Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?
After stack overflow closes their jobs section, which site would you consider a replacement, both as employee and/or employer?
Existing sites do this, but very poorly, because they only try to detect information out of a resume and detect keywords in a job listing. There is only so much data you can gleam from those sources and it's highly variable. You need to ask specific questions, like "Is Functional Programming the best form of programming?" or "Do you prefer asynchronous communication when dealing with coworkers?", or "Do you like being in an office?", or "Do you like working in finance?".
1. Organizational structure mismatch: The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions. Outside of startups, job postings may be drafted by a manager, but a committee, legal, and/or HR has the final say on what's in the posting. An assistant or VA is often the POC when the job posting is copy&pasted into the job board. This can be overcome, but it's challenge to try to reeducate the organization.
2. Chicken-egg Problem: The challenging part here is that your racing against many existing players with large audiences, and hoping that they can't reverse-engineer the solution before you catch up.
3. User Habits: I can't think of any "normal" person I know that looks for jobs without some negative catalyst pushing them into it. Meanwhile, I imagine that single people are incentivized a bit differently. Not that this wouldn't work, I'm just not sure if it would work the same as for dating. For example, "why would I feel motivated to complete a long profile when I can just spam my pre-made resume, since it will be required at some point in the future anyway." There are good answers to that question, but now you're entering the same re-education waters as in challenge #1.
That is a feature, not a bug: it means that candidates know that jobs they see posted on that site have actually been at least looked at by the actual team you'll work with. Filtering out jobs offers that are just HR buzzword soup would be exactly its competitive advantage over Indeed and LinkedIn job-spam.
> hoping that they can't reverse-engineer the solution before you catch up
Don't worry; they can't. Kodak couldn't even pivot to digital and they invented digital photography! Huge companies have awful, terrible, very bad, no-good software, and leadership that has no interest in ever adapting to anything. Besides, the niche is different anyway.
> "why would I feel motivated to complete a long profile when I can just spam my pre-made resume, since it will be required at some point in the future anyway."
Because you're catering to applicants who are picky about what job they're looking for. I don't just want any job -- the list of jobs I'm qualified to do is vastly, vastly larger than the list of jobs I'd ever want to do.
You're not trying to replace Indeed: you're trying to replace recruiters.
> hoping that they can't reverse-engineer the solution before you catch up
>> Don't worry; they can't. Kodak couldn't even pivot to digital and they invented digital photography! Huge companies...
Yes, b/c Kodak taught us that, better put: hoping that they can't acquire a better connected imitator before you catch-up.
> You're not trying to replace Indeed: you're trying to replace recruiters.
This is spot-on.
My vision is like "talent agents for the rest of us." There are additional challenges that I won't mention because their knowledge is a competitive advantage at this point. But yeah, that's what's up.
5. What I would want as a candidate (a blunt and specific "warts and all" description of the team I'm joining) is not what employers would provide (vague, HR-y generalities like "we use cutting-edge technology" and "we prioritize work-life balance"). This was what turned me off from KeyValues.
But I hope these are tractable, because I very much like the OKCupid model and would use the product if these could be solved.
Personally, that's what lead me to focussing on what might be the most innovative direction I can fathom instead of the incremental direction (aka "this for that" innovation). If I didn't recognize that all of the challengers would face this same uphill battle, then I myself would've built "OKCupid for jobs" by now. It would 10X the pure-spam nature of the current market if the execution was done well, but current players are too big. To conclude, you have to outthink them and create something that can't be reproduced with effectively unlimited budget.
The questions should be answered by all the devs in the hiring team. You don't care about the compatibility between HR and employee, you care about compatibility between your peers and your direct boss.
> I can't think of any "normal" person I know that looks for jobs without some negative catalyst pushing them into it.
You can also solve it by making the match between team members. This way, companies could even ask their currently employees to participate, which means that people would be using the website even if they are not looking for a job directly.
What might a B2B employer-only network look like?
I'd also like to see cover letters replaced by something more useful for both parties, like a small set of direct questions to answer.
When an applicant applies for a job, she's left to make her best guess as to what information the company might find useful, and has to find a way to cram that into an awkward, stiff, rather bullshitty epistolary format. The hirer is then left to try to parse and interpret that to arrive at some guesswork notion of whether the applicant might be a fit.
If the hiring company were to instead come up with a list of guided questions, they'd communicate and request up front what information they need to determine whether a candidate is worth meeting (and thereby would be forced to figure this out themselves before beginning interviews—an important step often skipped). Seeing these questions, the applicant would first make a quick judgment on whether she's interested in a company or role that wants to know these things, and then if she is, proceed to answer them, demonstrating her ability to communicate in a much more contextual, engaged fashion, versus modifying her own cover letter template or laboring over the blindfire of a custom one.
