Feedback on my startup job aggregator | Hacker News Reader

Feedback on my startup job aggregator

startupshiring.com

84 pointsagotterer49 comments

Today I launched Startups Hiring. The idea is simple; eliminate recruiter posts, noise and the need for startups to maintain and manage job postings on third party job boards. I ended up building a curated list of companies that are crawled for open positions directly from their career pages. Links are fresh and updated daily. Clicking a link takes you directly to the job description on the company website. The service is free and we are adding new companies every day.

I would love to hear feedback from the HN community and suggestions on possible ways to generate revenue outside of featured links (which I have).

First of all, let me say I think your site is exceptionally attractive. I am immediately presented with the logos of scores of exciting startups. This engages me right away. Although, at the moment the front page is a bunch of Airbnb listings. I think the variety of logos does a lot for the site's first impression, so you might want to make sure there aren't too many listings of a single company on the front page. Also remember to add a favicon.

Featured links seems like a good way to go. Do you actually have companies paying for featured links at the moment?

Edit: Oh, and your Adap.tv logo is broken.

Thanks for the feedback. Currently when you add a new company it does the initial crawl and brings in all of their listings. Future crawls only bring in the new listings, keeping the cmpany variety good and mixed. I haven't come up with a good way to get around the initial crawel yet, short of randomizing the dates for launch.

All the logos are from crunchbase. I will shoot them a message.

Grats! A few suggestions from the guy who ran WorkZoo.com - also a job scraper, one of Time Mag's top 50 sites of 2005 - sold to Jobster in the same year:

-Republish the jobs in a directory by location on your own domain. Big SEO win.

-Scrape the big boards but link to them (as you already are linking to the source). They won't mind and when we stopped scraping Careerbuilder they called us and asked why.

-Try solving the location problem by getting a list of the 5000 biggest cities in the US and parsing the content for those cities. Filter out common english words from the list of 5000 cities though. Make sure you store lat/lon once you've tagged a job with a city so you can do radius search.

-Forget categories for the UI. Users can just use search to find what they want. If you need categories for your directory then come up with a list of 100 search queries and use that to generate 100 "categories".

-This really needs to be a search engine so shove it into sphinx or a similar fulltext engine. I used to use swish-e which sucked so badly - I envy the options you have for fulltext these days.

-Not really sure why you're limiting yourself to startups, but if this is just a fun project or a way to contribute to the community then that's the way to go. If you want to earn $$ then I'd index everything or perhaps the most lucrative sectors.

If you're serious about this be sure to chat to Dave McClure who used to run marketing for SimplyHired and take a look at simplyhired.com and indeed.com for biz model and implementation ideas. I'm also happy to be an advisor if this turns into a business.

Best of luck!!

I think the whole point is that some people want to go work for only startups. By creating a site where you know those are the only jobs, you attract that niche. The market for general developer job boards seems very saturated.

- can't search by location (searching for "new york" has many false positives and missing results)

- need an option to flag a listing for incorrect information (e.g. http://www.dailymotion.com/us/about/jobs#ref05 comes up as being in Paris), job no longer available, etc

- would be nice to see some indication of when a job was posted-- stale listings have less value.

Older listings don't necessarily provide less value. We have several that have been up for almost a year now because we never stop hiring. Recurring payments to keep a job posted, and marking those jobs that pay to be there, may work better.

In my experience, older listings are more likely to (in order of frequency):

- point to 404s

- already be filled, and nobody deleted the listing

- have received a higher number of applicants over time, decreasing your chances

- indicate an overly-picky employer (why is the position still not filled after 6 months?)

Given that most job sites display listings in chronological order, your company should probably add fresh listings periodically anyways just to rank higher in searches.

The index is updated daily. When it crawls if it notices a job is no longer listed it will pull it from the index. In theory every job on the site should always be available and listing on the company career page. The older ones will still work it's way to the bottom... Search is ordered by date discovered desc.

Yeah, this was not a response to your site specifically, but to the parent poster and job sites as a whole.

Some people keep "job postings" up that never close because they are just collecting resumes rather than filling an open position. See justin.tv for instance. I guess that sort of ties into your #3.

Haven't actually added location search yet. Thats next. Its also really difficult to determine the location because I'm working with limited data. The idea was to use the headquarter data, especially since most startups don't have multiple locations.

I will add the "discovery" date to give a bit better idea of when things were found. But my crawler removes jobs that are no longer listed, so the results should always be fresh within a day.

Thanks for the feedback!

"Discovery" date is very useful for filtering out generic job postings that HR sometimes keeps up just to collect the resumes. Not sure if this is at all legal in the US, but in Canada this is a very common practice.

With regards to the location uncertainty - better not show anything in this case. Until you said "headquarters" I didn't even bother to look at the name of the column and assumed it was the location of the actual position.

Also the information on your site is not meant for pleasure reading, it is meant for scanning. As such the list needs to be much more compact. I'd take the logotypes out, reduce the line-height as well as the width of the table.

Allow me to play devil's advocate. There are plenty of job listings for all kinds of companies including startups. Why do I want to use yours?

You're right. The best startup job site in my opinion is startuply. The problem is it's not every startup. They only have what a company willingly goes and posts. Startups Hiring is in its infancy, so theres not a lot of companies yet. But the end goal is the be the largest list of startup jobs. I think the only way to attain this is be eliminating the requirement of a company physically going and making a post.

