The Jobs problem is not search problem (i.e. it isn't difficult to discover available jobs) but rather a trust problem. In this setting you have suppliers and consumers with many to many relationship.
The good supplier doesn't want to spend their energy in reviewing vast quantity of available consumers. At the same time good consumers don't want to go after every available suppliers. There is also good likelyhood that bad suppliers as well as bad consumers are trying to masquerade as good ones. This is the same setting as dating website or Amazon product website. The solution that humans seem to prefer is somehow build the trust model. In case of Amazon product website, you look at reviews and ratings by others. In case of dating website you look at characteristics that you have learned to trust such as what's in the photos, what person is doing for living, what degrees do they have and so on. In case of jobs, companies look at who is referring to who or if you are already at other top company (which is the reason why most people get jobs because of referrals, not by posting resumes). The trust model is developed individually and can massively be different from person to person.
I'm in fact more certain that virtually all companies ignore resumes posted on their website and most interviews happen solely because recruiter actively identified candidate from other similar company/university or referrals. However this may be more true in skilled jobs.
I know you're use "search" in the sense of search engine, but there's a branch of economics called search theory, and matching job hunters to employers is a canonical example.
If you consider that both parties (job hunters and employers) must locate each other and agree on each other then you enter the realm of matching theory.
There's a great book on this called "Who Gets What—and Why". The book talks about lots of matching markets: job hunting, school selection, kidney exchange, etc. It talks about the reasons why these markets work and how we might improve them.
What you describe sounds exactly like a "search" problem.
Employers need a way to search through the many applicants for people worth interviewing. Today they use heuristics (like referrals) to make filtering easier. There might be better ways to do filtering.
As an employee, it isn't easy for me to list all job openings within 15 minutes of my home today.
You're wrong because you can't even get to the "search problem", many of the current popular job boards are such unusable garbage that it's effectively impossible to wade through them and apply to jobs without inadvertently having your data stolen or spyware installed, it's that terrible. Something like monster.com or dice.com is more dangerous than the deep web at this point.
As much as I hate Google, someone has to come along and become the authority to put these all in one place and hopefully drive all these terrible sites/recruiters out of business.
Yes, it is a search problem, but in the sense of a matching problem or finding maxima given a dataset. The parent commenter was illustrating the difference between the problems of having a paucity of data (applicants) and assigning an accurate value ("trust") to determine the data with the greatest value (most qualified or desired applicants).
"...but rather a trust problem. In this setting you have suppliers and consumers with many to many relationship."
The key word here is relationship. As in relationship management.
What, where are CRM equivalents for recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, etc? Does everyone roll their own? Or just done manually, ad hoc?
Is this a service that indeed.com or competitors could provide to their customers (both sides)?
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My team has been actively interviewing. My current employer's HR/recruiting is better than most places I've seen. Even so, it's still opaque. After we do our bit, we have no idea what happens to our candidates.
Without any feedback, the whole exercise feels pointless. For both sides.
God spare me for saying this, because I hate JIRA with the passion of billion imploding stars, but we need some kind of candidate tracking system, perhaps modeled after issue trackers, coupled with some basic CRM features (call log, tickle reminders, etc).
Looks like Indeed sold in 2012, for 1 billion. I would bet it would've sold for much much more if they sold it later (at peak "unicorn" hype), but this is easy to say in hindsight.
And perhaps, in six months with Google Jobs Search eating up market share, it would have sold for much less. Seizing a 1 billion USD exit opportunity seems like a more than acceptable outcome.
Google has said numerous times they don't want to get involved in any further steps of the job applicant process more than they are with this search tool.
Which makes sense, because this is the step in the funnel where they can make the highest margins. There is incredibly strong user intent, and their existing ads product can plug in nicely.
That combined means advertisers (read: companies trying to hire) could find a lot of value in using this over other options, and that could mean a large revenue opportunity for Google.
True, however, Google is facing more and more pressure from regulators for favoring their own services in search. The EU is expected to drop a massive penalty in the next month or two for Google favoring their own shopping services over others, and surely implement new restrictions on how they can conduct themselves in this regard.
This is a commonly misunderstood issue, because of Google's superior PR. Amazon banned Chromecast in response to Google's refusal to allow Amazon products like the Kindle Fire from using Google services like Chromecast, without agreeing to the illegal requirement of bundling competing products like Play Books, which Amazon obviously doesn't want to load on their Kindles.
Google behaved anticompetitively, Amazon responded in turn, but unfortunately, very few people are aware of the former.
(And yes, Google's anticompetitive behavior regarding Android apps and services is subject to another, separate EU antitrust investigation than the one mentioned above, which is still ongoing.)
