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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I read a story recently about a guy who, through sheer happenstance, managed to fix his entire life. He had gotten laid off of his job and was getting desperate. He usually picked up the New York Post and applied to the jobs he saw there.

This time they were out of the Post, so he grabbed the Times. He saw an ad for a job fair. He went to the fair. The fair was practically empty, but the employers were desperate, the first recruiter he meets basically just takes his info down, tells him where to report to and when he starts.

The job fair folks didn't realize that blue collar workers didn't read the Times, so that's the reason why the fair was empty.

Blue collar job matching still appears to be a blue ocean and Facebook seems to be uniquely positioned to serve that market. If they can get this right, this could end blue-collar unemployment overnight.

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I don't know about the real numbers but I did have a similar experience. I needed somebody to do manual labor (yea, I know, I am lazy) and was having a hard time finding any in a high unemployment country.

I told my friend about how there is no single guy despite the unemployment. His reaction was "oh, really? They are in that coffeeshop just around all day waiting for jobs".

Turns out sitting there all day was their way to advertise. You just talk to the waiter about what you need and if it requires some speciality (painting, plumbing, etc...) and he points you right to the few guys who do it.

I'm not sure if Facebook will help them since my country has a low gdp/hdi but this might be otherwise for the developed and more connected world.

I'll piggyback on your comment as my sentiment is the same. This is far from the worst thing Facebook has done. It seems to address an unmet need. Maybe it will end up creepy and full of unforeseen consequences (like everything else FB) if nearly all non-office job seeking moves to FB, but for now it's helping people.

(And also, Striper Sniper Tackle is a fabulous name for a fishing store.)

> Maybe it will end up creepy and full of unforeseen consequences

The first thing I thought of when reading this article was "I wonder how many Herbalife 'jobs' in disguise will end up on here..."

Well... One thing job sites are very hesitant to do is qa. Jobs that aren't jobs. Listings without salary brackets. Where I live (Dublin) most jobs on job boards don't even mention the company name. This is because they're posted by recruiters that way, to avoid being routed around or tipping off the competition. Often the job doesn't exist, they're just resume fishing.

LinkedIn has similar issues.

I think there's hay to be made just on requiring a minimum amount of (ideally structured) information.

I agree with everything you say, but I also think that it's incredibly unlikely Facebook will curate jobs any more than they do the rest of the content in Facebook. You're right about the opportunity to improve recruitment in these aspects, but it's not going to be Facebook that does it.

oh yeah. I'd rather FB don't dominate another niche, so the worse they do the better.

I've been on the hunt for a while and I'll echo these sentiments. Indeed, Zip, Monster, LinkedIn, most of them are just 'ghost' jobs. Maybe they already have an internal candidate, maybe they have had the posting up for 2 years, maybe they are recruiters that are just fishing idly. There's a million reasons, but they all end up being just a time suck and resume black-hole.

Look, I know: network. That's the way to get work. But I suck at networking. I don't feel that it's because I'm unsociable, it's that I don't know anyone that that is working at a place that is hiring. All my contacts are in my same boat of shitty jobs in a shitty area (biotech-denver)

Does anyone know how to break out into another region where you don't know anyone? How to do remote-networking?

I'm not even lying when I say this: 2 out of my last 3 jobs as a remote site reliability engineer have come from Reddit. They were contract gigs, and you have to do a bit more work vetting folks, but every now and then you'll find a recruiter who actually knows wtf they're doing with tech people.

So yeah, 2/3 in 5 years getting quality remote jobs via reddit of all places.

/r/forhire, /r/devopsjobs, /r/sysadminjobs

I'll try this out for bio-tech, thanks for the tip.

One idea: look up the closest somewhat-relevant tech meetup on meetup.com -- it might be worthwhile to travel, even if it's 3 hours away.

Oh man, I've done a lot of this. The problem is that everyone else is trying to get a job too, there aren't really any employers here despite the med campus. Thanks for the tip though.

Where Facebook overlaps with the real world it is quite a strong service. What limits them from extending further is that their revenue is dependent on competing with time spent offline.

Except in your example, blue collar doesn't appear to use the internet to find jobs or job fairs, even if they have a Facebook account.

This reads like a pitch for smart devices for baby boomers. Sure it's a blue ocean, but most retirees don't use smart devices, even though they may have a cell phone.

That seems like a hurdle that Facebook of all companies could leap if they set their minds to it. Also, there is anecdotal evidence in this very HN post of the contrary.

And I think you underestimate the utility of technological aids for old people. They are using them, more now than ever.

> most retirees don't use smart devices, even though they may have a cell phone.

Really would love a citation for that. My dad is 74, my step mom is retired in her late 60s, all of their church group of about 35 people — every single one has a tablet or smart phone. That’s anecdotal obviously, but this sample is a mix of retired blue and white collar people at a variety of incomes (and ethnic backgrounds.)

Retired boomers are a huge smart device market from my experience.

Same, my mum is a bit younger (61) and she spends more time on the internet than I do (and I'm a software engineer).

She also puts more hours in on her tablet than I do mine and way more hours on the Chromebook I got her for xmas than I do my laptop.

Indeed. If anything, the saying "Facebook is for old people" seems to become truer by the day.

> If they can get this right, this could end blue-collar unemployment.

Blue-collar unemployment isn't due to the lack of a sophisticated job search engine, it's due to not having enough jobs. Those jobs have been lost to process improvement and automation and they're not coming back.

They need training and education, not simply a blue-collar LinkedIn.

I don't think there is any reason to not think that there's a lot of inefficiency in the job marketplace that a large tech service that literally their entire market uses couldn't vastly clear up.

What I'm more worried about is that Facebook will drop the ball.

There's definitely inefficiency but I was replying to the notion that this would be a cure for blue-collar unemployment. It's not even going to make a dent.

The article itself shows a lot of screenshots which are specifically service jobs, also referred to as "pink-collar". Those are indeed rapidly on the rise and generally underrepresented in LinkedIn (https://poachedjobs.com is the go-to for food & drink) so I think it could be successful there.

But to suggest Facebook Jobs will be the panacea for blue-collar unemployment is sheer ignorance.

>The job fair folks didn't realize that blue collar workers didn't read the Times, so that's the reason why the fair was empty.

Quite the assertion, that one. I feel like this was ripped straight out of an insane FWD:FWD:FWD email thread one of my older relatives would send.

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