6 ms·

Show HN: TrueJob 1.0 – Pandora for jobs and data for everyone

140 points by eggbrain 10y ago

eggbrain 10y ago
Hey Guys, It's been 2 years since I first submitted a side project I was working on to Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644172), and so much has changed since then (including our tagline). We've done a major overhaul on so many systems that I wanted to let you guys know what we've been up to, how we've changed, and get feedback to let us know we are still on the right path. The idea with TrueJob was that we want to help job seekers find employers and vice versa, while giving analytics to both sides to help them improve as well. We allow job seekers to like or dislike almost anything about a job posting (location, company, random words or phrases in the job description), and then employers can see that data on the other side: https://gfycat.com/HarmfulSizzlingKitty https://gfycat.com/HarmfulSizzlingKitty https://gfycat.com/UntidyMagnificentKodiakbear https://gfycat.com/UntidyMagnificentKodiakbear We want to improve job search -- we know how hard it is to hire as a startup, and we know how hard job seekers have it trying to search for jobs. We want to give data that helps both sides improve, and we think we've done it in quite a cool way. So, what's happened since our last posting? * I quit my job and focused solely on TrueJob * TrueJob was setup as an official business, incorporating in Deleware, setting up business accounts and getting a good "base" for the business * I started building a lot more features into the product, and also working on a lot of the bugs, errors, and performance issues that people had mentioned in the comments * I built out the entire other side of the platform (employer side), and added in a bunch of support to setup organizations * TrueJob became a team of two in October 2015 when my coufounder, Michael Kling, joined onboard, and has really helped flesh out a ton of code and build up the product even more * We built out a custom scraping solution that scrapes company websites to find job postings, and keeps track of how many jobs a company has, what system they use to post those jobs, and how those jobs change over time -- Here's a snippet from AirBNB for example: http://i.imgur.com/FjPL8UB.png http://i.imgur.com/FjPL8UB.png * We've interviewed startups on how they hire, like FarmLogs and TentCraft, Arbor Networks and more (https://blog.truejob.com/ https://blog.truejob.com/) * We've become the second biggest listing of startup jobs in the United States, outside of AngelList (mostly from our scraping processes) * We've created a custom tool to embed a company's job postings into any page (which we've used with Michigan tech communities like the TechBrewery, TC New Tech, and other Michigan businesses) * We've added in a lot more ways to filter for jobs and get information about companies, like our new tooltips or filtering * We've built out job recommendations based on things you like/dislike/etc * We interviewed with Sid of Gitlab here: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/03/yc-application-office-hours/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/03/yc-application-office-ho..., where we talked about our YC app and more
- hariananth 10y ago
  Why is thus product focused on startups, and why is this better than angel list?
leblancfg 10y ago
Anything outside the US?
- mwkling 10y ago
  Hey - I'm Mike, the other cofounder of TrueJob. We're focused on just the US right now (originally just Michigan), but once we get more resources we're hoping to expand!
  - korijn 10y ago
    There's a lot of non-US devs on here; you might want to set up a mailing list for them to sign up with. I'd like to hear again when you open up for the rest of the world! (NL here)
smmnyc 10y ago
Congrats guys!
Lord_Zero 10y ago
I noticed this job is under "Denver" but the posting itself says India. https://www.truejob.com/locations/denver-colorado/jobs?sort=date&job=front-end-developer-34rmw https://www.truejob.com/locations/denver-colorado/jobs?sort=...
- mwkling 10y ago
  Ah, thanks for finding that, that's something for us to fix. As Scott said below, we find most of the job postings direct from company websites. We do different things to parse the locations when we're scraping, but it's not perfect yet. We have a 'report' feature for cases like this, but right now that only appears when you are logged in. Probably we'll add something like that available to everyone.
yoamro 10y ago
Love the layout and design. Not sure if I missed this but is there a way to specify all of California in the search function instead of just individual cities? I think that would be useful for some people.
- eggbrain 10y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! It's actually fairly easy for us to specify all of California (it was actually part of our alpha release years ago), but we were never quite happy with how the UX of it would work -- how do we break out state vs city, or both combined? We do want to make this happen though, and it shouldn't be too bad, but we need to figure out a good way to show it to the user. Stay tuned!
clt123456 10y ago
Why does the location page for Charlotte, NC say "ANN ARBOR" in orange letters in the top left? https://www.truejob.com/locations/charlotte https://www.truejob.com/locations/charlotte
- eggbrain 10y ago
  Oof, good point. Looks like we had hardcoded in a variable for location profiles that we meant to take out in the end. We're pushing up a fix now for this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jabberwocky923 10y ago
How is this similar to Pandora? In Pandora you specify one song/band you're interested in, and it shows you a list of similar things. Can I say that I work at Microsoft, and have it show me a list of jobs that are super comparable to my current position? This would be great for pivoting out of a stagnant job...not something I need now, but I've been there in the past. I see an incredible amount of voting, highlighting, keywording, etc. Maybe I'm missing it. I'm almost certainly being nitpicky about how you invoke Pandora.
- eggbrain 10y ago