This is an incomplete answer. Google Play Services are required on all OEM Android devices running supported Android distributions. Google wasn't behaving in any untoward way, but the result was Amazon's refusal as you describe.
Imho, it's perfectly reasonable for Google to include Play Services as a requirement to OEMs running managed Android (as opposed to custom compiled flavors based on AOSP). Don't you agree?
Ah, you forget how incomplete your answer is. It controls not just the Android devices with Play Services, but restricts all Androids (and SDKs based on Android) that the company releases, including strict "compatibility" requirements, which include branding, pre-installed applications, etc.
Google's agreement for this is in fact, illegal anticompetitive tying (or bundling, if you prefer). Requiring that in order to support Chromecast, Amazon must include Google Play Books is a very questionable requirement legally, especially considering the other highly dominant apps they require, like Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Chrome. In almost every civilized country, it's illegal for a company to use one monopoly to expand it's reach into another market. (Like to use these bundling requirements to encroach on the Kindle ebook market.)
If, as you suggest, however, it's perfectly reasonable to require all this of Amazon in exchange for Kindle support, isn't it perfectly reasonable for Amazon to decide not to sell hardware not compatible with their products?
Amazon will continue to sell streaming media devices that compete with its Fire TV and Fire Stick, including the Roku, Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation -- all of which allow customers to stream Prime videos. In an emailed statement, Amazon called all of those devices "excellent choices."
"Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime," the statement says. "It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion."
Combined this with Google's relatively secret (but well known to you, oh avid reader of my comments here) Mobile Applications Distribution Agreement (or MADA) which places heavy requirements on what Android devices can be if they have Google Play Services, like forbidding so-called "incompatible forks".
I mean, bitmapbrother, it only makes sense that Amazon only sells products compatible with their own products. The Apple Store doesn't sell chargers for the Galaxy S8! That would be madness. If Google wants their products sold on Amazon, they should feel free to loosen up their license restrictions to permit compatibility.
Really, you look forward to? What makes this that personal to you? You are somehow afflicted if Google is indeed fined and regulated? "The few that exist" what is that supposed to mean? That operate in US? I believe it's more than "few".
I agree that EU has too many bureaucrats inviting new ways to regulate things. Sadly it seems that it's the only way countries inside EU are going to have more uniform (and sane) laws.
Without really no knowledge of the Google ruling in my opinion it seems that it's a flick to show Google that there is a line that it can't cross. Maybe Google in all of its superiority has become too arrogant, who knows.
And free markets work only if they are fairly regulated. If there was no penalty from abusing your monopoly you think companies wouldn't do it? I think even Google wouldn't be all the goody-goody with its business practices if we'd let its actions go unchecked. Granted Google seems better than most.
Unless they result in a monopoly, which has arguably happened in the case of Google. Users only want to use one place to search, Google is currently dominant and the problem seems solved well enough that no newcomers are likely to succeed in the future.
Now Google is using its monopoly on search to move into a new segment (shopping) with an unfair advantage.
This would only be possible if EU companies were violating US laws or regulations. Given that EU laws and regulations are typically more restrictive than those in the US and EU companies are already required to comply with them, it seems less likely that an EU company would be fined by the US than a US company fined by the EU.
And I, as a consumer, hope that the opposite happens. The lack of regulation in the US may be great for corporations but it's definitely not for consumers. When it comes to things like privacy, most of the features I get from US companies seem to be a result of EU regulations.
Note: I live and work in the US for a major US company. I just prefer to have consumer rights than a minor bump to my stock portfolio value.
I think its very disingenuous to use the reputation of the article to also push for a " no skills shortage in technology" view. The original article is well researched and based on facts, whereas the blog posts you link are not.
LinkedIn has always stayed close to my heart. I'm currently on my third job, and I found all of them through LinkedIn. But I find it incredibly hard to like their new UI. They try hard to look like Facebook, when they really have no reason to do so. LinkedIn messaging is supposed to be professional messaging like email, but they turned it into a chat window. The "news feed" used to be useful and relevant, now I see memes and irrelevant sponsored posts. I try to check the site at least once a day, and in the past 3-4 weeks I find myself leave the site in less than 30 seconds. The home page is so heavy that you can almost feel it. I deleted my facebook account recently for some reasons, and I find the exact same reasons on LinkedIn now.
This might seem weird but I've never heard of someone getting a job via Linkedin. I mostly get recruiter spam. Do you work in tech? I've heard outside of tech the site is indispensable. Care to share any tips on how to use it for job hunting?
Yes I'm a software engineer. I guess I got lucky in unintentionally doing the right things that eventually helped me out. Here are some tips.