I see only advantages to this approach. It helps companies avoid an inbox full of inappropriate applicants who didn't even read the job description, and it enables applicants to learn more about the company and role up front while breaking the monotony of the application grind and having a greater opportunity to put their best feet forward by applying their personality, knowledge, and experience contextually, rather than packing it into a shotgun shell and blasting the job board with buckshot.
This may ask for more of an applicant's time than the current approach, especially in an era where every job site is trying to make applying into a one-click process, but as someone who has spent a truly unbelievable amount of time and effort looking for jobs (and a fair amount of time hiring), I can confidently say the dragnet application approach is ineffective, inefficient, and demoralizing compared to preparing fewer, better applications for jobs that actually interest you.
This "small set of direct questions," in my opinion, is implicit in the job description/duties and desired qualifications. Employers lately have had challenges in job definition, of course (they seem interested in advertising for the company rather than a job, and the job descriptions have become increasingly elastic; in their defense, retention is hard, and it can be difficult to slot people into single roles anymore).
My general practice in responding to job postings is to prepend my resume with a table containing the job requirements vs. my experience with an estimation of whether I meet the requirement (check, dash, X) and a brief explanation.
In cases where there aren't any job postings, but I have an interest in the company—or if I want to make an impression that I'm targeting them—I'll send a cover letter by postal mail with a printed resume. Usually it's a few sentences: here's why I'm interested, how I might be useful to you, and here's a resume with contact information if you want to reach out.
That's an interesting approach. But what I think gets somewhat lost in this, and why I don't quite think a job description serves as that set of questions, is that there's so much more color and character (culture?) that can come through if the questions are good.
For example, a bad question, or something that should satisfied by the JD and résumé, would be "Do you have experience doing X?" If that's important, just say so. A better question might be "Why are you interested in building X for Y industry?"
I think résumés and job descriptions as they're currently written do an okay job of checking off raw qualifications. What's missing is clarity and direction for the less quantifiable bits. Done right, it could be like a low-pressure, no-expectations first interview in lieu of a crap email that's tedious to write, tedious to read, and likely only helps a hirer understand whether the applicant can write a good cover letter.
If the JD is building X for Y industry, I'd think a cover letter might address this. Sometimes, of course, we're in the position of doing a bit of spray-and-pray when it comes to application...but generally I try to make sure the cover letter justifies sending the resume at all: here's my interest, your needs, and some more information if you want to read further.
> What's missing is clarity and direction for the less quantifiable bits. Done right, it could be like a low-pressure, no-expectations first interview in lieu of a crap email that's tedious to write, tedious to read, and likely only helps a hirer understand whether the applicant can write a good cover letter.
I think you're basically right here: the interview process is challenging because it's a bit like a first date and you really want to know what the marriage is going to be like. That's why, I think, some companies have shifted away from being very clear about what they're asking for and more towards trying to find personality, adaptability, and retention fits: it maximizes their ROI by ensuring they get people they like, who can change as needed, and who will stick around. The challenge for applicants, of course, is that they no longer really know "What am I going to do?" and "Am I qualified for this?" or "How much do I need to learn?" There's a lot of comfort in competence!
I wouldn't underestimate the value of communication—including the ability to write a cover letter. I resented, at first, that I found myself in more forward-facing positions in my career, because I wanted to spend more time in technical work. But it's been a suitable way to get paid while enjoying time programming, too.
That’s a very interesting tactic.
I don't do this often, so I'd be wary of reading in too much. In each case, I got an interview and one job, though that took awhile. (The hiring manager did not comment on the letter, but rather on the table at the top—probably because I couldn't find his name.)
I try to find the appropriate person to contact through LinkedIn, ideally a manager in the department of interest; I wrote to a (small) company president once, too. I try to avoid recruiters if I can help it, though my bias against them is perhaps a little uncharitable. The goals are two: to sidestep the usual application process through a little elbow grease and to differentiate myself in the candidate pool. I'm probably a pretty average programmer, and this has been a useful tool for me.
In the past, cover letters were usually a weak point because I would use boilerplate language that comes across as a bit canned. I've had the luxury lately of not having to do this: the letters were all written for companies I thought I really wanted to work for, so the interest was genuine and (hopefully) came across that way.
"Find engineering teams that share your values"
(No affiliation, just a fan)
That said, I don't see it ever scaling to the mainstream. It serves a great niche, though!
Around 2007, when there was this wave of "37signals job board clones" and I was still living in Brazil, my friend and I started a job board focused on the Brazilian market (job4dev.com). It was free to post as long as the name of the company was provided and the contact was direct with someone from the team. No agencies and no clueless recruiters allowed.
At first, there was very little traction. We were doing most submissions ourselves. After a few months it started to pick some audience (a few thousand unique users/day). We did all the "Web 2.0" things from the time: auto-classification and filtering by tags, integration with social networks, a company wiki, etc.
