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Show HN: Get a better job offer, anonymously - my weekend hack
- playhard 15y agotwitter bootstrap?
- vyrotek 15y agoI don't know how you did it, but I'm pretty sure you were spying on me. I was literally talking to a friend about this exact idea this weekend. We're trying to hire some developers and wondered if anything like this existed since its becoming very difficult to poach. I almost built the same thing this weekend. Edit - I'm curious. Have you thought about how you will tackle the potential spam problem? Recruiters are going to go crazy over this. We tossed around a few ideas such as charging to contact the individual and making it more expensive based on things the jobseeker could do. Those things might be paying to have JobPoacher contact referrals, coding tests, etc. Good luck with everything.
- ryanhuff 15y agoAn effective method of filtering out recruiters would be to require a screening (paid for by the company). A few simple checks would cut out 95% of the problem.
- v33ra 15y agoFeature request: What happens when there are hundreds of listings? Would people be reading all those listings line by line? A search box with filters for each input data you are collecting would be a nice fit.
- ferrofluid 15y agoI can already see it cluttering up. Thanks, I'll add that shortly!
- powrtoch 15y agoI was going to suggest this, as well as a way to browse by category. Employers probably don't want to look for "iOS developer" and "iOS programmer" and "iOS engineer", so some kind of automatic way to combine these seems useful. Also, filtering by salary. Overall though, love the idea.
- ednc 15y agonice. Where are you getting the recruiting traffic from?
- joedev 15y agoIf a hiring company were look at this they'll naturally see the "I currently make" amount and consider that market rate. After all, it matters not what people want to make, but instead by the amount for which people have demonstrated that they are willing to work.
- cheald 15y agoIt's worth noting that something like this will naturally self-select people who feel they're underpaid, so you're likely seeing the lower edge of "market rate" here.
- gte910h 15y agoWhy would people disclose the current salary they have?
- thematt 15y agoI agree, I've never understood why that data point is relevant to the job I'm applying/being-recruited for.
- jpablo 15y agoBecause they want to offer just enough for the money to be attractive to you, but no more.
- raimondious 15y agoBut that only explains it from the poacher's perspective. The question still remains, why would the poachee want to state their current salary?
- mjwalshe 15y agoThey don't know how to negotiate
- LukeRB 15y agoI think it's even more interesting when the first number is more than the second, as it is in the listing below: "I'm a Mobile Product Support Specialist, and I currently make $90,000 in Mountain View, CA. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Community Manager, Product Quality Analyst, Junior UX/Interaction Designer that pay at least $65,000 in San Francisco, CA."
- felideon 15y agoI assumed it is by people who want to jump-start a new career path, eg: from developer to designer, or want to move to a different city.
- ilcavero 15y agohow are you going to avoid head hunters' spam, either as fake candidates to discover new clients or with fake offers for CV mining?
- unreal37 15y agoI don't think this is a huge problem. The value to an employee is in the $10,000s per year, and so its worth it to go through a few spam emails to find the good offers. The value to companies is also $10,000s in saved recruiter fees. So on both sides, to go through 50 spam emails to find one good opportunity is worth it. And the penalty for being such a spammer is that clients/employees won't want to work with you, and potentially expose you on twitter as being someone to avoid. The risks are high to spam this.
- noobface 15y agoAfter posting and reading all the other listings. I've realized I'm one of the few hardware guys on HN. Any other hardware/low-level guys out there?
- mietek 15y agoIf you count C as low-level, here I am. Now what?
- noobface 15y agoWe revolt against the software majority. Threaten to cut off their sockets.
- coffee_bender 15y agoI primarily do FPGA design and embedded software. I agree we are definitely under represented on HN though.
- BudVVeezer 15y agoI do compilers, and I'm usually surprised by how many people are around who "know a thing or two", so maybe it's more field-relative?
- joezydeco 15y agoYup. Embedded systems board bring-up, device drivers, and embedded GUI/HMI applications.
- phamilton 15y agoI usually describe myself as a Full Stack Programmer, or Generalist. I'm as comfortable doing embedded C as I am Ruby.
- zeratul 15y agoMaybe instead of "and I currently make ___" you should have "and I have ___ years experience in ____". Or at least have both.
- randomdata 15y agoPay is probably a better indicator though. People can have years of experience and still not be good at the job, but pay highlights what kind of value they are generating. Someone who is not good at the job is unlikely to be in the position to earn top dollar. There will be outliers. Like the talented person who is willing to work for peanuts just because the job is amazing. But that is why there is an infinite number of ways to find a job.