1. When I was doing Masters, in order to not forget every little academic project I did, I documented them on LinkedIn and put the code on github and linked it.
2. People would be against doing this, but when I was searching for internships, I kept adding any recruiter I came across to my network. Especially with recruiters from well-known companies (like MS, Google, Intel etc), I add them aggressively and was sure to do (3) below.
3. When adding someone to my network, instead of the default template message, I wrote something about myself, like "Hi I am currently doing my Masters in CS at <univ> university and I am looking for internship opportunities. Please take a look at my profile and let me know if you think I might be a match for something".
4. Always kept my profile updated as I took more courses, did side projects etc. This way, my network got updates about me, and they were able to see that I was getting more knowledge and experience. The recruiters and other professionals who were not able to find a match for me before now start to think may be they should give me a shot.
5. Network, network and network. I shared interesting tech articles I found online, liked others' posts about such articles etc. This might seem obvious, but don't "like" memes and funny statuses. I grew my network to the point that I had 400+ connections. But only about 200 of them were people I actually know and the rest were recruiters/professionals in the field/startup CEOs etc. The downside of this is that I now often get recruiting messages when I'm no longer in the job market. I save those messages hoping that I would find them useful one day.
TL;DR is that keep your profile updated and rich with content, and network as much as you can. Be professional, try to take time to respond to the recruiters who reach out to you. Even if you are not interested in their company, take a minute to just say so. It may help you in the future.
Not the OP but I'm a developer and I don't have LinkedIn. I never have any problems finding work. I have a personal site with my CV on it, and I spend a lot of time networking.
Do you ever follow up on those and see if there's value to it? I get 2-3 messages a week on LinkedIn by recruiters that clearly haven't read my profile for jobs I'm not interested in. I wouldn't consider any of those opportunities.
I get 6-7 messages per week (~1/day on average) and I'd say about half of them are actually recruiting for my skills/location/needs, which is admittedly pretty good for not investing any time into the platform.
I've followed up with a few over the years and they've ultimately not been good fits for me at the time (stack, salary, or location), but I wouldn't say they were bad jobs. Also, for the others I usually just respond with a canned "I'm only looking for X, Y, Z right now, so feel free to reach out again if you find something along those lines!"
I think it's worth having a LinkedIn if you're looking or open to moving jobs, as it's a pretty common venue for recruiters to (easily) get in touch, IMO.
> I'm curious of how job hunting and networking goes for you without LinkedIn
Whilst I do have a LinkedIn profile, I have yet to use LinkedIn as an avenue to search for a job in any meaningful sense. Perhaps this will change, but at the moment I'm far more likely to integrate Google's job search into my process than jacking up LinkedIn to max.
this won't have any bearing on linkedin because they see themselves as a (professional) social network, not a jobs site (even though recruiting is a decent chunk of revenue).
jobs seem to be a natural extension of google's search service, and a direct competitive response to indeed. these job search results will be useful to people but i don't see it changing the industry. discovery is an important step in getting a job but it's only one step.
(i say this as someone working on the matching problem between employers and employees.)
This sounds amazing. I honestly think recruiters can be entirely replaced by a decent A.I. and good scheduling software. And we would all be better off.
Noooo!! Recruiters are so useful. They do a lot of leg work for you. They have access to many openings that aren't public. They can provide introductions to people you've always wanted to speak to. And they can convince good companies to create an opening for you if you would fit really well with the company.
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in. They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
They are invaluable.
I do have to say though that there is enormous variability in their skill. The secret is to only work with a few that have access to different contacts and that you trust. Don't spray your resume out there to bad recruiting companies.
I have noticed a difference between industries though. In my main industry (finance and financial technology) recruiters tend to be very knowledgeable and work very diligently to give you leads that fit your skills and priorities. I've noticed that in other industries like web or internet start up they can be atrocious. I get all sorts of random crap from them so you probably need to be extra careful in certain industries.
But i would never give up my recruiters. They take a lot of pain out of me trying to find a new position.
I have a lot of love for my recruiters. I wouldn't have nearly the career i do now without them.
You''re describing good recruiters, which are rare and far between. The majority is spam unfortunately. The problem I think is the incentive structure. When you see human beings as nothing more than a commission, the tactics get cutthroat.
I deal with more good recruiters than bad recruiters. I'm picky and the industry might make a big difference.
I also spend the time to really talk to the recruiter the first couple times so he knows a lot about me and what I'm looking for. And i don't feel he would work out for me, i don't work with him.
I takes communication and i think part of the problem is on the job seekers side. Too many are uncommunicative.
Any recommendations? The only recruiters I've ever interacted with are working for or on behalf of employers. They're looking to fill their position and if I'm not that person, I don't hear from them ever again. It would be awesome to have someone always out there looking on my behalf. Does that kind of recruiter even exist?
