Show HN: HireMyFriend – Get your friends to help you find a new job | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HireMyFriend – Get your friends to help you find a new job

hiremyfriend.io

55 pointscooop41 comments

The biggest problem I have with this is that it attaches you to your friend's profile and whatever he does online. So, for example, what if a buddy of mine posts that he just smoked a joint, and then he endorses me for a job. Unfortunately most employers will likely draw certain conclusions from that, "He hangs out with those kinds of people? I'm not hiring him." It could be much subtler, like your friend posts "I love Bob Marley."

I love Bob Marley. I don't smoke pot.

The same correlation (or guilt by association) could be made by the people you follow on Twitter or your Facebook friends or the people who endorse you on LinkedIn.

Absolutely agree — I think that's the most important thing we want to test with this iteration :)

I'd think that people would choose the professional connections they trust rather than their stoner roommate from college, but there's only so much hypothesising we can do without real people trying it out!

I'm not a huge fan of Bob Marley either, but I know what you mean. It could be your friend who is, say, a prominent Rubyist tweeting a joke about PHP as you're applying to Facebook. We'll see how that plays out, but I'd think that an 'old school' job reference would have the same risks.

Awesome, I'm glad your really thinking everything over. To be honest, it wasn't entirely clear to be that you can pick the friends you want to tweet about you. I guess now looking at it that seems rather obvious, haha. It would be really cool to see a recommendation engine, for example, "We think you should ask your friend John Doe to endorse you because he has a massive Twitter following, speaks regularly to companies X, Y, and Z, whom are all hiring. We've analyzed his profile and it looks pretty non-controversial." It's good to see you guys are making use of Twitter and not Facebook. That's a huge selling point for me. Good luck to you guys.

The first few very, very early prototypes were built because I, then my girlfriend, then some of my closest friends were in the situation where they needed something like this - so I'm quite passionate about making it work :)

That's an amazing idea — we hadn't thought that far ahead yet in terms of NLP stuff, but we can definitely do some amalgamation of Twitter and, say, GitHub data to help you know who to target :)

It's a good point that you can't be responsible for the things that people who recommend you say online.

The idea is that you'd share the link privately just with people you really trust, so it's unlikely someone you don't trust would add their recommendation. I agree - you probably need to be able to remove any recommendations that you don't think are appropriate...

As everyone has said, good idea, but I see one big pitfall.

Don't become LinkedIn's "endorsement" system. I'm not an employer, but I think it has ended up losing it's meaning (people just endorse each other willy nilly or a scratch-my-back-and-I-will-scratch-yours kind of thing) -

I'm thinking one way to escape this whole is finding a way to enforce/emphasize talking up friends that you have personally WORKED with for extended periods of time, to get more honesty

Having been to the HN London and heard the talk from Makeshift, I hope this doesn't disappear in 3 months! As a dev in London looking for a job, i'll give it a go. Good luck.

What kind of work are you looking for?

Looking to move into a position as a Python developer, with a mix of front and backend work.

I know EDITD are looking for talented people — http://editd.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer/

Great, will take a look thanks.

Cool. We are looking for strong JS developers at Skimlinks. PHP and Python would be a huge bonus. My email is in my profile. Give me a shout if interested.

Great thanks, I will look into it!

I'd like to give this a go, but I don't have a twitter account. How do you see this working for those developers without a social media presence?

We've been using Twitter auth for all of our apps at @makeshiftHQ just out of convenience; some rely on it for core functionality more than others.

In the case of HireMyFriend we put in Twitter auth as a precursor to building a 'secretly DM your friends' feature that hasn't shipped yet.

That said - with an app based around your anonymity but the social presence of your friends & professional contacts I think this would work well for a developer without a social media presence. We'll consider adding email/password sign up in the coming weeks — I'm sure you appreciate how busy launches are :)

Have you considered integrating with LinkedIn as well?

As a complete tangent I'm presently looking for jobs literally on the other side of the world, in a country where I know nobody (so I guess I'm not your target market?). The site used most often there is SEEK. On their own I doubt services like yours would integrate with SEEK or similar smaller international jobs sites. However I'd love to see some kind of social networking standard take off where once you've integrated with say LinkedIn, integrating with someone like SEEK would literally be as simple as swapping a couple of API keys. It'd be even better if the integration could be bidirectional. That is, SEEK could decide to integrate with HMF or vice-versa and whatever features would just "magically" show up on both sites so long as both approved the integration.

Shit, that's kind of like a meta-friend request. "Hey there! My social network wants to be friends with your social network!" Weird.

