Show HN: Get a better job offer, anonymously - my weekend hack | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Get a better job offer, anonymously - my weekend hack

jobpoacher.com

182 pointsferrofluid84 comments

It struck me as odd that I would want to hire people this way. As far as I can tell everyone is just asking for more money (big surprise, I know) but it says nothing about what they want to do, are interested in, etc. Do I just blindly reach out to a bunch of people and hope they match my needs?

>Do I just blindly reach out to a bunch of people and hope they match my needs?

welcome to recruiting! :)

(except that a recruiter is totally unqualified to assess who can actually match their client's needs - even with their CV in front of them and the chance to talk with them by phone or in person)

That's why recruiters don't care about clients' "needs". They care about clients' "requirements"

>"except that a recruiter is totally unqualified to assess who can actually match their client's needs"

"How would you rate your ability to harvest Karma from a site such as Hackernews, on a scale of 1 to 5?"

"eh, 3?"

"and reddit?"

"um, 5"

Right, this only takes hiring into account based solely on the external motivation of money. Money only works as a motivator so long as basic (and intermediate) needs are met. This kind of behavior is how I perceive a lot of hiring takes place in SV now, with talent moving to the highest bidder without much thought of culture and other needs.

When employers all start offering the same wages because you've hit The Limit(tm), you start becoming very interested in culture, work/life balance, location, side perks, what your working on and probability of success.

This is just an introduction service. You're not sending out offers to anonymous individuals. You ask for their resume, talk with them on the phone, bring them in for an interview, and see if they are a fit.

This is just a way to find people who are already working and may be interested in changing jobs, but who do not want to post their resume to monster.com.

it simply starts the conversation, I'm a X who lives in Y and wants a salary of Z. i'd prefer this to receiving random emails from recruiters.

True, it also states the person has no loyalty to their current employer if it means an extra $10k a year. This could be a red flag for some, or an opportunity. I am not in the programming business, so wonder what the turnover rate is at tech firms.

Employers don't have loyalty to their employees, so this is unsurprising. These are business relationships.

What value does loyalty have to an employee other than the eternal dangling carrot?

If they're unhappy, or need that extra $10k, let them go for it.

If the employer wants loyalty, then they can pay for it. Maybe not literally, but when I really like my job it takes a hell of a lot more than an extra $10k/year to get me to switch.

Or they can heavily encourage it, with vesting stock options, seniority based raises/promotions, etc.

Relying on "loyalty" to keep people when the employer has shown none (an employment contract that has penalties if you're laid off? Only for senior execs) is just a bad idea.

For interesting problems I'd take a 10-20% cut.

I promised to teach some stuff to some guys at work in a little study circle, then I guess it is finally time to brush up on my Javascript etc and send out the cv.

I don't know how you did it, but I'm pretty sure you were spying on me. I was literally talking to a friend about this exact idea this weekend. We're trying to hire some developers and wondered if anything like this existed since its becoming very difficult to poach. I almost built the same thing this weekend.

Edit - I'm curious. Have you thought about how you will tackle the potential spam problem? Recruiters are going to go crazy over this. We tossed around a few ideas such as charging to contact the individual and making it more expensive based on things the jobseeker could do. Those things might be paying to have JobPoacher contact referrals, coding tests, etc.

Good luck with everything.

An effective method of filtering out recruiters would be to require a screening (paid for by the company). A few simple checks would cut out 95% of the problem.

I got contacted by a recruiter within 20 minutes of posting.

Suddenly, I'm thinking that it IS kind of strange that if I reply to their email, I will be beginning a relationship with someone who already knows my approximate salary.

On the plus side, they contacted me knowing that information full well. No nonsense with lowballing. Maybe it's a great starting point!

lowballers will unlikely be deterred.

Wow, I can't believe how quickly this site activated my inner voyeur.

I'm a CTO (Rails), and I currently make $20,000 in San Francisco. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Rails Engineer that pay at least $100,000 in The Bay Area.

I'm assuming the $20k he/she works at a early stage startup. There are CTOs that are working for $0 and all equity.

Yeah, me too... just the most dramatic of the narratives I can't help but create around these little blurbs.

Also, the site appears to requite a minimum current salary of $10K.

The "Poachees" listings should be searchable and sortable if they're to be of real value to would-be recruiters or hiring managers.

I hope you can keep out the script kiddies - I just saw one of these:

I'm a <script>alert('lulz')</script>, and I currently make $40,000 in <script>alert('lulz')</script>. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a <script>alert('lulz')</script> that pay at least $120,000 in <script>alert('lulz')</script>.