  Our tagline has always been a bit of a struggle -- we originally said OkCupid for jobs, and then tried (briefly) doing Tinder for Jobs, but none of it felt really "close" to what we were going for. The idea behind using the Pandora analogy was: when you start a new station on Pandora, you input something you want to listen to, and it starts playing music, at which point you can "like" or "dislike" the song to get Pandora to "learn" what type of music you like. In that same way, you can "like" or "dislike" a lot of things about a job posting, and then we can give job recommendations will try to find jobs that fit you based on that. But even outside that, we also allow you to filter through a bunch of other things, so the Pandora analogy breaks down somewhat fast about that time. If people have thoughts as to how we can describe this differently, we're all for it :)
  - ben_jones 10y ago
    IMO "We're x for y" is not a catch all. The convention is used to explain what can be a complex mission statement to people usually outside your space and though this is particularly necessary for SV-shenanigans -> regular people, I would recommend playing around with taglines your team can personally find compelling rather then trying to fit that mold. YMMV and always get feed back, but don't artificially constrain yourselves... there are enough natural constrains in the world.
  - Dangeranger 10y ago
    When someone invokes the "x for y" metaphore in a description it has always come off as lacking from my perspective. I don't want to think of you as an Uber for someIndustry, tell me in a clear short beautiful statement what value your company creates.
gailees 10y ago
Pricing page is on point
- eggbrain 10y ago
  Thanks man! We thought it would be funny if it said $0 no matter what you chose, because we were going to be free during beta. Also, if you're back in Michigan sometime, let me buy you a beer.
tcfunk 10y ago
Can't sign up because they think my email address is fake. Edit: They are fixing this, thanks!
- eggbrain 10y ago
  Ah, I know we keep at least one spam email point open for people to register under (letthemeatspam.com), which is a Mailinator alias. If that still doesn't work, reach out to me at scott ~AT~ truejob.com and I'll get you sorted out.
- ibejoeb 10y ago
  Also, when the warning appears, the controls are pushed off the screen on a standard laptop display, and it's not scrollable. https://sli.mg/tYSBc0 https://sli.mg/tYSBc0
anaolykarpov 10y ago
Looks interesting. Some possible improvements: * add salary info (where that's available) * offer the possibility to search for remote jobs
- eggbrain 10y ago
  Remote jobs has been one of the most requested filters from the feedback we've gotten, so we're definitely looking into that. Salaries are harder (since we gather jobs directly from company websites and salaries are rarely listed), but in the future the hope would be to use the salary data we do have to at least suggest what salaries are for comparable jobs. Stay tuned!
vanrysss 10y ago
Puppet Labs in Portland has two company entries, one with 36 jobs, the other with 30.
- eggbrain 10y ago
  You're right -- we scrape a good deal of startups, but sometimes we get duplicates, and although we try to de-duplicate via a lot of different methods, sometimes they sneak through. This one should be fixed now, but there's probably some other examples people will find as well, and we catch and fix them when we see them.
phaed 10y ago
No jobs in Canada I see :/
- michaelmior 10y ago
  There are some actually. You just can't search for them directly. A keyword search for Toronto turned up a few. Unfortunately when you try to sign up, there's a message that it's not available in Canada yet. Curious why if the the OP is around.
lgse 10y ago
Just a few things that came up to mind when I first arrived on the website: As a UI/UX perfectionist, the dark theme gives me a terrible vibe. It's just not well executed. I think you guys would be much better off with a white themed site. Look at inspiration from the new Stripe website! I do believe that the splash page could be redesigned much better, it's very dull and it doesn't really have a major call to action when I land. You should make the signing up / searching more in your face. Secondly, the tagline is horrible, not everyone is familiar with Pandora and the concept of the station, etc. Good place to iterate from though! Good luck!
- mwkling 10y ago
  Thanks for your thoughts, appreciate the feedback! We've gotten lots of mixed reactions on the dark theme (e.g. some people have said it stands out from most current sites with white themes), but it's something we're thinking about. Thanks also for your points on the home page - we're continuing to iterate on that too.
- JusticeJuice 10y ago
  Agreed, please hire a designer.
jeano 10y ago
Congrats on starting to work on it full-time. If you scrape the jobs from companies, what incentives do the companies have to pay to post the jobs on TrueJob?
enahs-sf 10y ago
Having spent the last few years working on the jobs industry/problem, I wish you the best. Most of the major players function on antiquated business models that have carried over from the newspaper days. Measuring success is still done on a pay-per-click basis, which in the scope of hiring really makes no sense. I hope you can move the needle forward!
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  This is the number one issue people who post jobs on job sites have. Too many useless clicks and completely unqualified applicants such as plumbers applying to programming jobs.
  - enahs-sf 10y ago
    I think a cost per application system makes much more sense in terms of measuring ROI and trying to solve for cost per hire. The hard part of creating a matching algorithm for jobs is dealing with people who are looking to change careers. For example the plumber who has been reading up on algorithms and learning C++ in her spare time. Your algorithm would likely classify this person to a plumber career track based on her experience, but struggle to show this person jobs in programming. On the flip side of your marketplace, you would likely screen this persons application from ever going to this employer for just the same reason. The experience on their resume is irrelevant for a programming job. This in my experience is the crux of the job industry problem today.
ebel 10y ago
bug: your job post calculator = 0 all the time.
donretag 10y ago
Cannot right-click or shift-click to open a job in a new tab. I do not want to click the back button when browsing a list. I want to open each item in a new tab.
- mwkling 10y ago
  That makes sense. We'll look at making an update so that works.