Tread carefully friends, there's dogma here [1].

I obviously can't answer for the author, but in my own endeavors I've used social auth as a quick fix and said "eh, if it takes off I'll go back and do it right." Chances are the subsegment of his market without a social presence is small.

Authentication and marketing are big hairy problems, especially for people embarking upon small side projects. Social auth can help with both with remarkably small effort on the dev's part.

Edit: Also if you'd really like to give it a shot, having a twitter account doesn't require you to use said twitter account.

Edit 2: Changed tone - "whether you like it or not" is way too confrontational of a phrase to use there - I apologize if I sounded like I was attacking.

1: There seems to be a social auth holy war going on. Your comment was respectful, so please don't think I mean you when I say this, but there's too damn many people saying the equivalent of "OHHH you shitbag! I hate the Facebook/Twitter/other! Why would you force me to have that in order to have your service?" The truth is that it wasn't meant as a personal slight - your opinions just fell on the wrong side of an early-stage tradeoff.

That's really helpful, thanks :)

This is really a great idea. It has the potential to offer a practical end-run around recruiters for potential employees in this situation.

As an employer, I'd love to be able to sign up and have your system DM me any time there's someone in my area looking for a job. Heck I'd even pay a small fee for the service!

Great idea, pretty site.

Very minor concern: I see "Hu" instead of "Hi" in 'Hire', because of the script. I didn't see it on first glance, but when I navigated to the demo profile I did, and now I see the U shape much more strongly than the I or R, and it's bugging me. :)

Thanks — we'll take another pass at the logo this sprint :)

btw if you're interested in that kinda thing the logo is based on a heavily reworked Candy Script by the amazing Sudtipos http://sudtipos.com/fonts/94

It would be great if profiles could be searchable through the three hashtags one can use on the profile. That way one would not necessarily only rely on sending an email, but would always be available to the pool of hiremyfriend users who are looking for growth hackers or ruby devs, etc.

That's a really great idea, thanks :)

This has been a crazy rush to get the product launched as-is (and there's a whole bunch of hypotheses we want to validate right now anyway), but working more on the employer side is definitely something that we're excited to explore in the very near future :)

Interesting approach to a real problem.

Talking out of my arse but could you use the list of "friends" to get a rough idea of who the candidate is? Amongst a given set of friends there may only be one Rubyist with JavaScript and Karate skills...

Good point - quite possibly, depending on the mix of how you describe yourself (e.g. if you just copy your Twitter bio), the sum of the people you choose to endorse you, and the density of the people with your skillset in your social graph/geographic location.

Selfishly, I've always worked in London/San Francisco where almost everyone I know is either a designer, front-ender, Rubyist, or an awkward mix of the above, and everyone knows each other.

I'm not sure how this would work out in more specialised disciplines, other industries or other locations, but the only way to find out is to see how people use it :)

I like the idea a lot but when I go to the demo profile, I can highlight the redacted text with my mouse and see the person's name. Is that intentional??

Inspect element on it ;)

In the contact form the name is: Hidden McRedacted

If you hover your mouse over the name the title is "Give us some credit, we did think about this - this is a randomly generated name. Reload the page!"

I tried reloading and it was indeed a random name. Although, not sure why they did this, people could very easily be turned off from using this because they didn't see the hover text.

I agree, it's quirky but poor Columbus Torphy is probably getting called into his bosses office today ;)

It's a hangover from a previous iteration of the design - we were generating names with ffaker and then doing a strikethrough, but in reality it was confusing users rather than being a funny aesthetic touch.

In the interests of getting this thing shipped we decided to hide the text with CSS, but replacing it with an SVG is at the top of our priority list :)

Amusingly enough, my friend is upstairs in an interview busy getting hired RIGHT NOW. Alas! Too late!

Maybe next time, though? :)

Beaten by the buzzer! Congratulations to your friend; if you feel like kicking the tires and looking for a new job we'd love to have you sign up!

"Sign in with twitter". Don't have an account, don't need one right now. Thanks and bye.

Twitter is a lot better than Facebook IMO, and a Twitter account is easy to set up and easy to delete.

Why not implement your own as well, for people who do not want to connect to another account?

What about google?

FWIW, I like this idea.

Thanks Scott :)

btw not sure if anyone spotted it, but we came up with a high-tech solution for keeping out recruiter spam (god forbid this turns into the LRUG mailing list…). What do you reckon?

http://c.jon.gd/image/1u013o34073u

Bravo, sir... bravo!

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