Our site was featured on some tech magazine as one of the best sites for tech jobs. We had a couple of "repeat customers", companies that were posting regularly on the site and were giving excellent feedback. The one thing that we "forgot" to do: sales and marketing. By 2008 I was moving to the US, right before the big crash, so I was focused on finding any kind of job which could sponsor a visa. My friend on the other hand was more focused on his day job, and he was just too afraid to go to companies that were facing a recession to ask "maybe you'd be interested in some paid features"?
I continued moonlighting on job4dev for some years, but because I was in the US and because much bigger companies started cornering this market, it became mostly a hobby project for me.
All of this to say: guess what was one the things that I did start to prototype?
Yes, it was "OkCupid for Jobs".
The algorithm is actually simple to implement. I didn't take it further because I pitched the idea to some and and no one "(in Brazil) knew of OkCupid, and few seemed to care about using "algorithmic compatibility matching". Credentials/Education Level/Networking were the most important filters.
Anyway, after a while I left the US to move to Germany, and put aside job4dev for good. The idea of "OkCupid for jobs" still seems to me a good one, and I still wonder why it wasn't picked up by someone more competent than me.
I think the key is the right vision to make it work. I see replies of "I did the same thing!" but they seem to be missing the killer feature: high-quality data. Good data (and lots of it) enables better algorithmic matching. To get the data, you need gamification. IIRC, OkCupid grew fast because bored people would fill out fun surveys, and that generated tons of data. So a big part of their site was probably just dedicated to "how can we convince people to answer all these questions and submit new ones?", and that's much harder than just creating a job board.
For example, if they need educators, LI is pretty useless.
I have posted on whoishiring's who wants to be hired threads and each time I got half a dozen cold emails from generic job boards startups. The entire industry needs to take a step back and evaluate their entire process.
The process of evaluating a candidate is technical skills first, personality test second. If we flip the entire I wonder how effective recruiting could be. At least for entry level jobs, I am not sure why technical skills are prioritised over personality, enthusiasm and adaptability of a candidate.
I'm not saying personality isn't relevant for hiring, but the people conducting a hiring process can (perhaps inevitably) add bias to it, knowingly or not.
You use Tinder when you don't know what you want or your wants are superficial, you use OKC when you know what you want/don't want.
Job searches would be similar. For those who don't know what they want, the salary is the pretty face. For those who have suffered from bad relationships, they have a checklist.
https://www.recurse.com/manual (citation using this exact term)
I'm a software engineer and I noticed that LinkedIn's business model was pay to spam. They charge $3 to send a message to a candidate, so their incentive is to have recruiters send as many messages as possible so they don't want to make it easy to target. Our business model is to charge per hire, so we try to be as efficient as possible in matching people to the right job and send the fewest candidates we can to hiring managers.
We require companies to give salary and other key information in the job postings too.
We're bootstrapped and still early, but it's' been an incredible ride so far!
> Jobs and Developer Story will no longer be supported as of April 1, 2022.
What’s crazy is that I haven’t received a single email about them deprecating Jobs. I think they have my most up-to-date resume, so I may have lost that (maybe they’ll send something out later this month, but seems like most companies give a longer heads-up when deprecating products).
Shameless plug: I was pretty bummed too, so I built a JSON exporter that anyone can use: https://developerstory.dev/stackoverflow
Besides, if they are not operating at a loss, why not keep the job board running and improve it until it is the market leader? They know what people search. Who is better positioned to bring programmers and companies together? What do I miss that makes it impossible for them to continue?
> less than 1% of our monthly users engaged with Jobs
> Most employers found our sourcing system too restrictive or difficult to work with
> We would need to spend a lot more time & effort to address these issues
But why does it matter? It's all automated.
I've been operating niche job boards for a decade, starting with angularjobs.com (for Angular developers).
Before this, the job ad aggregators (Indeed, Zip recruiter, Talent, Talroo, and LinkedIn) were probably* the best bet.
IMO, Google expects a return to business websites posting their jobs on their own domain[1]. This way, they can take all the job-ad $$$, too.
*99.99% of jobs on most job boards come from these sources, as "backfill". The ones that don't use the job ads (and often brag about it) are just paying other companies to scrape the same jobs from the company webpages so that the "job board" outranks them in SEO, and use that "advantage" to sell premium listings. When I was working on ETL with these sources, combined there were ~10MM unique job postings in the US (late 2020).
Edit: I wanted to add, be wary of job boards that pop up to fill this void. Anyone can create a job board in 2 minutes with Jobboard.io. However, building an audience, especially one that is worth advertising to, doesn't happen as quickly.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
Thanks for the down votes. Would love to know which part of my anecdote was so offensive to you, though!
