, the two things that
get on my nerves are:

a) Ads posted by Recruitment Agents giving me no idea who the actual employer
might be.

b) Ads with no sensible salary hint.

On (b), I don't mind there being a wide band (e.g. 25-60K, depending on
experience), as at least that is a hint. What I really hate is "£Competitive"
or "£Neg+Bens" and other such non-information.

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scrrr
Hm. I'd say that is not the easiest target audience to go after. I think you
are very likely to fail, even if you produce something revolutionary. If it's
that good there are probably hundreds of competitors of which some will be
able to copy it quickly. Plus you have to solve the chicken and egg problem,
of course.

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iworkforthem
Er... Whose problems are you trying to solve? Job-seekers or recruiters?

