Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching_theory_(economics)

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.

http://www.hmhbooks.com/whogetswhat/

Note that trust is an important component of a functioning market.

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.

It is pretty easy to list current job openings within X miles of a zip code on indeed or another aggregate job posting site.

Search is a different machine learning problem than recommend / match. They are very related, but performance isn't a symmetrical challenge.

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.

Maybe for you it's a search problem, but for the customer, the person paying the recruitment + advertising fees (the employer), it's a trust problem.

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).

Are you saying all job boards or the major ones? Do you use niche job boards?

"...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).

_Search_ is a trust problem. At least at the scale of the internet it is.

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