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Comment by snarkypixel | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to make an app to make job searching easier. It's a pain in the ass on both side and imo current tools on the market suck.

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Is this really a problem that can be fixed by an app? It seems more like a human behavior issue to me. There is a filter, and people are trying to get through it. It's adversarial, and automating the process makes it easier to game, which is why those solutions have not been adopted.

I think it could, in theory. I've had the idea of approaching it more like a sorting problem. Scrape social media of the candidates and the company, use NLP to provide a 'cultural fit' metric that circumvents the interview process...

Problem with culture fit is that no one is willing to be completely honest about what they want, or what their culture is. No candidate is going to ever say "I'm a mediocre engineer really just looking for something easy where I can coast. Below market comp is OK." And no company is ever going to say "Kind of bureaucratic for a company this size, so want somebody who has a high BS tolerance, and will put up with that in exchange for good pay and reasonably low productivity standards."

Also god help you if your culture fit algorithm has correlations with race / gender / nationality. And there's pretty much a 100% chance it will.

Mediocre means average. Most developers/people are mediocre or average. Perhaps you mean below average.

Sounds like an even worse approach than Triplebyte's.

I think the problem is how the vast majority of inbound job requests are spam or irrelevant, while at the same time there are a few gems out there that can't seem to reach the right candidates.

Sure, but how do you address this routing issue? Let recruiters target candidates in a different and more granular way than Linkedin, I guess? But then there is the issue that the paying customers are going to be on the recruiting end (like they are on Linkedin), not the employees, and the recruiters want to spam. I do think you could find a better way to solve this problem, though. Unfortunately I also think that you would run into this problem (https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...) except replace Steam with Linkedin.

https://xkcd.com/927/

lol :) I have a new take on it that I haven't seen yet, but yeah it seems like such a crowded space not sure I want to get into this mess.

this has been done a hundred times since it's the low hanging fruit that every engineer has gone through. The biggest pain at this moment in time as someone who's searching is that I have to hand build a table in notion of:

1. hiring freezes from twitter/blind 2. specific insurance providers from corporate info/ glassdoor 3. salary ranges from levels.fyi/glassdoor 4. specific roles and tech stack from google jobs/glassdoor 5. finding refering relationships through linkdin/blind 6. general company reviews, work life balance, from glassdoor/blind 7. then the actual application through the company website

It's a huge pain in the ass to hand-populate and research. Every platform has a piece of the puzzle but it's not in once place.

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