A head's up for Hacker News folks - this is entirely for jobs in Detroit.
Some other feedback:
- Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying "whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form
- Building powerful filters won't help most job seekers. Most job seekers keep the net wide because it's hard to predict what the perfect job is going to have as a keyword in it. (I helped build trovix.com, acquired by Monster, and ran dozens of user research sessions)
- Your tour is way, way too long. At the end, there's a next button that doesn't do anything
- Why can't I upload my resume? I have to cut and paste everything in to your fields?
- I have a 13" Macbook Pro, and the site doesn't even come close to fitting in the horizontal width of my browser
- green/red/blue buttons are ugly
- There are numerous z-index problems around the site
- the video, particularly of the mouse moving back and forth over the star ratings, is super distracting
+ a lot more issues - you guys should spend some time dogfooding this.
There's a lot to like here and a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I buy the "OkCupid for Jobs" description. OkCupid matches people up based on answers to (multiple choice) questions (along with how important you think a prospective match's answer is to the given question). I'm not seeing anything like that here...
But I like the filtering features, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes. Well done!
I went to Startup School in SV this year and must have met 3 dozen startups but the only one I kept thinking about was this one. Scott is brilliant and is thinking about this space in a refreshing way. I am actually a bit blown away TrueJob is not in the W15 batch - SamA and team often say they mess up and miss big things, if any partners read this - please take another look, he is the real deal.
I met him the same weekend, and remember him vividly because of his "throwing star" business cards. Unfortunately, we didn't discuss our startups, but I'm very glad to learn of his here and now. I'm very passionate about this domain too. Hiring needs so much improvement, and there's a lot of people trying to find the best solution. I wish Scott the best of luck.
I'll be providing some more thorough feedback to Scott, but at a glance, one thing I really think is great is the JobStats feature. Being rejected with feedback like, "We found someone better for the position," doesn't help struggling job seekers identify areas they should focus on improving.
Same here, memory drastically increased as page was left open and eventually went to swap. Linux 3.17.3-1-ARCH with Chromium 38.0.2125.122 (290379) (64-bit).
You should convert all your gifs to videos. Otherwise a lot of people will drop cause their browsers crash. And don't think about people from mobile devices. Sometimes they're about 50% of the traffic.
I completely agree. This was a struggle for me -- I wanted to show off features on the homepage, but adding a Gif slideshow added a crap ton of load to the page.
I wanted to create a video, but my video editing skills are pretty poor and I wanted the experience to be great (even my gifs have a few bugs in them if you look closely). I'll work on this for sure.
Back in 2009 I graduated with a degree in Psychology into one of the worst job markets in years. I was unemployed for about 6 months, during which I tried every job website out there, and thought each one was terrible.
I had some programming experience, so I hacked up a demo that I tried to put out there in 2010 called Scoople, but it was a single page php file that ran horribly and was really bad code. Initially I looked for a technical cofounder, but couldn't find anyone. So I decided to learn myself.
I've spent the last 4 years jumping from job to job, from IT Administrator to Computer Consultant to Web Developer to finally Rails web developer, and now I help build startups for a living. During the past 5 months I finally felt I had enough experience to build the job website I always wanted, and so I built TrueJob, which I'm calling OkCupid for Jobs.
I've made an imgur gif album of all the features here if you'd like to check out that first (more features to come!):
The idea is that you sign up with just an email and password, and then fill out your profile -- manually (one field at a time), by authenticating with LinkedIn, pulling from JSONResume, etc.
It then gives you a base set of recommended jobs, which you can then start to tweak by rating 1-5 stars a job posting, or favoriting/blocking certain attributes about that job posting-- company name, job title, job description keywords, etc.
My site then crunches the numbers, and reranks and reprioritizes the job postings so the most relevant matches are always at the top.
Once you apply for a job, employers look at your resume, and favorite or block things about it as well in order for them to get the best candidates -- but not to fear! Once you apply for a few jobs, you'll get back analytics on why someone didn't like your resume -- what keywords they hated, and which ones they loved, so you know what to change before you apply to the next job.