Coincidentally , startuply's main page is throwing this lovely error: http://pastebin.com/7pCDmJBS .

In any case, location search should exist. It is one of the most important requirements that a job seeker uses to filter desirable listings.

This is a great idea. I am graduating soon and would love these kinds of sites.

I wish there was an advanced search where I could at least search if the company was looking for fresh graduates or senior engineers.

If you really want me to sign up, create a "favorite" button so that I can look at the job later.

I also wish there was a time of the post or some indication of how old the job posting is.

Thanks.

Some sort of categorization might be worthwhile (and do-able, since you're sticking in the startup vertical). Maybe tags/labels, given that your audience is pretty geeky? i.e. "engineering, design, mobile, marketing, management", etc. Browsing 600+ jobs is not just about good pagination controls.

+1 on the searchability issues. Should be able to search by city/region.

Location search (or at least sort) would be good. I'd love to see a set of icons that give extended info for each job (i.e. willing to hire remote workers, maybe funding stage or approximate company size)

Seconded on this, plus the ability to sort/filter on these criteria. For me, the ability to search for "only telecommute jobs" is the make or break factor on whether or not a job board is worth my while.

This is Great. I was going to ask what direction you were going to take this in.. but it's interesting that you only have jobs listed for/at really startup companies that most geeks want to work at. I'd say you should drive that point home a little more if that is what your focusing on.

Otherwise, yeah dude take it to the next level. Keep reaching out to add more of them.. I'm sure you can be well known for offering jobs in this space.. great quick clean idea!

Very cool Adam! Ive always wanted a site like this. Definitely keep it focused exclusively on start-ups and never touch the Monsters of the world.

-I would build this on top of an existing job board platform. There are plenty out there, no need to reinvent the wheel.

-Include job description summaries on your site - use some kind of onmouseover div if you don't want to clutter the page.

-Have you considered scraping from other startup job boards out there?

-How are you planning on monetizing the site?

It seems your search might not be working properly, http://www.startupshiring.com/search/PHP brings back nothing, yet you have at least one(the collegehumor PHP developer position).

I think my fulltext search might be killing off words that are 3 letters or under. Will have to look into that. Thanks.

This might seem crazy, but I keep reading the url as "startup shiring". Too much LOTR, maybe.

That's how I read it too. I couldn't imagine the exact metaphor he was going for (companies start in the shire before adventuring out into the world?), but it's not off-putting, at least. It's no expertsexchange.

thoughts:

it would be very useful to have the ability to filter/sort the listings based on things like job types (developer, dba, sales, etc), posted time (if you can), or location.

you've eliminated the recruiter posts/noise/etc., but in doing this, you've become the new middleman. you might be able to contact the companies and find out if you could negotiate any referral bonus if someone gets hired through the use of your site. worth a shot, at least.

I'm planning to add a tags system that will organize jobs and companies by their type. Thats up next!

May be you should tie-up with http://www.linkup.com/

It would nice to able to sort by those headings your have (Company and location especially)

Your search feature filters out #, so searching for "C#" yielded search results for C.

Sounds like theres a few problems with my fulltext search. Going to update it sometime today to be more accurate. Thanks!

For startups, a categorization by stage of company would be usefull.

first rxn "wonderful!!!"

I like the idea and the simple design. hope you'll resolve the little problems in search - eg: search on company name not returning any results

Agotterer,

I LOVE the simplicity of your design. Well done!

looks good, though it's a bit strange that the "n results found" copy reflects the results only on the current page, not all search results.

how about putting the salary range as well if possible, something similar to indeed.com.

Internships Support?

great job1

I love how simple it is. In fact, this couldn't have taken more than 30 minutes to make. Not always a bad thing though.

Giving users the ability to find jobs where they live might be a good idea right? Maybe. Who knows, maybe you prefer scrolling through 50 pages instead.

Ha. The design took a few hours. Coding the site took a bit longer :)

The simple and clean design is actually what I like best about the site. I'm sure you've seen www.startuply.com (which is amazingly down right now because of an asp.net web.config error, wow!) That might be a good source of job leads for your crawler.

I also really like how you link to the companies website and not to some 3rd party job posting. Have you thought about adding more info to the start-up profile page on your site?

Startuply has been down since last night :\

I'm pulling a lot of my company data from crunchbase. I plan on adding a full profile in the next few weeks.

Really?

script/generate a few scaffolds, throw in a has_many or two and maybe a belongs_to here or there, code some simple erb layouts and BOOM!

If you downvote me, at least reply with a reason.

You're trying to make it seem like the time he invested in it wasn't worth it or that he was too slow.

You can do this in 30 minutes? Really? Prove it to us. You have 30 minutes, replicate this by "script/generate a few scaffolds, throw in a has_many or two and maybe a belongs_to here or there, code some simple erb layouts and BOOM!" then give us a link.

Everyone can look at someone else's work and be a critic. And, that's fine. But blatant criticism and ripping apart work that took time for no apparent reason is, at least in my book, terrible.

I never said that the site was bad. In fact I said its simplicity was a good thing. I was just saying that it is relatively easy to make.

I also love how simple it is, but it might border on being too simple. It doesn't come off as immediately trustworthy (aggregators often don't). Maybe you just need a simple, but original logo?

You're forgetting the fact that he is crawling job pages and extracting the data himself. His plans for using the startup's location as the location for the job, if done somehow automatically, is certainly non-trivial. I highly doubt this took 30 minutes to make. I think you're just being insulting and ignorant.

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