140 points by eggbrain 10y ago

Hey Guys, It's been 2 years since I first submitted a side project I was working on to Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644172), and so much has changed since then (including our tagline). We've done a major overhaul on so many systems that I wanted to let you guys know what we've been up to, how we've changed, and get feedback to let us know we are still on the right path. The idea with TrueJob was that we want to help job seekers find employers and vice versa, while giving analytics to both sides to help them improve as well. We allow job seekers to like or dislike almost anything about a job posting (location, company, random words or phrases in the job description), and then employers can see that data on the other side: https://gfycat.com/HarmfulSizzlingKitty https://gfycat.com/HarmfulSizzlingKitty https://gfycat.com/UntidyMagnificentKodiakbear https://gfycat.com/UntidyMagnificentKodiakbear We want to improve job search -- we know how hard it is to hire as a startup, and we know how hard job seekers have it trying to search for jobs. We want to give data that helps both sides improve, and we think we've done it in quite a cool way. So, what's happened since our last posting? * I quit my job and focused solely on TrueJob * TrueJob was setup as an official business, incorporating in Deleware, setting up business accounts and getting a good "base" for the business * I started building a lot more features into the product, and also working on a lot of the bugs, errors, and performance issues that people had mentioned in the comments * I built out the entire other side of the platform (employer side), and added in a bunch of support to setup organizations * TrueJob became a team of two in October 2015 when my coufounder, Michael Kling, joined onboard, and has really helped flesh out a ton of code and build up the product even more * We built out a custom scraping solution that scrapes company websites to find job postings, and keeps track of how many jobs a company has, what system they use to post those jobs, and how those jobs change over time -- Here's a snippet from AirBNB for example: http://i.imgur.com/FjPL8UB.png http://i.imgur.com/FjPL8UB.png * We've interviewed startups on how they hire, like FarmLogs and TentCraft, Arbor Networks and more (https://blog.truejob.com/ https://blog.truejob.com/) * We've become the second biggest listing of startup jobs in the United States, outside of AngelList (mostly from our scraping processes) * We've created a custom tool to embed a company's job postings into any page (which we've used with Michigan tech communities like the TechBrewery, TC New Tech, and other Michigan businesses) * We've added in a lot more ways to filter for jobs and get information about companies, like our new tooltips or filtering * We've built out job recommendations based on things you like/dislike/etc * We interviewed with Sid of Gitlab here: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/03/yc-application-office-hours/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/03/yc-application-office-ho..., where we talked about our YC app and more

hariananth 10y ago
Why is thus product focused on startups, and why is this better than angel list?

