Show HN: App to discover job listings directly from company websites | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: App to discover job listings directly from company websites

unlistedjobs.com

67 pointsJabbs57 comments

Before you sign up this is a paid product that doesn’t show you any information about the company unless you pay $15 per month or something. I feel like this is a bit of a dark pattern to not mention charges before getting people to sign up.

EDIT: corrected price $$$

The landing page has a pricing section. Hmm perhaps this should be obvious on the /jobs page as well.

I think one rule around Show HN is that you allow people to see content without signing up, let alone paying for it. So this is a violation of that rule.

Edit: actually search is not behind the paywall (although that's not very obvious)

You can currently search the job listings without having to sign up, which only hides the company and the link the job listings.

That’s definitely violating the spirit of the rule

Right, the data is worth nothing without additional info.

Also, there's no way to delete your account, or remove your email. Which is not just frustrating -- it's flatly against GDPR, CCPA, etc etc.

I relatively recently was looking for a new job, so I was curious to see how well my own search process compared to this. Then I was mildly annoyed to discover that they require email signup to actually view any details about the company or the job. So I give them my email. And then I was even more disappointed to discover that they require you to pay money to even see the link to a single actual job posting. Sorry, not gonna do that if I'm just trying to scratch the curiosity itch. So then I go to delete my account, and... nothing. No can do.

Honestly one of the quickest turnarounds from "oh, neat" to "jeez, what a disappointment" that I've had in recent times.

I made a point to collect almost no information (only email) from the user (as opposed to Linkedin which asks for all sorts of data to sell) but happy to delete your account if you just email support. I also dislike having my data used or sold. That is not the purpose here, the feature to delete your account is just not yet there, appologies

UPDATE: You can now delete your account (under the 'My Account' tab within the /settings page)

Looks like the price went up to $15.49 within the last ten minutes. Supply must be limited. Demand must be soaring.

No that has always been the price. Nothing changed. Same $ as a Netflix subscription was the idea

How do you deal with companies that post jobs on their corporate website, have hired someone months ago, but haven't taken down the listing? I imagine that is most of them.

A potential solution to this is to have this software solution generate emails to recruiting contacts posing as a human, inquiring if the req is still open. Reverse ATS of sorts maintaining light state about job openings.

You can’t really. I was a recruiter working internally at a company, and a hiring manager wanted to keep certain jobs open to collect resumes even though he had no headcount to hire anyone at that time. There was nothing I could do other than object.

Good point, I'm not sure the numbers that accounts for this yet. I also have the reverse issue of an employer removing a job posting that has been filled so the scrapers need to visit each listing to see if it is indeed still up (where most listing sites will have an expiration date or the employer will pull it once filled)

I'd like to extend features for job seekers to log steps in the interview process. If users are not getting past the initial application then it would be able to show this feedback for a particular job listing (giving it less credibility)

If you’re not already, consider scraping and building a list of company workday public instances and pulling job postings from there as well. Should be straightforward to find breadcrumbs in search engines with those URLs, or render permutations for testing based on known domain patterns.

I'm not yet but thank you that is an interesting idea. Currently it is quite dumb and just looks for listings on each company website but in the future it would be nice to connect to workday or other such services

I'm not familiar with workday and new to coding. Is this beneficial compared to scraping company pages because workday will have consistent structure across companies?

Workday (if used, there are many other HRIS systems out there) is traditionally the source of truth as an HRIS (HR information system), is built into the org’s recruiting workflow, and the data has consistent structure. You don’t know where the data is coming from when directly on the company website, who is updating it and on what cadence (if any), etc.

This seems a small part of the problem - how would you know these jobs aren’t also listed on a popular job aggregator?

You wouldn’t, so you would have to scrape both and reconcile potentially. But where is the most accurate, current information likely to be sourced from?

(think in systems)

This is very misleading.

The platform flags only a small subset of the offers as supposedly unlisted (small “U” tag).

Moreover, I checked one with a unique title and I found it listed on linkedin - so even those can be listed.

Also, this is a paid product that offers no substance without subscribing - I wouldn’t submit this as “Show HN”.

You can browse job listings without subscribing to see whether there are enough job listings in your domain to add value to your job search. The "U" tag is assigned to job listings without search engine results for paid platforms (indeed, glassdoor, monster, etc.) and then it is checked daily for changes.

Title is kind of misleading. This is not scraper code you can use yourself. It is a pay job site.

Ah thank you, I modified it away from scraper (just thought that would help people understand how it functioned)

How are you extracting the data?

Currently 4 worker services run headless chrome browsers and visit company websites (about 10k URLs per service per day). If certain keywords and phrases match a valid dataset of job listings and titles then the page content is saved and parsed w various tags (locations, technologies, etc.)

Thanks. I was wondering if you're using a LLM to get unstructured data? Or how do you recognize that something is a location for example?

Ah yea no LLMs but probably some of the similar ideas were used by having a validating dataset. I just have ~800 common locations (city, state, countries) that are parsed out of the text with validating logic wrapped around each one. Far from perfect but it is now pretty accurate. I found the index of the location matters a lot for accuracy. Its still a WIP

Not sure I understand this. You've basically set up a job board where employers can post listings for free and job seekers have to pay a monthly fee to access them. So what value does one get over visiting Indeed/LinkedIn/Glassdoor etc. which are free for applicants and charge the companies instead?

