Show HN: We tried to build a job board that isn't awful

I tried to build a job board awhile back, and although there was demand in the consumer side, it ended up being a gigantic slog and a waste of time because every company is busy paying the Indeeds/Linkedins of the world. Because they get millions of more users. Unless you intend for this to be free, I don’t see how it could ever be profitable.

I ended up pivoting to just having a free daily remote jobs email for engineers (among other roles) https://bloomberry.com/blog/remote-jobs/

"because every company is busy paying the Indeeds/Linkedins of the world"

The reason why is because they possess significant competitive advantages.

Im actually working on something in this space and am building out competitive advantages with government backing that'll make LinkedIn and Indeed an inferior offering in my country.

If youre going to enter a market with established incumbents, you wont go very far without a lot of strategic-thinking.

Hi, OP here. Really like your approach! Like you we want to solve for talent-first. We believe we can add value for hirers beyond just charging to post jobs. Please get in touch if you'd be interested in discussing further (email in bio).

Free isn't even free to them. If a company is paying their HR staff, the minutes to hours that they spend learning a new interface, and setting it up, and using it, are a real cost.

Compare that to an existing service, where they only have to do the last part, and are dividing that cost by the millions of jobseekers that the existing solutions already reach.

The challenges I've seen with job boards include showing job postings that are no longer open, jobs that are unclear on key factors like pay or location, and especially poor handling of "remote" which means something different to everyone.

There's also way too much barrier to entry here, signing up, especially with Google is a big ask. I also bounced at that step. A demo or video of the product could help if you don't want anonymous access.

OP here. Appreciate the feedback - the login barrier is definitely something we will take on board. I think some level of identity authentication is a must to counter the scourge of bot traffic, but we will think of ways to be cleverer about this.

With regard to job posting accuracy - absolutely this is a problem. Normalising what different job descriptions actually _mean_ is one of the key challenges we want to solve.

The trouble is, you don't have enough clout to do a good job on this. Look at Alibaba. Here's a typical Alibaba customer profile:

    4.8/5 Satisfied
    113 reviews

    ≤2h average response time
    98.7% on-time delivery rate
    US $470,000+
    474 orders

Tracking interactions with employers like that would be a huge help. "Ghosting" should show up in employer stats.

Great suggestion, many thanks

It's a really good feature that I'd love to see, but that would be like giving dating site users the chance to review their past dates. Why would companies want to expose their image to that scrutiny?

Got in no-time an opportunity with a well established start-up, ran quickly through the interview process, almost finished it, and we both decided to pause the process since an offer I was waiting for finally arrived.

This is good news, as I wasn't expecting to move so fast via Teeming.ai, and it worked! Too bad that this time I was the one refusing to continue instead, although the platformed proved it's success and I'm going to use it again, even for fractional work opportunities.

  "Continue with Google"

no thanks.

Hi, OP here. One of the problems we want to solve is the proliferation of bot traffic on job sites. Requiring a Google login is the simplest way to achieve this for the time being.

Simplest for you. Negative indicator for your potential customers.

"We decided to not put barriers between the user and the data"

Aside from requiring a login - Google login no less to see the job description.

How else would you farm user data to be sold off later?

Hi, OP here. Perhaps "minimal barriers" would have been more accurate. One of the problems we want to solve is the proliferation of bot traffic on job sites. Requiring a Google login is the simplest way to achieve this for the time being.

No everyone has a Google account. You'd think it'd be a pretty damn obvious factoid.

Sorry to pile on but, the google sign on also turned me away. I have a google account and usually use it to sign up for sites I'm interested in but when it's used to gate content that could be accessible without a login I just feel like my data is being harvested.

If you really want to keep the login then maybe a message like we won't spam email you unless asked and only want your to log in to protect against bots would help.

OP here. Appreciate the honesty. I actually agree - I think the same way and I'm realising now that we don't do a good enough job of communicating the need to the user. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

> If you really want to keep the login then maybe a message like we won't spam email you unless asked and only want your to log in to protect against bots would help.

Such messages are lies usually in my experience.

Looked for a QA remote role and one of the top results was for a Sales Engineer and nearly all the rest were just generic engineer roles

Hi, OP here. Would you be willing to share your query? I will investigate.

Sure - on the front page I put "QA", that took me to the jobs page where the AI was asking me for more details so I put "remote" This gave "There are 57 remote matches", the Sales Engineer was about #19

Thanks - will look into this

A search in the dropdowns would go a long way. "AI field" has 700+ entries, and aren't in alphabetical order.

Excellent point - they are sorted by frequency they appear in the data. We have search boxes in the keyword selectors (funding stage, location, etc) but not in tags where arguably it's most useful. Will work this into an upcoming release. Many thanks!

The HTML <select> element already has built-in search functionality, in most browsers. Why don't you just use HTML? (I can't provide detailed feedback because of your login-wall: do you have a version with fake data that I could poke around at? You should probably look at getting an accessibility expert involved.)

True! We use a custom element that hides most options by default but this is definitely something we will consider. Thank you for your feedback

Why the hell would this require a google account? I do not have one.

Rolling your own user account system is not that hard.

First impression - seemingly random jumble of jobs, none of which are interesting to me, but clicking on any of them requires sign in to read.

Click "I'm an engineer" to try to search for jobs to see if there's anything interesting. Get a sign up page.

Click "I'm hiring". Get presented with an email harvesting page.

Yeah no, I won't be looking any further. There's nothing here to suggest this sucks less than any other jobs site, where at least I can peruse the JD before having to give away my personal details.