In-house recruiters are a lot different. I've met some very persistent ones that even after you say not interested they keep calling you (I'm glad one did because he broke me down and i finally interviewed and had great success at the company).
To find new external recruiters i look at the job listings (Indeed, LinkedIn, etc) and see if i notice the same recruiting firm listed at jobs i find interesting. Then i get in touch with the recruiter directly and have a discussion with him. So i kind of look for recruiters more than i look for jobs.
Agreed. There's a lot of snakes in the biz. I had to tell one to turn his auto-dialer down because it was annoying me. If I didn't answer he'd be hitting me up several times per day every day. Then he'd lie about not having an auto-dialer.
They want huge commissions but they don't add a lot of value. That commission is almost always way more than it would cost me for my time to recruit from my own network or through traditional means.
Many of them never even meet their candidates. When I was in the market a long time ago - they would prep me with what to say to the hiring company even if it wasn't part of my skill-set at the time. That's very dishonest.
I'm an employer and they'll call me and immediately start talking about a candidate. They'll ramble on and on about how great their candidate is even though I'm not hiring or I'm only hiring for a different role.
Part of their strategy is to push a candidate on you, get you to like them and then talk about their commission only if necessary. They get really squeamish if you ask about commission.
As someone who has previously conducting a job search while employed full-time, recruiters are a must-have. I don't have all the time in the world to job hunt during normal business hours. Having people who were motivated to be the one to find me a job saved me a lot of time, got me a lot of info, and the recruiter who was working for the company that inevitably hired me was super helpful in recognizing my potential from maybe a bit of a lacking quality resume, and pried for a bit more info... a dedication a faceless Google algorithm will never have.
most "good" points you mentioned there about recruiters code can replicate.
They do a lot of leg work for you
- simple stats and analysis
They have access to many openings that aren't public.
- This is just companies choosing their preferred recruiters in a fragmented industry. A solid platform would solve this
And they can convince good companies to create an opening for you if you would fit really well with the company
- I dont see code doing this. But how often does this happen though?
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in.
- Not sure why you think this is exclusive to recruiters. Isnt this just another way of describing filters on a recruitment website?
.They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
- Its not hard to code something that can achieve this. Even saw a post here on HN about a site that can mass apply for jobs for you. Could make it a little more intelligent so it learns which jobs you prefer.
Companies in certain industries often don't publicly list because they don't want it widely known what they are looking for, what they are doing, or even that they exist sometimes. Or they don't want to weed through all the crap resumes and recruiters are their front line against that. That's not solvable with just a better platform.
And no algorithm, stats, and analysis is going to be a good as a recruiter who works regularly with a firm and knows what they are looking for, what the culture is like, and their internals.
Also recruiters help negotiate salary for you too, and that always helps.
Also recruiters help negotiate salary for you too,
and that always helps.
The recruiter's paid by the employer, and wants to maintain a good relationship with them. Surely their incentive is to place two candidates at $0.9x for a total of $1.8x, rather than placing a single candidate at $1.1x by driving a hard bargain?
I guess I'm confused as to why anyone would expect a better result by having someone else do your negotiation?
That's an interesting point but realistically I've never had that happen (that i know of at least). I've a always had them come back with better numbers than the initial offer.
Not down here in Australia. They get so much commission their interest is mainly in making a placement and will actively negotiate downwards if they think there is some risk in making the placement at a higher salary.
Most position i get through recruiters. And i get far more offers dealing with recruiters than not even if i don"t take them.
In NYC i might deal with 3 or 4. A lot o them have the same listings so i will work with the ones i either already have experience with or that seem to understand the biz best.
So maybe i work with one that has great leads with small trading firms, another with better access to large banks, one who is more on the financial technology side, and one who does tech start ups.
I try not to do one offs (deal with a recruiter for a single position) but it happens of course.
There are some places i never would have thought to interview at because of preconceived ideas i had, but I'm glad the recruiter was able to talk me into it (eg, Bloomberg has a top rate technical side handling their trading platform and news distribution - i never would have thought they were so talented).
Uh no, Google is an advertising company. You know the terrible full page creepy ads taking over mobile that make the internet almost unusable and you can't block? Google is responsible for that.
With Google Jobs you're the product to be sold. Only this time it's not annoying ad's, they're offering your employment for sale, your life.
Quite the opposite. If you have a site with Adsense and a good chunk of mobile trafic they recommend you to install ads for mobiles and there are options to show a banner fixed to the bottom of the screen and another to display an ad that takes all the screen. Google is really contradictory in that regard if you see what they recommend for adsense editor and what they said in the quality guidelines for search.