Google are doing pretty good things when it comes to jobs to improve candidates' experience. Of course at the end all these features are to increase their ads revenue, but isn't that the goal for any business?
Here are some quick points about Google for jobs:
1. You can view jobs from different sources at one place.
2. Google is highlighting the benefits (US Only right now).
3. Google is *claiming* to filter out the bad job descriptions. I said claiming because I can still see some bad ones.
4. Directly apply feature. They will highlight the website where you can actually apply directly instead of being redirected.
5. Removing expired jobs based on validation date so candidates do not see expired jobs.
I wrote a blog post about the new Google for jobs algorithm back in October:
https://jobdescription.ai/blog/google-for-jobs-new-algorithm...
OP has 1 point. Had 0.
Maybe people read the OP as anti-G?
That said, I agree with your sentiment. It's a natural evolution of the market at this point. And it should've happened years ago. The other players aren't as good at limiting the spam because it's a cash-cow. If Google could stop the spam, then they should offer ads now. It would be good for workers. And companies will undoubtedly spend more money with Google than they do at the much less reputable alternatives.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=jobs+near+me#fpstate=tlexp&h...
As employee and/or employer I would go for more local/vertical websites/newsletters. There's no community such as StackOverflow outside of it, so you have to narrow down your scope somehow. Posting on LinkedIn is a mess. I've talked with many people looking for devs and they pay a lot of money for a lot of low-quality applications, it's even worse for remote companies: If they specifically state they look for people in EU timezones they'll receive anyway 100+ CVs from India or other countries.
So, LinkedIn is a mess, general job posting websites miss all the stuff a developer/company hiring developers needs, I love HN jobs but it's too much of a niche, remoteok or similar are too broad in scope.
There's space to build stuff and make some money if you play well your game.
Shameless plug: I recently launched one newsletter for remote-friendly companies hiring Italian developers that already reached ~900 subscribers and I already received requests for sponsorships. So there's interest in these kind of stuff.
www . fullremote . it
info @ fullremote . it if you want to reach out. :)
If they state EU _timezone_ and they receive applications from India which is *ahead* by 3.30H or Nigeria which is in about the same timezone, I don't see what the problem is.
If they want only people from Europe, they should just say so.
I don't why someone in India would have difficulty starting at 11am.
It's understandable if it's the other way around: Someone in the US starting at 4am
(Just kidding)
But, worth pointing out: A job board is only good when it's low-spam; and that does require some moderation. If we start getting lots of spammy / uninteresting jobs; or job posts get lots of spammy applications; the usefulness of these threads will errode.
A few hours after I posted my first comment on the ‘who wants to be hired’ post I got ‘referred’ by another person (whom I don’t know) to a jobs site.
If you build the replacement, please accommodate places that don't have constant churn!
- https://4dayweek.io/ (Disclaimer, I'm the founder)
Everything like https://remoteok.com and https://4dayweek.io is too niche. https://keyvalues.com maybe?
I’m building something for career switchers at https://CareerSwitchToCoding.com that’s nearly ready to go.
No affiliation, I didn't end up taking a role found through them in even in the end!
I didn't end up signing up but they could atleast provide a sample of the roles they have available instead of wasting the time of anybody that just wants a quick idea of what they have to offer.
Happy to provide a special discount for companies posting their remote jobs. Just send me a private message on Twitter or email(in bio)[2]
The gist of how it works as a dev is that you do an automated entrance test (if you're a junior - and it was quite easy IME), and once you are in you set up your profile and wait for companies to contact you about positions they want to fill. You then decide (with input from your assigned 'career coach' if you wish) whether you want to go forward with an interview etc. For myself and everyone I've spoken to who has used the service, it was a great experience. Infinitely better than trawling through Indeed and such.
More reading here[3]
[2] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/328018
[3] http://docs.offerzen.com/en/articles/5977855-what-makes-job-...
We're now in the process of building out profiles on the website and are working with the companies to add interesting details about things like dev processes, tools used, tech stack, how planning works, how on-call works, etc.
Bit different from what SO does/did with our devtools focus. Our inspiration is the Joel Test, if anyone remembers that! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
Applying on places like angellist/SO jobs etc gave me little in the way of success.
What is different to other boards:
- only job postings with clear salary ranges
- no recruiter spam, apply to companies directly
- hand curated and reviewed jobs
- open source
- filter by minimum salary
When I m not looking for a Go job I just go straight to LinkedIn
Also I know there was a curated list of job board alternatives here https://stackoverflowjobsalternatives.com/ still all very niche I think
www.rtljobs.com
You can read the job highlights in a snap and then decide to read the full description. You can also search as you type and filter jobs with salary or signup bonuses.
Still a work in progress, but you can take a look:
edit: I forgot to mention that currently, it is US-only jobs.