Hi, OP here. This is the "catch-22" of job sites. If they are open to the web they become swamped with bot traffic. If they are closed then users have to overcome a barrier to use them. We have tried to find a middle ground and use the lowest-effort way (for users) to demonstrate authenticity in the form of a Google login. But we understand this might be putting users off so we are looking at ways we can give away a bit more before requiring a login. Appreciate your feedback.

You absolutely need to get an accessibility professional (one you pay, not try to crowdsource free labor) to review your site. Your site excludes disabled people from participating.

Hi OP here. Thank you for the feedback, which specific issues jump out at you?

That's overstating the problem, but accessibility is very important.

"DOT AI" ofc...

You show a frontend engineer role at Gr4vy in the landing page but looking in their careers page and LinkedIn the only role they have currently is Python Engineer.

Unless you tell me you have exclusive roles, it doesn't give me much initial trust.

Edit: the voting ring of comments / AI comments make the whole thing even more disgusting.

Hi, OP here. One of the things we've discovered is that companies post their jobs in a number of locations but often forgot to take them down when the jobs are filled. Compounding this is the fact that some job sites automatically take down ads after a set number of days (say 30 or 60). Working out whether or not a job is "live" is therefore non-trivial but something we actively want to solve.

This is a problem I was hoping to see a modern job board solve, stop working on keyboard shortcuts and make sure your AI isn't encouraging people to apply to non-existent jobs.

Tried it out, honestly works pretty well.

The data and filtering feel solid, found navigating the table pretty easy. Not in love with the agent, maybe add multiple threads or preserve context between sessions. Needs a bit of polish here and there with UX still.

Definitely gonna take another look when I’m next job-hunting as it looks like it's going to be a time saver. Good job!

Appreciate the feedback!

Agent is definitely an area I'm looking to improve with persistence and make it truly personalised.

[stub for offtopicness]

(as gus_massa pointed out, it's a no-no on HN to do voting rings or have booster comments - this is in both the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

but we do know that in many cases it's unintentional)

I truly appreciate the platform’s design and the logical flow - it feels intuitive and visually pleasant. I also like how the interaction with the company and the role you’re applying for is presented more clearly. The wide range of filters, combined with the option to further personalize with Nell, also gives you extra confidence that all your considerations are being taken into account. Overall, it looks very solid for the stage you’ve reached.

Thank you for your kind words!

Love this approach, the founders really put a lot of time and effort into figuring out what us as users want.

Job hunting is a serious chore and having good filtering and UI really matters in such a diverse industry, big love for the platform!

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

A great approach as both applicants and companies are now surrounded by lot of noise. Specially it can be a unique opportunity for early stage startups to present themselves and have a share from the applicant pool.

I enjoyed using the platform. It's really simple to use, and I really love how it allowed me to easily find jobs in industries that I'm interested in. Plus, the cofounders are very friendly and always willing to help

Its great to find potential startups to join, espacially with the matching function. does my profile also get recommanded to startups?

We are currently building out the portal for startups to find Teeming members. In the meantime we manually connect members to startups when they click "I'm Perfect for this" or "Nudge Founder"

No ban hammer execution for the clear number of sockpuppet accounts promoting this?

No. But your question is both a good and an understandable one, so I'll try to explain.

It's against HN's rules to do promotional voting and/or commenting. We want voting and discussion to happen because people are randomly curious—not because they or a friend have something to promote. This is in both the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

However, there are different degrees of breaking this rule. For simplicity, I'll call them A and B. There are more than two of these categories, but let's keep it simple.

Degree A: OP is clueless about the culture and rules of HN. Out of enthusiasm, they tell their friends (or project community) "hey, I posted <link> to Hacker News". Friends are even more clueless but want to help OP so they come to HN and and create new accounts to upvote and post things like "Wow this is really cool! I think this is really cool! Woo hoo OP!!"

Degree B: OP knows perfectly well that HN doesn't allow voting rings or booster comments, but want some sweet sweet frontpage juice for their thing. So they organize and make a bunch of accounts (or co-ordinate a bunch of existing ones) to upvote and/or comment but also hide their tracks.

A is naive. B is abusive.

A is venial. B is cardinal. A = misdemeanor, B = felony.

A means well, but is hapless and obvious. B knows what they're doing and think they can get away with it.

A is the juvenile delinquent that responds to kindness and explanation. B is the hardened criminal that learns nothing but to game the system better next time.

B is an obvious ban. A, maybe not. If their work is good and they seem like they (and their friends) might become good community members with enough guidance, then they're welcome—even though the rules are the rules.

Going lenient on A would be a bad idea if HN were vulnerable to naive voting rings; but we've been writing software for many years to catch those. The A cases are so naive that after a few years we realized that we were better off going easy on them. They're not the abusers we need to worry about! and often they turn into good citizens.

Hi dang, I'm the OP and a longtime user of HN so I appreciate your fair-handedness on this. We have a small circle of enthusiastic early-users and we made them aware of our 'debut' without explicitly soliciting votes or comments.

[flagged]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Be respectful. [...] Don't be gratuitously negative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

(Edit: originally the parent comment just said "Meh I dont see this going very far" without the second sentence.)

I have really enjoyed the experience of searching for roles on Teeming. Additionally I like the concept of cutting through the process of sending mass applications and being able to go directly to founders to make contact.

My only feedback is that it would be nice to have a view where you can see more of the job description at a glance. Right now you have to click in to each role to get information about the job.

Many thanks for your kind words and thoughtful feedback.

Which additional pieces of job information do you think we should surface before clicking?