leblancfg 10y ago

Anything outside the US?

mwkling 10y ago
Hey - I'm Mike, the other cofounder of TrueJob. We're focused on just the US right now (originally just Michigan), but once we get more resources we're hoping to expand!
- korijn 10y ago
  There's a lot of non-US devs on here; you might want to set up a mailing list for them to sign up with. I'd like to hear again when you open up for the rest of the world! (NL here)

smmnyc 10y ago

Congrats guys!

Lord_Zero 10y ago

I noticed this job is under "Denver" but the posting itself says India. https://www.truejob.com/locations/denver-colorado/jobs?sort=date&job=front-end-developer-34rmw https://www.truejob.com/locations/denver-colorado/jobs?sort=...

mwkling 10y ago
Ah, thanks for finding that, that's something for us to fix. As Scott said below, we find most of the job postings direct from company websites. We do different things to parse the locations when we're scraping, but it's not perfect yet. We have a 'report' feature for cases like this, but right now that only appears when you are logged in. Probably we'll add something like that available to everyone.

yoamro 10y ago

Love the layout and design. Not sure if I missed this but is there a way to specify all of California in the search function instead of just individual cities? I think that would be useful for some people.

eggbrain 10y ago
Thanks for the kind words! It's actually fairly easy for us to specify all of California (it was actually part of our alpha release years ago), but we were never quite happy with how the UX of it would work -- how do we break out state vs city, or both combined? We do want to make this happen though, and it shouldn't be too bad, but we need to figure out a good way to show it to the user. Stay tuned!

clt123456 10y ago

Why does the location page for Charlotte, NC say "ANN ARBOR" in orange letters in the top left? https://www.truejob.com/locations/charlotte https://www.truejob.com/locations/charlotte

eggbrain 10y ago
Oof, good point. Looks like we had hardcoded in a variable for location profiles that we meant to take out in the end. We're pushing up a fix now for this.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jabberwocky923 10y ago

How is this similar to Pandora? In Pandora you specify one song/band you're interested in, and it shows you a list of similar things. Can I say that I work at Microsoft, and have it show me a list of jobs that are super comparable to my current position? This would be great for pivoting out of a stagnant job...not something I need now, but I've been there in the past. I see an incredible amount of voting, highlighting, keywording, etc. Maybe I'm missing it. I'm almost certainly being nitpicky about how you invoke Pandora.

eggbrain 10y ago
Our tagline has always been a bit of a struggle -- we originally said OkCupid for jobs, and then tried (briefly) doing Tinder for Jobs, but none of it felt really "close" to what we were going for. The idea behind using the Pandora analogy was: when you start a new station on Pandora, you input something you want to listen to, and it starts playing music, at which point you can "like" or "dislike" the song to get Pandora to "learn" what type of music you like. In that same way, you can "like" or "dislike" a lot of things about a job posting, and then we can give job recommendations will try to find jobs that fit you based on that. But even outside that, we also allow you to filter through a bunch of other things, so the Pandora analogy breaks down somewhat fast about that time. If people have thoughts as to how we can describe this differently, we're all for it :)
- ben_jones 10y ago
  IMO "We're x for y" is not a catch all. The convention is used to explain what can be a complex mission statement to people usually outside your space and though this is particularly necessary for SV-shenanigans -> regular people, I would recommend playing around with taglines your team can personally find compelling rather then trying to fit that mold. YMMV and always get feed back, but don't artificially constrain yourselves... there are enough natural constrains in the world.
- Dangeranger 10y ago
  When someone invokes the "x for y" metaphore in a description it has always come off as lacking from my perspective. I don't want to think of you as an Uber for someIndustry, tell me in a clear short beautiful statement what value your company creates.