EDIT: To clarify, when I was a recruiter, we could build profiles on candidates, buy information on candidates, etc. It was pretty trivially easy to get all the relevant info from linkedin alone. My thought is, why not want that? It'd save me wasting a candidate's time if I could glance through his linkedin and see he/she wasn't a good fit. Because if you had a private profile, 80% of the time I'd be able to pull your phone number from a resume you'd posted somewhere (that my company paid pennies to have access to) and give you a call, just to find out real quick if you're a good fit or not.
>Few people would hire me if they had access to my full Google profile.
Why is that? What is it that google knows about you that the rest of the world couldn't somewhat easily find out?
I'm mildly surprised, because I can't think of anything google knows about me that would prevent me from being hired. The only thing is maybe my porn history, which is all in incognito mode anyway, and really not even that shocking in terms of content.
Haha I had considered this. I really am curious though, could you at least point out what class of data would be dangerous? I mean, maybe I'm exposing this with no idea!
Nothing special, it's not like I would get arrested, but when you have the habit of exploring, for example, political texts of all kinds, someone skimming and cherry-picking could find plenty of stuff to mark me as "inappropriate", even if they're a negligible part of the whole.
It's essentially the idea "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Ultimately we have to accept some form of centralized control to reap the benefits of this technology at scale. Would you rather be using an AltaVista job search?
The assumption is I google search the things I know and enjoy, which is actually pretty accurate for time-at-home bored-surfing.
One problem is I also spend a huge amount of time googling stuff I'm completely uninterested in and hate doing. What wires do you jumper again to test a mid 00s whirlpool freezer icemaker to verify its motor works, again? Once its fixed I never want to see that again, certainly don't want to work as an appliance repairman.
Possibly there is an algorithm to analyze behavior. Oh he's searching for freebsd something or other maybe he'd like a sysadmin job. Oh look he's hate-searching for icemaker repair again, better not suggest appliance repair jobs.
How different would your private life be, if you thought there was a chance it could affect your future job prospects?
If everything in my personal life were known over the last 20 years, I'd probably be unemployable. Let's just start with politics. I was an activist in my early 20s. When I was young, I had some pretty radical ideas. Google knows that, there's plenty in my gmail about it. Should that really be used to inform my current job prospects, 20 years later?
Google knows every time I've taken a sick day and lied about it (I carry my android phone, and use google maps).
There's no reason for any of your information to be shared with the prospective employers here, no? The flow of information here is from the employers, via Google, to you, not the other way around. Your information, plus what you type, would just filter that info down to what you actually care about.
I agree-ish. A good solution needs to happen. I've been happy with Hired from both sides.
Recruiters are getting vile. Recently one contacted a friend and told my buddy that I had referred him. My buddy hit me up after the call mad that I'd told a recruiter he was looking.
I'd never met the recruiter but he'd added me on LI at some point in the past.
It annoys me when IT folks despise recruiters and refuse to acknowledge how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters. Non-stem folks would easily exchange places with you.
Be thankful that jobs search for you and not the opposite.
Should we be thankful that there are lots of realtors? We should be thankful there is enough real estate and the price is accessible (at least for some of us). Realtors are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
I liken it to web ads. The worst web ads will attempt drive-by downloads or are simply obnoxious -- loud, obtrusive, clickjacking, forced-redirects, autoplayed video on pay-per-bandwidth connections, ill-designed for different form-factors, badly layered under/over content. Then again, some ads are perfectly tailored, unobtrusive, small, and fast. Most people generally don't complain about the latter. They don't install AdBlockers to avoid the latter. But the latter are collateral damage of people avoiding the former.
> how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters
This is not costless. I stopped answering my phone because it was causing context switches while at work and affecting my productivity. Eventually I figured out that I needed to unsubscribe from recruiter lists (some of which were probably email-confirmation spam traps) and to completely obfuscate my job search profiles while I was not searching.
It annoys me when IT folks despise recruiters and refuse to acknowledge how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters.
It was kind of flattering until I realized most of them never works for me.
They'll call, ask a lot, ask me to submit a cv although my updated profile is already on LinkedIn. They'll ask about salary expectations and then I won't hear from them again.
(BTW: Yes, I walk from one nice job to the next, can't complain. But I've found that for me talking to recruiters is pointless most of the times. FTR: I got my current job through a recruiter, first time in ten years I actually got a job through a recruiter.)
Yeah I'm not sure it's that much of a blessing either. Lots are interested in talking to me, but most of the jobs are a bad fit and it's fairly time/energy consuming to figure out which recruiters have positions that are a good fit.