Hate my site? You can at least take the information you put in your profile, and convert it over to a hard copy PDF, with one of a few design styles. Take it to another place, or just use it to get a job! I just want to help people get into a job, whether they use my site or not -- job seekers too often get kicked in the teeth as it is, I want to help them succeed :)
A few caveats! (PLEASE READ)
* Right now, I haven't seeded the database with that many jobs, only about 1000, and all from Michigan, so if you wonder why you keep getting suggested Detroit jobs, now you know why. This is my number one priority right now -- my biggest struggle is finding a source for jobs that doesn't anonymize a lot of the important data like employer name, salary, etc, so if anyone knows of a great source to pull structured job postings from where I can link back to the original employer company page, let me know.
* The profile to PDF feature isn't working quite yet, so that will be my release next week along with creating scrapers that can get me a ton more job postings (or if you have any other ideas of how to get clean job postings, let me know). I'm also hoping it entices people to check back on the site every so often, in order to see the new stuff I'm planning!
This has been a labor of love for me guys -- I've been developing this app for the past 5 months after spending 4 years trying to get the experience to build it. I'm really hoping you guys like it, and give me any and all feedback and critiques.
Hrm I think I love the tagline more than the site. I really like what OkCupid has done and would love it if someone actually built a jobs site that worked in the same way. Both sides have lists of questions which are presented to them and they answer them and/or rate how important the answers of their prospective parter are. How would this work for a job site?
Q. What's your favorite CSS preprocessor?
- sass
- less
- I don't write CSS
Q. Do you want to work in an office where there are dogs?
- absolutely!
- that would be cool
- don't really care
etc.
I think there are a LOT better ways to find good employee/employer matches than pulling in job listings and resumes. OK Cupid for jobs is a great idea, I just hope you end up building it!
I've seen too many cases where a "job posting" on somewhere like dice.com is really a meta-posting by a recruiter that is looking to fill a position in the actual company and collect a royalty (or whatever it's called) for doing it.
I don't want to apply for Recruiters, LLC. I want to apply for RealCompany, Inc.
Another reason why blocking is great is because sometimes you'll find have a bad experience with Scummyco and never want to see anything from them again.
AngelList's API or getting a feed from TheLadders.com is probably your best bet for getting structured job data which includes salary data. There are plenty of other options (indeed, simplyhired, monster, burning glass) if salary data isn't a requirement.
I also have a job search tool I recently launched (aimed specifically at software engineers) that I'm looking to get feedback on: http://www.codejobs.io/
Any feedback/suggestions the HN community has would be really appreciated!
I definitely think there are improvements you could make to the color scheme and UI, but it's more important that you've made something useful - I think the dragging to favorites/blocking is a brilliant idea and a concept you can apply to any kind of search, not just jobs. I also really appreciate that you posted your story here, stories of perseverance are the best part of the HN community.
I really hope this takes off - a great way to do that would be to identify the biggest job markets and leverage some kind of physical presence to sign up job posters in that area. Your tool looks professional enough as it is to get anyone on board.
This is just the post I was looking for. I am from Michigan and currently looking for a software development position! Sadly there is slim pickins in Grand Rapids. While I have your attention, can you add an option to filter for "Remote" jobs? I currently work remotely and have difficulty finding similar positions.
I absolutely love what you have done with the site, with the exception of the colors chosen. IMO the dark scheme is not pleasant to look at. Just read https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-gorgeo... the other day, it was a wonderful piece on aesthetics (read Part 1 first).
It seems the LinkedIn data scraper has problems with people out of the US. It fails to read my city and country.
I really REALLY like the game-ified intro. Are you using a library for those effects or are they developed inhouse? (if library: which one?)
I love everything about your site, except the choice of background colors.
Why black / dark grey? It's really really hard on the eyes and I have seen that dark theme used only for nightclub websites and boxing websites (and it doesn't make sense even there.)
Wow, this is very interesting. I find this an amazing comment. I'm curious what the bias for white backgrounds is (or at least not 'dark' backgrounds). It's very common in web design, yet relatively neutral for application and other graphic design. Document based applications are usually white of course, but games, content creation, utilities, and many other app types are not.
I have often wondered why white is so amazingly prevalent in web design. I'd never have expected such a strong reaction, but more than one person has commented on the background of this site.
Great to see another Reactjs app in the wild (I poked under the hood a bit). I really like the use of animated gifs in a gallery. Very fast understanding for me of how the site worked. Awesome!
This is a great idea. I was joking with my coworkers that job hunting is just like dating. I had briefly considered setting up something like this before I remembered that my project list was already too long.