This is nice, but could you add an option to indicate that I only want to deal technically proficient people?

In fact, I would pay a few bucks up-front if you could somehow assure that I would only be put in contact with technical people that actually work for the company doing the hiring (no recruiters at all). And I'd pay to validate that I satisfy that requirement from the hiring side as well.

Great idea!

I hope this results in some "Piña Colada Song" situations where employers end up contacting their own employees.

Why would people disclose the current salary they have?

I agree, I've never understood why that data point is relevant to the job I'm applying/being-recruited for.

Because they want to offer just enough for the money to be attractive to you, but no more.

But that only explains it from the poacher's perspective. The question still remains, why would the poachee want to state their current salary?

They don't know how to negotiate

I think it's even more interesting when the first number is more than the second, as it is in the listing below:

"I'm a Mobile Product Support Specialist, and I currently make $90,000 in Mountain View, CA. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Community Manager, Product Quality Analyst, Junior UX/Interaction Designer that pay at least $65,000 in San Francisco, CA."

I assumed it is by people who want to jump-start a new career path, eg: from developer to designer, or want to move to a different city.

That's assuming the numbers they disclose are even honest to begin with.

The site's called "job poacher". You poach a good dev (who likes his job) by offering significantly more money than they're making now. 15k-20k more is usually enough to snatch anyone from anywhere.

I suppose it could be an indicator of your motivation. If you're making 80k and are looking to be paid at least 70k, it might show that at your level, you could potentially get 90k if you wanted, but have other considerations than money.

Minor bug report:

I tried to fill it out with the 'links' browser. I didn't see the captcha so I did not get a confirmation email but the app did seem to retain my email address so I cannot delete the old one to resubmit when I use a GUI browser.

As an aside, I really like this because of how people don't talk about how much they make. When I see someone makes $164000 as a pen tester in Mountain View and I make a smaller amount, I feel like I could be working on interesting problems and make a bit more coin. oh, well. :(

Minor suggestion: I wonder how much other people like my ad? Perhaps that's part of the mystery. That info, perhaps shouldn't be available to poachees but only poachers? I dunno.

Same problem happened to me. I'm locked out, so I guess I'll make a mailinator address and try again.

This is really awesome, so awesome I think that you should think about how to monetize it and make some serious money. (I know that's seemingly against the "hacker ethos", but it's not often that you think of million-dollar ideas).

If I were them, I'd be scrambling to make recruiters pay $xx-$xxx to contact people through the site.

You should make it so recruiters pay when they get a response. The could only message candidates through the site initially (not via email) and their email would also be anonymized. If the candidate replied then the recruiter could be charged $XXX per reply.

The most important feature is listing by locality IMHO. Without being able to filter out candidates to where I am, it would be easy to miss them, especially when having to search for variations (NY, New York, Manhattan).

I see in a comment you will be adding a search field which would help with the above; however the variations could still be an issue. A simple helper could be a predictable typing field for the location that allows people to select already existing locations so that there is consistency?

Good job otherwise!

I wish it allowed you enter an hourly wage, since that's what I make.

I could annualize it but I don't actually work full time so that wouldn't be accurate.

And I wish they would add the ability to specify rates in euro's.

After posting and reading all the other listings. I've realized I'm one of the few hardware guys on HN.

Any other hardware/low-level guys out there?

If you count C as low-level, here I am. Now what?

We revolt against the software majority. Threaten to cut off their sockets.

I primarily do FPGA design and embedded software. I agree we are definitely under represented on HN though.

I do compilers, and I'm usually surprised by how many people are around who "know a thing or two", so maybe it's more field-relative?

Yup. Embedded systems board bring-up, device drivers, and embedded GUI/HMI applications.

I usually describe myself as a Full Stack Programmer, or Generalist.

I'm as comfortable doing embedded C as I am Ruby.

It really needs a small "experience" section. It should be small, so a recruiter can still scan; but I really want to be able to differentiate at least between junior and senior people.

I also would like to have an "interest". I don't want to contact somebody wanting to do games for my web startup. That just wastes both our time.

Thats what a resume is for.

If a hiring company were look at this they'll naturally see the "I currently make" amount and consider that market rate. After all, it matters not what people want to make, but instead by the amount for which people have demonstrated that they are willing to work.

It's worth noting that something like this will naturally self-select people who feel they're underpaid, so you're likely seeing the lower edge of "market rate" here.

The recruiter that got back to me was more direct and less spammy than other random recruiting emails I get from those who see my profile on linkedin etc. I'm wondering if this is an accident or a change in the way the recruiter views these postings.