Not being auto sorted into the "Indeed/LinkedIn/Glassdoor/etc." pile, maybe.

Well you can always find the listing on indeed and then apply directly on the company's website.

Employers don't post anything, the job listings are scraped directly from company websites. So even if the employer has not paid for an ad on Indeed/LinkedIn/Glassdoor but they leave the listing up on their company website then the scraper will pick it up (which is a large amount of listings). But yea asking the user to pay for the service is certainly different but I think beneficial because now they are the customer (rather than the employer)

As a user you are now tje customer and the value that you get it's to not have to deal with LinkedIn and similar, and find jobs that are not posted on those platforms.

The app can be used without signup here: https://www.unlistedjobs.com/jobs

Then you can determine if enough relevant job listings are there for your domain to follow through with signup.

(there is some confusion that you must signup first)

Neat service, I signed up to look at CTO jobs. I'm seeing jobs listed that are expired on the company's site - I'd love a button to report jobs that are no longer live.

Ah thank you for the signup and feedback. I'm increasing the services to check for expired jobs now that a lot of companies seem to be expiring there job listings around this time of the year, so apologies for that (I want to show more transparency into how/when those job listings are indeed checked for expiry too)

You can currently 'archive' any job listing by clicking on the 3-dots dropdown menu on the right side of each job listing to remove it from your view (and it will disappear and only be accessible in the "Archived" section of your sidebar). But gotcha there should be a report method, thanks so much!

OP here. I found my last day job using a scraper that visits company websites in search of job listings. Now I've turned that into an app for others to use and access jobs found on company websites (rather than paid employer ads on Indeed or wherever). This gives the job searcher an advantage to find jobs not listed on job search sites and show the company you have taken time and interest to visit their company website. Would certainly love any feedback

Great job! It seems you have around 200k companies to list. How do you handle scraping at that scale – all websites are different. What if the schema and markup change? interested to hear what the DevOps aspect looks like.

Thank you so much. In some cases I was able to standardize where the title and location are located on the page (Greenhouse, Lever, etc.). But this mostly uses a valid dataset of job descriptions that matches lists of phrases for plain text within a page (with markup removed). Also the scraper remembers companies and career pages that have job listings. It will prioritize those companies that have listings and visit more often than those that don't. Currently there are 4 worker services that visit about 10k company websites per day (each).

I didn't build this, but here my guess: Most companies use a handful of ATS's (applicant tracking systems), like Greenhouse, Lever and Workday. Almost all of the jobs posted on these platforms are public and their top-level pages are indexable.

If I built something like this, I would start by searching for pages that have HTML fragments indicative to those systems a few times per week (since job listings don't change much).

While this won't do anything to reveal "real" ghost jobs (job reqs that are hidden or generic enough to be used for interesting referrals), it's probably a minor edge over LinkedIn Jobs (the home of stale jobs). Many of these companies cross post to those platforms anyway.

Are you able to add the ability to search either for a keyword or a product? I want to search for Google SecOps SIEM (fka Chronicle) and Google SecOps SOAR (fka Chronicle fka Siemplify). Searching fro cybersecurity engineer unfortunately doesnt really tell me which SIEM/SOAR it is, thus i have no idea if its worth me paying for.

Ah I understand, that is an interesting use case. Currently the only searchable keywords are tagged on the job listings upon creation, but I can see if these keywords come up often enough to make tags for them. I'm not familiar with those Google products. Appreciate the comment

Sounds like you have some kind of static list of company websites you’re scraping. How did you put that list together?

It was a slow aggregation over a few years from various resources but I recently came across https://www.thecompaniesapi.com/ and now that is the source for most of the company data

In the search bar you must add the option to search by company e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple etc.

Okay thank you that is certainly a good feature to have and might have that in the backlog somewhere. Much appreciated

jobfunnel is FOSS and accepting contributions: https://github.com/PaulMcInnis/JobFunnel

Currently supports indeed, in the past supported glassdoor and others.

Some feedback. I love that this is open source. I would love it to remain open source, a rising tide lifts all boats sort of thing. But I also want to give money to someone who runs it as a service. Make my problem go away (not me per se, but the ability to buy gift codes and such to help other people who are struggling to find new roles). I am time poor, but am willing to pay to make problems go away. Consider charging to run a platform for users while remaining open source for those willing to run it themselves.

The search bar doesn't seem to do anything when I try "game developer"?

Ah yea there might not be enough #'s for that job title. Apologies, but I will take a look and see if there are enough relevant listings to include it

> listing listed jobs

> unlisted jobs domain

There are both but the unlisted jobs are tagged as such. I thought about pulling the listed jobs but I think that is still valuable to the user

well, I typed 'Rust' and nothing happened lol :D

Actually "rust" was too difficult to yet parse out of a job description because it is such a commonly used word but I am in the process of working on this. Very sorry it is not included yet

Interesting idea. Good luck.

Many thanks!

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