Because they are not the same, not even close. Recruiters are pursuing professionals for their skills, while stalkers are pursuing their targets for... more nefarious reasons. Strawman alert.
> How is recruiters persuing professionals for their skills different from stalkers persuing their targets for their looks?
The former (speaking of recruiters targeting modern technology professionals; 19th century naval recruiters are a different story) has less of a history of escalating to physical violence and forced taking of what is desired by the pursuer, a context difference which results in a significant difference in the level of reasonably perceived threat to autonomy and physical safety involved.
So is every company who ever employed me, who MUST make a lot more money from the labors of my body than they pay me to remain profitable. What's your point?
I wouldn't call triviality when I see smart friends begging a job for months just because they made a bad decision somewhere in their past. Maybe it's just me.
My initial reaction using Google Jobs search compared to LinkedIn:
- Not enough jobs. LinkedIn seems to have more jobs posted for the things I searched for. While many recruiters still post to Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter etc... The beef of postings, from my experience, is found on LinkedIn.
- Not easy to apply. LinkedIn has the ability to more easily apply. Yes, one could argue this is a bad thing (since companies get spammed with candidates) but I think with AI a lot of bad candidates could get filtered out more easily.
- No social network. Since so many professionals use LinkedIn, it's easier to find people you know who work at a company you are applying for.
I think this is a long, long way to beating LinkedIn for job search.
I wonder if the end goal here is for Google to start selling "Promoted Jobs" advertisements.
I'm also a little concerned if this gets popular that competitors jobs will happen to be further down the list than they should be, but that's probably just my paranoia.
I don't think you're being paranoid enough; the end goal here is for Google to be the biggest and best source of every kind of information anyone would ever want, ever.
Nothing is wrong with a monopoly as long as it’s controlled democratically by all who use it.
In the next years, either we’ll have to break Google up, ban them from the European markets, or find a way for all citizen to have control over Google. And if we end up with the German government straight up buying Google.
But a single person having control over a monopoly that becomes a necessity in your life is becoming close to autocracy. It’s not that problematic yet, but if Google actually takes over the employment market, self-driving cars, and more (same with Amazon, if they actually manage to take over all Retail), then there’s a massive issue.
Autocratic Corporations should never be allowed to hold any monopoly – Cooperatives would be a better alternative for that.
Sure. But in this context I was more interested in pointing out that that's a kind of government, than in parsing differences between various such kinds.
I'm sure they will do promoted jobs. But I wonder if this is more of a defensive move against job related ads that are stagnant - they're trying to do something similar to what they did with the hotel booking: to encourage higher all around bidding from the ecosystem on ads (or find new revenue stream) by putting competition on the intermediaries (ota) that were outbidding the orignators (hotels) for keywords about the originators.
Does Google have a deal with these companies? Will this be the start of the end of all those job sites? is Google just testing the waters? So many questions.
Also, consider the size and employment of a lot of these other companies. And then, look at how many people Google is actually likely to employ on this product, given their obsession with automation and an utter lack of human support. Suffice to say, this, like many other new Google products, will put hundreds or thousands of people out on the street.
People want to know where the jobs went. People are looking for jobs? The only jobs safe from Google takeovers are Google jobs. And I'm not so sure how committed Google would be to keeping their own employees if they could automate them away too.
It's like Indeed (in the early days, when they didn't have post jobs/resume search).
I guess it's possible they could build google apps type thing for recruiters eventually and step on everyone, although it's doubtful it will do them much good to get into that field.
They announced a "Jobs API" for Google Cloud but it was closed, and as far as I can tell was the non-threatening trojan horse to get the big job sites integrated. ( https://cloud.google.com/jobs-api/ ) As you can see, Google is already including job postings directly from companies - which is in contrast to what they claimed they were going to do with the Cloud Jobs API. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr_8oNKtB98 )
This move, like so many other things Google does now, just pushes the organic results further down and off page 1.
In the short to mid term, the other job sites - Indeed, Monster, Ziprecruiter, could act as a funnel for populating the longer tail of job postings. In aggregate, it is very, very hard to get postings from all of these small businesses that lack a robust ATS. That is why companies like Ziprecruiter have to run their ads (to acquire employers) all over the place.
In the long term, it will be easy for Google to cut out the other job sites. If you follow where job sites get their traffic, with the exception of Linkedin, it is basically all ultimately from Google. I'm somewhat surprised it took Google this long. Perhaps in part it was reactionary to Facebook. ( https://www.facebook.com/business/news/take-the-work-out-of-... )
If Google takes that path, then it has to start charging companies for job postings. Already today companies like Uber have to hand over millions of dollars to Google to acquire their workforce. I imagine this would only strengthen Google's hand.