I find it odd that people would put such a wide discrepency between current and desired salary.

If you are making 30K, as a webdeveloper and are seeking 60K as a web developer, I dont see why anyone would read this and think "Hey, here's a guy who wants double what he is making now, lets go get him"

Like the manager in UAE who states 130K current and 180K desired.

50K is a lot, even though its a smaller % than the 100% - Why do these people feel that if they are worth twice what they are making now, that advertising via this site is a good idea.

Maybe I'm confused?

Like this one:

"I'm a Generalist, and I currently make $120,000 in San Francisco. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Generalist that pay at least $140,000 in San Francisco."

This tells me absolutely nothing.

Cool idea.

Small UI suggestions (realizing this was just a hack) - 1. Add some margin-left to the copyright notice at the bottom 2. Autocomplete on the cities (and other fields, like Occupation) will help standardize your dataset for search and sort later

This one is funny though:

"I'm a Very Unhappy Facebook User, and I currently make $10,001 in creating Facebook's content. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Happy Facebook User that pay at least $10,002 in creating awesome content."

Feature request: What happens when there are hundreds of listings? Would people be reading all those listings line by line?

A search box with filters for each input data you are collecting would be a nice fit.

I can already see it cluttering up. Thanks, I'll add that shortly!

I was going to suggest this, as well as a way to browse by category. Employers probably don't want to look for "iOS developer" and "iOS programmer" and "iOS engineer", so some kind of automatic way to combine these seems useful.

Also, filtering by salary.

Overall though, love the idea.

I like this, because it's difficult to get honest numbers about salary for a given position/location. Entirely apart from the "job seeking" part of the equation, the raw data is very interesting to me.

There will be a fake/fudge factor to account for, but it's so hard to get people to talk about their salaries honestly that it's very interesting to see some raw data there.

I like the idea. A nice start to something I'm sure will grow into something pretty neat.

It's an interesting idea, but pretty much unusable at this point. Definitely needs filtering, searching and a better UI with clean separation of submissions (think StackOverflow).

Interesting idea. I'd like to see some stats when you get enough data, stuff like number of responses, number of people who found a job through the service, etc....

One of the unintended uses for this tool is for founders to figure out what the competitive market salary is for positions they're trying to fill.

Since you don't know the persons background and skill level you still can't accurately determine this - even with the guess that someone has grown over time in compensation because of skill, there are plenty of people who have managed to slip through the cracks or have done enough job hopping to allow them to achieve a higher salary without actually have the knowledge to back it up.

Suggestions:

-Filter by job, location, salary (as suggested by others)

-RSS

-A "find other poachees" like this one button. (Could use ranges with the filter feature to make it even more convenient.)

Error when trying to delete: We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

how are you going to avoid head hunters' spam, either as fake candidates to discover new clients or with fake offers for CV mining?

I don't think this is a huge problem. The value to an employee is in the $10,000s per year, and so its worth it to go through a few spam emails to find the good offers. The value to companies is also $10,000s in saved recruiter fees. So on both sides, to go through 50 spam emails to find one good opportunity is worth it.

And the penalty for being such a spammer is that clients/employees won't want to work with you, and potentially expose you on twitter as being someone to avoid. The risks are high to spam this.

Maybe instead of "and I currently make ___" you should have "and I have ___ years experience in ____". Or at least have both.

Pay is probably a better indicator though. People can have years of experience and still not be good at the job, but pay highlights what kind of value they are generating. Someone who is not good at the job is unlikely to be in the position to earn top dollar.

There will be outliers. Like the talented person who is willing to work for peanuts just because the job is amazing. But that is why there is an infinite number of ways to find a job.

Well, in my city average pay for programmers is 12 000 $. I know of people earning 35 000 $, but that's the upper limit.

So if I wanted to use this site I would be considered bad programmer.

I'm not sure that is true. The location is noted, so it is still calculable where you stand. I don't think there is anyone who thinks $100K in the Bay Area is the same as $100K in India.

But if you're making $8,000 in your city, that raises some questions.

The footer would better if centered or placed inside the 940 grid (rather than stick to the left with 0 margin) - IMO.

Any chance we could see a freelance/contract version of the form? About the only difference would be $/hr support.

I think a great feature for this would be a map to visualize the results in your area.

Whoa, this is a scary good idea. Wondering if I should post tonight. I feel dirty!

nice. Where are you getting the recruiting traffic from?

Do you have plans for how to get rid of spam?

op, i just reserved @jobposter for you on twitter. email me and i'll transfer ownership to you.

twitter bootstrap?

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