Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

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I've applied to probably 100+ jobs in the past two years. I tried keeping track for a while and later felt it was not helpful. Occasionally I have to dig back through emails to verify things, like whether a recruiter submitted me for a certain company, and it can be a slight pain. But I don't think I would get enough value out of a whole app dedicated to this topic to bother to download it, and I am probably an ideal user of such a thing.

Third party recruiters are the number one pain of the process. They don't respect candidates; they don't want to hear about your goals or your search constraints; they just aggressively talk over you. And I'm even talking about the so-called 'good' recruiters that you get referred to by word of mouth. Even they will break your heart.

The second pain point is well known: everyone uses different online application portals, and everyone has different requirements for manual data entry. I would have expected by now that applying at any company is as simple as just uploading a resume and clicking through some boilerplate agreements or ethnicity surveys that we would all be wise enough to always opt-out of. But I'm still dealing with application sites that look like they were built in 1995 and require upwards of 30 minutes of manual data entry.

Apps that could alleviate the pain of these issues would be way more valuable than organizational apps. The pain of the disorganization is just not that meaningful.

I just finished my job search, and I'd agree with this strongly. I started used Trello for organizing my job applications, but I soon realized there was no point. Companies that wanted to talk to me responded to my initial application with a week or two, while companies that didn't weren't influenced by any kind of followup communication.

After sending out about a hundred applications, I found I had no control over the process, so there was no reason to track it. Instead, I spent that time working on my own projects and going to meetups to find out about live job openings and show off my stuff. The job application system at most places is badly broken and HR and recruiters don't seem to know or care enough to fix it, so it's better to circumvent through some kind of personal connection.

I strongly agree with the comments about doing your own projects and going to meetups. When I began to just submit applications and then stop thinking about them, it freed up much more time to actually do programming. This in turn made me feel more productive and allowed me to learn new things, which is a big source of happiness for me. The compounding positive effects from sort of tuning out the noisy signals from HR staff and recruiters and putting energy into what I love (programming and math) has made me feel much more positive about my job search overall.

Any time I have a day where there's just nothing good to apply to, or I don't hear back from anyone, I just tune it all out and write some code and it helps me feel much better.

I can agree with this too. Recently found a job after 50+ applications. I started with heavily tracking them, but in the end I lost the care in doing it. When a potential lead called me up it was to arrange an interview and so as soon as I got their details, a quick search of the company name in my Gmail revealed what I'd actually applied for.

If you're planning on writing something like this, perhaps a tool for the flip side would be better, i.e. an applicant tracker for organisations (although these do already exist).

Ditto. I'm in the midst of my own longer-than-expected job search and was elaborately tracking until I realized that past a 1 week horizon was a waste of effort.

As someone going through a job hunt at the moment, my biggest pain point is lack of standardization in resume formatting for online job portals. My biggest pain points are:

1) No standardized resume format that all job portals parse the same.

2) Inconsistent resume parsing and form filling meaning it's faster to do things by hand than upload a resume and edit.

A great place to start would be fixing this on the Job Portal side by creating and publishing a standard resume format that all of them can parse easily. If that means dumping my resume to a standardized XML format, I'll do it. I'm tired of wasting 20-30 minutes of my life filling out forms for one job because their resume parser can't tell me what they're looking for.

Having applied for a wide variety of jobs, I've noticed most of the non-major tech companies are using standard portals like Jobvite or Taleo to handle their application process. I think it'd be possible to upend this market by advertising you make it easier for candidates to apply which increases the likelihood of the company gets more qualified candidates. With the standardized resume format, you can increase filtering on the backend to help recruiters zero in on people they want to talk to increasing chances of getting a hit and finding the right candidate. Win-Win.

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