I'm getting a: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information." when I try to signup.
EDIT: Although it seems that it worked one of the times because I'm logged in when I go back to the homepage.
Something is seriously wrong with the gif slider on the front page. It eats unbelievable amounts of memory and makes my machine much less responsive. Are you actually hiding the gifs properly when they're not the slide on display? Are you doing opacity transforms on them? Whatever it is, it's extremely noticeable.
Site looks good, but didn't bring in anything from LinkedIn. Also, the "blocked" filtering doesn't seem to do anything, and I keep getting random Server Errors when clicking on certain positions.
Do you support any kind of Markdown, or plan to, or to provide links to resume, github, etc?
No worries! I anonymize data before submitting to employers, meaning that name and gender are removed. If I still do find employers who are blocking or favoriting based on discriminatory criteria, I can find these employers more easily so I can take action.
[+] [-] timcederman|11 years ago|reply
Some other feedback:
- Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying "whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form
- Building powerful filters won't help most job seekers. Most job seekers keep the net wide because it's hard to predict what the perfect job is going to have as a keyword in it. (I helped build trovix.com, acquired by Monster, and ran dozens of user research sessions)
- Your tour is way, way too long. At the end, there's a next button that doesn't do anything
- Why can't I upload my resume? I have to cut and paste everything in to your fields?
- I have a 13" Macbook Pro, and the site doesn't even come close to fitting in the horizontal width of my browser
- green/red/blue buttons are ugly
- There are numerous z-index problems around the site
- the video, particularly of the mouse moving back and forth over the star ratings, is super distracting
+ a lot more issues - you guys should spend some time dogfooding this.
[+] [-] jackmaney|11 years ago|reply
But I like the filtering features, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes. Well done!
[+] [-] keithwarren|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scobar|11 years ago|reply
I'll be providing some more thorough feedback to Scott, but at a glance, one thing I really think is great is the JobStats feature. Being rejected with feedback like, "We found someone better for the position," doesn't help struggling job seekers identify areas they should focus on improving.
[+] [-] posnet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercnet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hazelnut|11 years ago|reply
You should convert all your gifs to videos. Otherwise a lot of people will drop cause their browsers crash. And don't think about people from mobile devices. Sometimes they're about 50% of the traffic.
[+] [-] eggbrain|11 years ago|reply
I wanted to create a video, but my video editing skills are pretty poor and I wanted the experience to be great (even my gifs have a few bugs in them if you look closely). I'll work on this for sure.
[+] [-] eggbrain|11 years ago|reply
Back in 2009 I graduated with a degree in Psychology into one of the worst job markets in years. I was unemployed for about 6 months, during which I tried every job website out there, and thought each one was terrible.
I had some programming experience, so I hacked up a demo that I tried to put out there in 2010 called Scoople, but it was a single page php file that ran horribly and was really bad code. Initially I looked for a technical cofounder, but couldn't find anyone. So I decided to learn myself.
I've spent the last 4 years jumping from job to job, from IT Administrator to Computer Consultant to Web Developer to finally Rails web developer, and now I help build startups for a living. During the past 5 months I finally felt I had enough experience to build the job website I always wanted, and so I built TrueJob, which I'm calling OkCupid for Jobs.
I've made an imgur gif album of all the features here if you'd like to check out that first (more features to come!):
https://imgur.com/a/rDkaw#0
The idea is that you sign up with just an email and password, and then fill out your profile -- manually (one field at a time), by authenticating with LinkedIn, pulling from JSONResume, etc.
It then gives you a base set of recommended jobs, which you can then start to tweak by rating 1-5 stars a job posting, or favoriting/blocking certain attributes about that job posting-- company name, job title, job description keywords, etc.
My site then crunches the numbers, and reranks and reprioritizes the job postings so the most relevant matches are always at the top.
Once you apply for a job, employers look at your resume, and favorite or block things about it as well in order for them to get the best candidates -- but not to fear! Once you apply for a few jobs, you'll get back analytics on why someone didn't like your resume -- what keywords they hated, and which ones they loved, so you know what to change before you apply to the next job.