- ajuc 15y agoWell, in my city average pay for programmers is 12 000 $. I know of people earning 35 000 $, but that's the upper limit. So if I wanted to use this site I would be considered bad programmer.
- randomdata 15y agoI'm not sure that is true. The location is noted, so it is still calculable where you stand. I don't think there is anyone who thinks $100K in the Bay Area is the same as $100K in India. But if you're making $8,000 in your city, that raises some questions.
- cheald 15y agoI like this, because it's difficult to get honest numbers about salary for a given position/location. Entirely apart from the "job seeking" part of the equation, the raw data is very interesting to me. There will be a fake/fudge factor to account for, but it's so hard to get people to talk about their salaries honestly that it's very interesting to see some raw data there.
- rfrey 15y agoWow, I can't believe how quickly this site activated my inner voyeur. I'm a CTO (Rails), and I currently make $20,000 in San Francisco. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Rails Engineer that pay at least $100,000 in The Bay Area.
- DevX101 15y agoI'm assuming the $20k he/she works at a early stage startup. There are CTOs that are working for $0 and all equity.
- rpledge 15y agoInteresting idea. I'd like to see some stats when you get enough data, stuff like number of responses, number of people who found a job through the service, etc....
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoIt really needs a small "experience" section. It should be small, so a recruiter can still scan; but I really want to be able to differentiate at least between junior and senior people. I also would like to have an "interest". I don't want to contact somebody wanting to do games for my web startup. That just wastes both our time.
- unreal37 15y agoThats what a resume is for.
- ohashi 15y agoIt struck me as odd that I would want to hire people this way. As far as I can tell everyone is just asking for more money (big surprise, I know) but it says nothing about what they want to do, are interested in, etc. Do I just blindly reach out to a bunch of people and hope they match my needs?
- its_so_on 15y ago>Do I just blindly reach out to a bunch of people and hope they match my needs? welcome to recruiting! :) (except that a recruiter is totally unqualified to assess who can actually match their client's needs - even with their CV in front of them and the chance to talk with them by phone or in person) That's why recruiters don't care about clients' "needs". They care about clients' "requirements"
- samstave 15y ago>"except that a recruiter is totally unqualified to assess who can actually match their client's needs" "How would you rate your ability to harvest Karma from a site such as Hackernews, on a scale of 1 to 5?" "eh, 3?" "and reddit?" "um, 5"
- colinloretz 15y agoRight, this only takes hiring into account based solely on the external motivation of money. Money only works as a motivator so long as basic (and intermediate) needs are met. This kind of behavior is how I perceive a lot of hiring takes place in SV now, with talent moving to the highest bidder without much thought of culture and other needs.
- mahyarm 15y agoWhen employers all start offering the same wages because you've hit The Limit(tm), you start becoming very interested in culture, work/life balance, location, side perks, what your working on and probability of success.
- unreal37 15y ago
- damon_c 15y agoI got contacted by a recruiter within 20 minutes of posting. Suddenly, I'm thinking that it IS kind of strange that if I reply to their email, I will be beginning a relationship with someone who already knows my approximate salary. On the plus side, they contacted me knowing that information full well. No nonsense with lowballing. Maybe it's a great starting point!
- fvryan 15y agolowballers will unlikely be deterred.
- joshaidan 15y agoI like the idea. A nice start to something I'm sure will grow into something pretty neat.
- elliottcarlson 15y agoThe most important feature is listing by locality IMHO. Without being able to filter out candidates to where I am, it would be easy to miss them, especially when having to search for variations (NY, New York, Manhattan). I see in a comment you will be adding a search field which would help with the above; however the variations could still be an issue. A simple helper could be a predictable typing field for the location that allows people to select already existing locations so that there is consistency? Good job otherwise!
- functionform 15y agoWhoa, this is a scary good idea. Wondering if I should post tonight. I feel dirty!
- danberger 15y agoOne of the unintended uses for this tool is for founders to figure out what the competitive market salary is for positions they're trying to fill.
- elliottcarlson 15y agoSince you don't know the persons background and skill level you still can't accurately determine this - even with the guess that someone has grown over time in compensation because of skill, there are plenty of people who have managed to slip through the cracks or have done enough job hopping to allow them to achieve a higher salary without actually have the knowledge to back it up.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- zekel 15y agoSuggestions: -Filter by job, location, salary (as suggested by others) -RSS -A "find other poachees" like this one button. (Could use ranges with the filter feature to make it even more convenient.)
