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Comment by finspin | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking that launching just another job board won't get me anywhere. I'll have to either a) spend heavily on advertising (which I can't afford) or b) differentiate myself from all other job boards out there.

I live in Finland (5 million habitants) and based on my research only about 5% of job ads include salary. It's not part of the culture to discuss salaries publicly so it's very well possible that companies won't be willing to go public.

On the other hand, I think it's quite promising that there are even a few companies that are already publishing their salary offers, despite most of the competition not doing it.

I see it as my job to convince them it's good for their business and start a little revolution. Maybe others will join the bandwagon?

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The grandparent post is making an important point though: consider carefully which side of the market makes the rules and embrace their rules as constraints.

I spent ~8 months working on two different startup ideas in the hiring space, one with a cofounder who'd been researching it for close to a year before I came along. We also started with grand ideas of making hiring easier for the jobseeker. The problem is that jobseekers do not have money - hence why they need a job - and so all the money in the hiring space comes from the employer. Like any other competitive market, hiring is subject to the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."

That's why getting a job sucks so much. It's a process that's entirely designed to benefit the company offering the job, not the person seeking the job. And lest you think you can just force companies to make their hiring processes more employee-friendly (we did), consider what happens if they say no. You'll have no listings, and without any listings, you have nothing to offer the jobseeker.

I feel like the job board (yours, Monster, Dice, whoever) is in a unique position to solve this problem. You can ask each side for their salary range but then don't disclose it to the opposite side. You can then match candidates to compatible jobs and everyone knows up front that the desired ranges overlap.

This is a really interesting idea. I would expand it further... OkCupid for employment. Outsource algorithmic and language knowledge measurement to something like TopCoder and add that as a potential dimension on which to match. Education, clearances, experience: these could all be match dimensions.

Offer and demand explain a lot of phenomena. Companies only disclose sallaries when they need to, in order to seduce enough talent. Industries with a large talent pool to choose from will never do it.

Offtopic for original question, but yeah, us Finns should be more open about salaries since our tax records are already public information. But some Finnish companies are worried about publishing salaries because they think foreigners won't even apply for certain jobs if they see that e.g. Swedish companies are giving a better salaries.

...wait, if tax records are already public information - could you create a job board that doesn't require the employer's cooperation at all? Just scrapes tax return information, correlates the "employer" field (there is one, right?) with the "income" field, and displays the average salary for every job title at every company? That'd be hugely valuable information; it's not possible to build in the U.S. since our tax records are private, but it'd give a great picture of the economy and which sectors are in demand.

I nosed around the Finnish tax authority website and couldn't find a way to download the returns.

Even if it wee anonymized I think it'd be a fascinating dataset to play with.

Hey, I live in Finland as well, and this sounds very interesting, I'd love to discuss about it. Shoot me an email :)

Great, I'll be in touch! :)

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