5 ms·

Honestly, it's a little of both.

angelbob 15y ago
I'd kinda suspected. I've spent a lot of stray moments thinking about the whole "recruiting is obviously broken" thing (and congrats for taking it on). And I have yet to come up with a genuinely good solution. I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution with making and answering questions about your workplace. But that really won't work for startups since they don't have a bunch of existing employees to recommend them. I'd also probably have to commit the cardinal sin of trying to charge the job seeker -- not so good. Similarly, there are a lot of places that will certify that you (as an individual employee) aren't a bozo. Those don't scale terribly well, but worse, they also charge the job seeker. You can make money but not do the world much good by charging (probably bad) employees a small fee to apply or charging bad companies a lot for dubious access. But while that's probably where the money is, it does the least good for the world of almost anything you could do in recruiting. Maybe a "schlemiel match-up service" for mediocre-to-bad companies with exactly-equally-bad employees? Don't know. I'll bet you guys wouldn't be passionate about that one ;-) And yet, how do you make enough money and still scale well on matching up the best companies (who don't have to pay as much to hire) and the best candidates (who should never, never be charged anything at all)? It's a hard problem. Glad you're thinking on it.
- nicholasjbs 15y ago
  I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution with making and answering questions about your workplace. Funnily enough, the idea we applied to YC with was "OkCupid for jobs."
  - angelbob 15y ago
    It's a seductive-sounding model, isn't it? I couldn't find a way to make the business model work. It sounds like you've departed from that model pretty completely (not a bad idea, I say now that I've tried it out).
    - nicholasjbs 15y ago
      Yes, it is seductive-sounding. And yes, we switched to a very different idea shortly after YC started. I still think "OkCupid for jobs" has merit, but it has some serious problems, too, not least of which are that it only gets really valuable after lots of companies and people are using it (and we didn't have a good way to bootstrap, at least from the job-seeker end). Another issue is that matching isn't the really hard part of hiring -- the hard part is finding good people.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  One of the lessons of the mortgage crisis is that a rating service whose paying clients benefit from inaccurate ratings will become worthless. I wouldn't trust a bozo filter that takes money from bozos rather than me.

I'd kinda suspected. I've spent a lot of stray moments thinking about the whole "recruiting is obviously broken" thing (and congrats for taking it on). And I have yet to come up with a genuinely good solution. I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution with making and answering questions about your workplace. But that really won't work for startups since they don't have a bunch of existing employees to recommend them. I'd also probably have to commit the cardinal sin of trying to charge the job seeker -- not so good. Similarly, there are a lot of places that will certify that you (as an individual employee) aren't a bozo. Those don't scale terribly well, but worse, they also charge the job seeker. You can make money but not do the world much good by charging (probably bad) employees a small fee to apply or charging bad companies a lot for dubious access. But while that's probably where the money is, it does the least good for the world of almost anything you could do in recruiting. Maybe a "schlemiel match-up service" for mediocre-to-bad companies with exactly-equally-bad employees? Don't know. I'll bet you guys wouldn't be passionate about that one ;-) And yet, how do you make enough money and still scale well on matching up the best companies (who don't have to pay as much to hire) and the best candidates (who should never, never be charged anything at all)? It's a hard problem. Glad you're thinking on it.

nicholasjbs 15y ago
I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution with making and answering questions about your workplace. Funnily enough, the idea we applied to YC with was "OkCupid for jobs."
- angelbob 15y ago
  It's a seductive-sounding model, isn't it? I couldn't find a way to make the business model work. It sounds like you've departed from that model pretty completely (not a bad idea, I say now that I've tried it out).
  - nicholasjbs 15y ago
    Yes, it is seductive-sounding. And yes, we switched to a very different idea shortly after YC started. I still think "OkCupid for jobs" has merit, but it has some serious problems, too, not least of which are that it only gets really valuable after lots of companies and people are using it (and we didn't have a good way to bootstrap, at least from the job-seeker end). Another issue is that matching isn't the really hard part of hiring -- the hard part is finding good people.
prodigal_erik 15y ago
One of the lessons of the mortgage crisis is that a rating service whose paying clients benefit from inaccurate ratings will become worthless. I wouldn't trust a bozo filter that takes money from bozos rather than me.