- bluedevil2k 15y agoThis is really awesome, so awesome I think that you should think about how to monetize it and make some serious money. (I know that's seemingly against the "hacker ethos", but it's not often that you think of million-dollar ideas).
- r00k 15y agoIf I were them, I'd be scrambling to make recruiters pay $xx-$xxx to contact people through the site.
- jamiequint 15y agoYou should make it so recruiters pay when they get a response. The could only message candidates through the site initially (not via email) and their email would also be anonymized. If the candidate replied then the recruiter could be charged $XXX per reply.
- johnbender 15y agoAny chance we could see a freelance/contract version of the form? About the only difference would be $/hr support.
- dan_yall 15y agoI hope this results in some "Piña Colada Song" situations where employers end up contacting their own employees.
- araneae 15y agoI wish it allowed you enter an hourly wage, since that's what I make. I could annualize it but I don't actually work full time so that wouldn't be accurate.
- mtrimpe 15y agoAnd I wish they would add the ability to specify rates in euro's.
- fam 15y agoThe footer would better if centered or placed inside the 940 grid (rather than stick to the left with 0 margin) - IMO.
- illumin8 15y agoI hope you can keep out the script kiddies - I just saw one of these: I'm a <script>alert('lulz')</script>, and I currently make $40,000 in <script>alert('lulz')</script>. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a <script>alert('lulz')</script> that pay at least $120,000 in <script>alert('lulz')</script>.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jownz 15y agoI'm a Pet Detective, and I currently make $60,000 in Miami. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Sr. Pet Detective that pay at least $60,000 in The Bay Area. This made my day.
- jonnathanson 15y agoThe "Poachees" listings should be searchable and sortable if they're to be of real value to would-be recruiters or hiring managers.
- rch 15y agoThis is nice, but could you add an option to indicate that I only want to deal technically proficient people? In fact, I would pay a few bucks up-front if you could somehow assure that I would only be put in contact with technical people that actually work for the company doing the hiring (no recruiters at all). And I'd pay to validate that I satisfy that requirement from the hiring side as well.
- troygoode 15y agoGreat idea!
- dps 15y agoDo you have plans for how to get rid of spam?
- jason_shah 15y agoCool idea. Small UI suggestions (realizing this was just a hack) - 1. Add some margin-left to the copyright notice at the bottom 2. Autocomplete on the cities (and other fields, like Occupation) will help standardize your dataset for search and sort later
- PaulAnunda 15y agoop, i just reserved @jobposter for you on twitter. email me and i'll transfer ownership to you.
- sakopov 15y agoIt's an interesting idea, but pretty much unusable at this point. Definitely needs filtering, searching and a better UI with clean separation of submissions (think StackOverflow).
- benvanderbeek 15y agoError when trying to delete: We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.
- sown 15y agoMinor bug report: I tried to fill it out with the 'links' browser. I didn't see the captcha so I did not get a confirmation email but the app did seem to retain my email address so I cannot delete the old one to resubmit when I use a GUI browser. As an aside, I really like this because of how people don't talk about how much they make. When I see someone makes $164000 as a pen tester in Mountain View and I make a smaller amount, I feel like I could be working on interesting problems and make a bit more coin. oh, well. :( Minor suggestion: I wonder how much other people like my ad? Perhaps that's part of the mystery. That info, perhaps shouldn't be available to poachees but only poachers? I dunno.
- joezydeco 15y agoSame problem happened to me. I'm locked out, so I guess I'll make a mailinator address and try again.
- samstave 15y agoI find it odd that people would put such a wide discrepency between current and desired salary. If you are making 30K, as a webdeveloper and are seeking 60K as a web developer, I dont see why anyone would read this and think "Hey, here's a guy who wants double what he is making now, lets go get him" Like the manager in UAE who states 130K current and 180K desired. 50K is a lot, even though its a smaller % than the 100% - Why do these people feel that if they are worth twice what they are making now, that advertising via this site is a good idea. Maybe I'm confused? Like this one: "I'm a Generalist, and I currently make $120,000 in San Francisco. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Generalist that pay at least $140,000 in San Francisco." This tells me absolutely nothing.
- samstave 15y agoThis one is funny though: "I'm a Very Unhappy Facebook User, and I currently make $10,001 in creating Facebook's content. I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Happy Facebook User that pay at least $10,002 in creating awesome content."
- rg81 15y agoThe recruiter that got back to me was more direct and less spammy than other random recruiting emails I get from those who see my profile on linkedin etc. I'm wondering if this is an accident or a change in the way the recruiter views these postings.
- benharrison 15y agoI think a great feature for this would be a map to visualize the results in your area.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]