EmployIQ – a slightly smarter job search engine

Creator here. I previously posted EmployIQ here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8282180 but thought it was appropriate for a redux post - partly about EmployIQ improvements, partly about taking feedback.

On the previous post, I’d say 1/2 of the comments were critical. It’s easy to dismiss criticism. It’s also easy to get discouraged by it. But neither of these options are productive as a creator. In my experience the most important thing you can do for a product is really listen to negative comments, even if they aren’t constructive, and try to parse out the real problem.

For EmployIQ, I could quickly tell the problem was category discovery. The secret sauce that makes EmployIQ different is that we smartly group similar jobs even if they have different titles (like “software engineer” and “web developer”) into relevant categories. Previously, users selected their appropriate category by scrolling through a select box that was about 70 lines long. Obviously, this wasn’t very user-friendly – is “software engineer” under “S” for software? Or “I” for IT? Or “E” for “Engineering”? Who knows.

All of the negative comments revolved around category discovery. I was aware the select box was a little annoying, but I thought I could get away with it. The alternative would be to build a whole open search box system that would have to match any word a user types with the appropriate category, which would be very time consuming. This is where denial kicks in – you can accept the feedback and spends weeks of difficult development work, or you can ignore the feedback and lazily delude yourself that your product is perfect and everyone is dumb. I chose to accept the feedback and get to work, which I’d like to share with you now. Now when you go to the site, you get an open search field that you can put in almost any reasonable job title into and it will match you with a reasonable category. It’s not quite perfect because our human job naming schemes are imperfect, for example if a user enters “analyst” do they mean a “business analyst” or an “IT systems analyst”? In these cases the system just picks the its best guess. Any search term that the system does not recognize get stored for later review and discovery.

I invite you to give it a shot and let me know what you think. info@employiq.com