I tried out the example in the post and didn't get any of the contextualized information. Guess it isn't rolled out to everyone yet or do you have to sign up somewhere to see it?
I am not in the US but used a free VPN to search for "golang jobs" [1]
Once you click one of those postings you get a screen like this [2]
However, be aware of the date filter because the posts listed here are older than what Google says. Many, if not all, of the posts scrapped from remoteok.io are several months old, even years, so the "x days ago" that Google shows is just the time when the post was indexed rather than the time the post was created. So you are still prone to see useless posts.
Probably. If I was monster/linkedin I'd get chills on reading this news. Luckily the google employees interviewed were saying things along the lines of "we just want to make it easier for people to find jobs on these providers, not replace the providers."
CEO of Monster said basically the same thing - I can't find the quote on mobile, but essentially "This fits with our goal, which is for candidates to find a good fit. This will be difficult times, however, for jobs sites that depend on SEO."
Dunno, but I get the best "passive" response rate from recruiters on Monster - i.e., out of the blue calls increased by a huge margin when I put my resume on it.
OK google, now find me an employer that wants to pay more...
Kudos to google, hopefully this helps majority of America find jerbs.
most hackernews readers think this is stupid because our industry has different problems. Our jobs problem is:
- "employers often lie because they want to pay less than a typical employee is worth"
but also at the same time:
- "applicants often lie about their experiences and such"
So there are 4 quadrants: honest/dishonest applicants and honest/dishonest employers and where they overlap is small.
Not sure I like this. The reason I tend to use external job sites is that they don't know who I am so I don't have to spend three weeks beating off recruiters with a shitty stick. Google knows who I am.
When I hear these sorts of comments I'm always curious how long these people have been working. It obviously isn't everyone receiving cold calls and such, so what sets them apart?
A LOT of open source development would be a big one for me. My name is all over the internets as a result (google: Jeff Schroeder Linux -"Smashing Pumpkins").
My first OSS contribution, before I could code, was a Bluecurve icon set for Rhythmbox that was merged into an ancient version of Rhythmbox on an ancient version of Fedora Core Linux on Jun 13, 2005. Your name stays in open source things virtually forever, and if you make it easy to find your email, recruiters hound you non-stop:
Also, hiring managers, or decision makers (I could count myself as someone in this category) often do give a crap about OSS work. Give it a shot! Find a project doing something you enjoy and contribute to it. It doesn't have to just be code, documentation and graphics are also important (amongst other things).
Based on my own experience, the large majority of students looking for industry jobs (including myself) will apply to many jobs without even hearing back. To read about people complaining about being recruited is the complete opposite of our problem.
It might happen as soon as you land a job in the industry. You're a much easier sell for a recruiter if somebody else has already interviewed and hired you; it's less risky.
I've been at my job for about a year post university. Semi-actively applying and not a single reply back. I don't know if its my resume, me only having a single year of experience, or something else.
Even as a software engineer, I love hearing from recruiters. Sometimes I get a call a day. Great.
The more opportunities = the more likelihood for a great opportunity. I'm always polite, tell them I'm not looking now, send me the job description and I'll forward it to my friends who are, reply to their email and tell them it's my preferred method of communicating.
Lets me build up a nice fat folder in Inbox of "jobs", filled daily by recruiters. I can skim it, see none of the companies I'm interested in, and click "done" on the whole folder. Takes a couple seconds, no skin off my bones, and the last time I was job hunting it meant my search took about a month to find something that really is a perfect fit.
So, why not spend a couple minutes a day dealing with recruiters?
This is my attitude as well. There is no down side to politely replying to recruiters, even if the role they have for you is not interesting. The best that can happen is that slim chance you'll find your dream job. The worst? I dunno--the recruiter doesn't get back to you?
For me it was just location. When I was in Atlanta for grad school my LI profile was quiet. As soon as I moved to the Bay Area for work it exploded. And I don't mean after having gained a year or two of work experience; I mean within a month of changing my location on LI.
I have a CS degree, but only spent a year in a technical/developer position. Since then (a decade), my job role, responsibilities, and titles have all been around strategy and operations. I get regular recruiter emails telling me about "awesome" developer jobs for which I'm a perfect fit.
I've been working for 16 years in the IT sector in software dev (senior/architecture/devops cack) and then 3 years engineering before that.
You don't get cold calls. You plonk your CV somewhere, take a position and then have to change your phone number because they won't go away even if you have taken a position :)
I have a CS degree and just short of 5 years worth of buzzwords in my resume(React, Rails, JavaScript and alike)
I don't get cold calls(ok, I've gotten it maybe once or twice), but I get spammed on email and Linkedin because of people crawling for keywords on these sites, they barely ever read your resume.