gailees 10y ago

Pricing page is on point

eggbrain 10y ago
Thanks man! We thought it would be funny if it said $0 no matter what you chose, because we were going to be free during beta. Also, if you're back in Michigan sometime, let me buy you a beer.

tcfunk 10y ago

Can't sign up because they think my email address is fake. Edit: They are fixing this, thanks!

eggbrain 10y ago
Ah, I know we keep at least one spam email point open for people to register under (letthemeatspam.com), which is a Mailinator alias. If that still doesn't work, reach out to me at scott ~AT~ truejob.com and I'll get you sorted out.
ibejoeb 10y ago
Also, when the warning appears, the controls are pushed off the screen on a standard laptop display, and it's not scrollable. https://sli.mg/tYSBc0 https://sli.mg/tYSBc0

anaolykarpov 10y ago

Looks interesting. Some possible improvements: * add salary info (where that's available) * offer the possibility to search for remote jobs

eggbrain 10y ago
Remote jobs has been one of the most requested filters from the feedback we've gotten, so we're definitely looking into that. Salaries are harder (since we gather jobs directly from company websites and salaries are rarely listed), but in the future the hope would be to use the salary data we do have to at least suggest what salaries are for comparable jobs. Stay tuned!

vanrysss 10y ago

Puppet Labs in Portland has two company entries, one with 36 jobs, the other with 30.

eggbrain 10y ago
You're right -- we scrape a good deal of startups, but sometimes we get duplicates, and although we try to de-duplicate via a lot of different methods, sometimes they sneak through. This one should be fixed now, but there's probably some other examples people will find as well, and we catch and fix them when we see them.

phaed 10y ago

No jobs in Canada I see :/

michaelmior 10y ago
There are some actually. You just can't search for them directly. A keyword search for Toronto turned up a few. Unfortunately when you try to sign up, there's a message that it's not available in Canada yet. Curious why if the the OP is around.

lgse 10y ago

Just a few things that came up to mind when I first arrived on the website: As a UI/UX perfectionist, the dark theme gives me a terrible vibe. It's just not well executed. I think you guys would be much better off with a white themed site. Look at inspiration from the new Stripe website! I do believe that the splash page could be redesigned much better, it's very dull and it doesn't really have a major call to action when I land. You should make the signing up / searching more in your face. Secondly, the tagline is horrible, not everyone is familiar with Pandora and the concept of the station, etc. Good place to iterate from though! Good luck!

mwkling 10y ago
Thanks for your thoughts, appreciate the feedback! We've gotten lots of mixed reactions on the dark theme (e.g. some people have said it stands out from most current sites with white themes), but it's something we're thinking about. Thanks also for your points on the home page - we're continuing to iterate on that too.
JusticeJuice 10y ago
Agreed, please hire a designer.

jeano 10y ago

Congrats on starting to work on it full-time. If you scrape the jobs from companies, what incentives do the companies have to pay to post the jobs on TrueJob?

enahs-sf 10y ago

Having spent the last few years working on the jobs industry/problem, I wish you the best. Most of the major players function on antiquated business models that have carried over from the newspaper days. Measuring success is still done on a pay-per-click basis, which in the scope of hiring really makes no sense. I hope you can move the needle forward!

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
This is the number one issue people who post jobs on job sites have. Too many useless clicks and completely unqualified applicants such as plumbers applying to programming jobs.
- enahs-sf 10y ago
  I think a cost per application system makes much more sense in terms of measuring ROI and trying to solve for cost per hire. The hard part of creating a matching algorithm for jobs is dealing with people who are looking to change careers. For example the plumber who has been reading up on algorithms and learning C++ in her spare time. Your algorithm would likely classify this person to a plumber career track based on her experience, but struggle to show this person jobs in programming. On the flip side of your marketplace, you would likely screen this persons application from ever going to this employer for just the same reason. The experience on their resume is irrelevant for a programming job. This in my experience is the crux of the job industry problem today.

ebel 10y ago

bug: your job post calculator = 0 all the time.

donretag 10y ago

Cannot right-click or shift-click to open a job in a new tab. I do not want to click the back button when browsing a list. I want to open each item in a new tab.

mwkling 10y ago
That makes sense. We'll look at making an update so that works.