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Comment by robcohen | Hacker News Reader

This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them, and I should pay job postings to apply to them. The only reason why ghost postings exist is because the marginal cost to the company is so incredibly low to do it.

In demand people should get paid for their attention.

What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents, but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually try this.

Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs, in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done?

My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have identity figured out quite yet.

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Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years. Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little incentive for spam in this relationship.

The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort.

It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means.

I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.

I’ve never heard of, or met, a job agent. More info?

You ask someone to land you interviews and, if you get hired, you pay them a fee. Usually some (fat) percentage of your first couple paychecks.

I was asking for specific people.

The power dynamics between employee and employer are such that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job.

The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.

> Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job.

Do you know how much the last candidate got hired for? An agent probably does.

I know how much I'm willing to accept after doing my own diligence, and I'd rather not shell out tens of thousands of dollars to an agent. There are also jurisdictions where the salary must be disclosed. Hiring an agent introduces the principal-agent problem, so they cost more than just their fees.

Yes, you can absolutely add a middle man to sort through the spam for you, and that "solves" the problem in the sense that you are trading money for time. It's no different than paying for a personal assistant to collect your mail for you and pass along the valuable stuff. That said, it's incredibly inefficient and most people, for most interactions, cannot hire a third party to handle those interactions for them.

So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really solves the problem for most people.

> "solves" ... money for time

The proposal was two middlemen. It's just an inefficient way to, as you (or somebody up the chain) said, charge for attention to reduce spam. Since the middlemen are being paid, most spammers won't hire them.

> incredibly inefficient

In practice, yes. In theory, it could be fantastic. Imagine, as a simple example, you have two early-career backend developers. They could each do the same search, or a middleman could do one search and share the highlights with each developer. The fact that you have overlapping demands and information opens up the potential for the work to be amortized, even if you're not adding any value as a middleman other than trading time for money.

I've heard that one of tricks recruiting agents use is to maximize mismatch without breaking the illusion of a perfect match, so that victim companies has to come back as often as possible, each time rewarding them with commissions. Value alignment is definitely going to be a problem.

Unfortunately there are good and bad agents out there, and the bad ones absolutely do have an incentive to spam. I remember one place I worked at maintained a blacklist of bad recruitment firms.

If we assume that a posting costs $1 in either direction, the $100 cost to a company of any significant size of posting a single job to 100 sites is pretty negligible.

On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job.

Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.

Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.

I sympathize but totally disagree, if the $1 I paid guarantees:

A) it is an actual job, with intent to hire now B) I will get an actual response, from a human, within a few days

Then $100 is completely worth the time saved vs applying to ghost jobs.

The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a completely bogus job 100 times is basically nothing to even a medium-sized company.

The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation.

If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?

The issue is thst we both know those won't happen. Even if it's just scam shops that abuse it and everyone else plays the honor code. Rotten apples and all that.

> someone who... has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.

Slightly tangential to your main point, but in this day and age electronic transfers are money; cash is in effect just a fallback option for situations where there's no connection to the Internet. I believe that, in the absence of central bank digital currency, banks should be required to have a process for issuing current accounts to homeless people (albeit not necessarily with credit, just like customers who do have fixed homes). That measure alone would immediately fix a range of issues that homeless people face, wouldn't it?

It absolutely would, as would Postal Banking, which there's already a movement afoot to bring back(? I think it was around before? I'm not super up on it).

Micropayment systems don't work well because there are free options. Convincing people to pay any amount of money is incredibly hard.

Would micropayments result higher quality? Maybe, but until you have a critical mass no one can really tell.

Free options are more likely reach critical mass and dominate. Paid options thus die off, starved of attention.

Also, free applications systems are so common that I'd simply see any system that I, the applicant, needs to pay for as a scam. Much more different than a paid forum or news site. I pay $10 for those and I get exactly what on the site, even if the news updates slowly or the forum is empty.

If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good job app.

It would be worth it to build a highly refined and moderated "free tier", with a paid option that is even better. From what I noticed during my last job hunt, all the big platforms could vet their submissions better.

(paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)

I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.

In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford.

For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.

Other way around. You should paypal them $0.01 if your reply is worth viewing.

But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour period.

Who would say their reply is not worth viewing?

Spammers. Even the most miniscule transaction cost means that sending spam costs more money than it makes.

Your account is being rate limited because your replies were repeatedly against the “rules”. Been there done that

Morality aside, the logistics of this means you cannot literally PayPal someone 10 cents. The processing cost isn't worth transferring such a small amount.

So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50 replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.

I suspect they want to do a side-channel payment system.

So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50 never moves between bank accounts.

Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.

I thought Indeed charge companies for posting and per applicant clicks? That combined with near 100% university graduate capture is what Japanese job market is like, where their current owner's corporate HQ resides.

In that environment, the agency maximizes clicks and matches because that earns them most. Applicants are lured to maximize numbers of applications and qualifications(and failed matches), hiring companies go FOMO mode, hype up themselves and tighten up requirements. Everyone's paperclipping everything and producing clinically depressed graduates in big batches. It's a huge resource sink. Then of course fake posting problem isn't even remotely gets solved because the power structure builds up in the background in uncaptured dimensions, parallel to the system. You wouldn't want that.

>but we don't have identity figured out quite yet

Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot on)

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