Hate my site? You can at least take the information you put in your profile, and convert it over to a hard copy PDF, with one of a few design styles. Take it to another place, or just use it to get a job! I just want to help people get into a job, whether they use my site or not -- job seekers too often get kicked in the teeth as it is, I want to help them succeed :)
A few caveats! (PLEASE READ)
* Right now, I haven't seeded the database with that many jobs, only about 1000, and all from Michigan, so if you wonder why you keep getting suggested Detroit jobs, now you know why. This is my number one priority right now -- my biggest struggle is finding a source for jobs that doesn't anonymize a lot of the important data like employer name, salary, etc, so if anyone knows of a great source to pull structured job postings from where I can link back to the original employer company page, let me know.
* The profile to PDF feature isn't working quite yet, so that will be my release next week along with creating scrapers that can get me a ton more job postings (or if you have any other ideas of how to get clean job postings, let me know). I'm also hoping it entices people to check back on the site every so often, in order to see the new stuff I'm planning!
This has been a labor of love for me guys -- I've been developing this app for the past 5 months after spending 4 years trying to get the experience to build it. I'm really hoping you guys like it, and give me any and all feedback and critiques.
Thanks,
eggbrain ([email protected])
[+] [-] iandanforth|11 years ago|reply
Q. What's your favorite CSS preprocessor?
- sass - less - I don't write CSS
Q. Do you want to work in an office where there are dogs?
- absolutely! - that would be cool - don't really care
etc.
I think there are a LOT better ways to find good employee/employer matches than pulling in job listings and resumes. OK Cupid for jobs is a great idea, I just hope you end up building it!
[+] [-] nnnnni|11 years ago|reply
I've seen too many cases where a "job posting" on somewhere like dice.com is really a meta-posting by a recruiter that is looking to fill a position in the actual company and collect a royalty (or whatever it's called) for doing it.
I don't want to apply for Recruiters, LLC. I want to apply for RealCompany, Inc.
Another reason why blocking is great is because sometimes you'll find have a bad experience with Scummyco and never want to see anything from them again.
[+] [-] redmattred|11 years ago|reply
I also have a job search tool I recently launched (aimed specifically at software engineers) that I'm looking to get feedback on: http://www.codejobs.io/
Any feedback/suggestions the HN community has would be really appreciated!
~Matt [email protected]
[+] [-] primitivesuave|11 years ago|reply
I really hope this takes off - a great way to do that would be to identify the biggest job markets and leverage some kind of physical presence to sign up job posters in that area. Your tool looks professional enough as it is to get anyone on board.
[+] [-] fillskills|11 years ago|reply
Best of luck for the future.
[+] [-] morgante|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belzebub|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beltiras|11 years ago|reply
It seems the LinkedIn data scraper has problems with people out of the US. It fails to read my city and country.
I really REALLY like the game-ified intro. Are you using a library for those effects or are they developed inhouse? (if library: which one?)
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notastartup|11 years ago|reply
would love if this could work in Canadian cities.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justboxing|11 years ago|reply
Why black / dark grey? It's really really hard on the eyes and I have seen that dark theme used only for nightclub websites and boxing websites (and it doesn't make sense even there.)
[+] [-] joshuak|11 years ago|reply
I have often wondered why white is so amazingly prevalent in web design. I'd never have expected such a strong reaction, but more than one person has commented on the background of this site.
[+] [-] SyncTheory13|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmsh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azdle|11 years ago|reply
I'm getting a: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information." when I try to signup.
EDIT: Although it seems that it worked one of the times because I'm logged in when I go back to the homepage.
EDIT2: Seems to be completely down now.
[+] [-] eggbrain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panon|11 years ago|reply
Love the concept.
"We're sorry, but something went wrong.
If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."
[+] [-] eggbrain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frontsideair|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ankurpatel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabemart|11 years ago|reply
Chrome 38.0.2125.111, Windows 8.1
[+] [-] astangl|11 years ago|reply
Site looks good, but didn't bring in anything from LinkedIn. Also, the "blocked" filtering doesn't seem to do anything, and I keep getting random Server Errors when clicking on certain positions.
Do you support any kind of Markdown, or plan to, or to provide links to resume, github, etc?
I look forward to seeing this take off.
Alex
[+] [-] anonfunction|11 years ago|reply
Lesson to the wise: Use cloudflare if you are not prepared to scale up and expecting a lot of traffic. It's saved me more than once.
[+] [-] tibbetts|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geogra4|11 years ago|reply
Great idea as well
[+] [-] s_baby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eggbrain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saumil07|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iskander|11 years ago|reply