I have been working for almost 15 years as an electrical, systems, and software engineer. Except for the initial flurry in the 2-3 days after I post my resume on a job board, I get maybe one hit a week. Throw out the shitty, clueless recruiters and it's more like one every month or two. Throw out Amazon, and I consider three a year to be good. That's what I get for spending almost all of it indirectly working for the government.
Of course, I am not now not will I ever be in web development.
I've been running digital marketing and doing front end work for about 6 years - I get contacted pretty consistently. If you put your location on Linkedin as NY or SF and you have any kind of technical skill-set, particularly with startup experience, recruiters will contact you.
I've got close to 20 years under my belt and am in Silicon Valley, and I'd love to hear from recruiters more often. I am curious to know what magic sauce you "captains of industry" have causing you to get so many calls from recruiters that you find it annoying.
I'm on mobile so I'm posting a bunch of unsourced crap right now, apologies, but when I read this this morning, the employee interviewed said along the lines of "just because you like fishing doesn't mean you want to be a fisherman."
Basically google will not be using prior knowledge about you to drive jobs search results. The results will be literally based off your search string (and applied filters) alone.
> goal is to help you find whatever it is you are looking for.
Oh, I thought the goal was to obtain incredibly detailed consumer profiles by offering to search whatever it is you are looking for, and then sell targeted ads based on those profiles, in order to obtain monetary profit.
In the techrunch article, the interviewed employee says they won't be using prior knowledge to drive jobs search results. Sure, ads may become more targeted, but this isn't your typical "users also bought..." type deal.
I wonder if this means that instead of applying across numerous - way too many - career/job search sites (and filling in the same thing over and over again)...that maybe I can just fill stuff out once, and be done...and let the "machines" do the work for me? ;-)
These large companies can and do use lock-in with their tools to shape people's lives the way they want. This is the extreme end of where Google wants to be, I hope I'll never end up having to use any more of the things they develop.
This is the URL [1] where FOOBAR is whatever job you want.
You will have to be IN the US, near, or using a VPN routing through the US to see the new feature, otherwise you will get the same old results that you have been getting so far. Notice that if you are going to use a VPN you MUST NOT be logged into your Google account, otherwise the search engine will ignore your request because it will detect that your account is not from the countries selected for this release.
I don't think they want it to be a different service from Search (like Google Flights is). It's more that when you search for something like "jobs near me" you get these job results, just like the custom restaurant search/flight search from google.com
The interface needs a lot of work. It's feels not just mobile first, but mobile only.
Also, maybe I'm just not a typical user, but it would be nice to have some better control over location, or at least indication of how close to the target location each job is.
How long will it be until employers can look up all the information Google has about me? More importantly, how long will it be until users will be expected to give access to their "likes, skills, and interests" for targeted recruiting? At least LinkedIn is easy enough to keep separate from the rest of my life. Google knows everything about me.
Linkedin is owned by Microsoft. If you're using Windows, what Google knows about you is (potentially, hypothetically, etc.) a subset of what Microsoft knows about you.
I empathize, but I'm pretty sure that Google already knows a bit about your employment, and/or is doing really good modeling to figure it out probabilistically. (Ex: if you make Google searches between 9-5 in a certain location consistently, you most likely work there.)
I'm not sure this is really a defense... I try and practice a certain level of privacy (not enough) but I don't really like how much google is aggregating on me. Just recently I had a problem with my car (Honda Civic) so I searched some youtube videos on it and ended up ordering a part online, now my Google News feed is showing me a whole bunch of articles for the Civic Type-R and asking me if I'm interested in Honda. That's my mistake for being lax but I'm starting to think that maybe we should reconsider our relationship with our personal data. Google relies on individuals like me to make small slips which permanently compromise our privacy.
The good supplier doesn't want to spend their energy in reviewing vast quantity of available consumers. At the same time good consumers don't want to go after every available suppliers. There is also good likelyhood that bad suppliers as well as bad consumers are trying to masquerade as good ones. This is the same setting as dating website or Amazon product website. The solution that humans seem to prefer is somehow build the trust model. In case of Amazon product website, you look at reviews and ratings by others. In case of dating website you look at characteristics that you have learned to trust such as what's in the photos, what person is doing for living, what degrees do they have and so on. In case of jobs, companies look at who is referring to who or if you are already at other top company (which is the reason why most people get jobs because of referrals, not by posting resumes). The trust model is developed individually and can massively be different from person to person.
I'm in fact more certain that virtually all companies ignore resumes posted on their website and most interviews happen solely because recruiter actively identified candidate from other similar company/university or referrals. However this may be more true in skilled jobs.