9 ms·
Show HN: Wife couldn't find a dev job so I built a tool to automate the search
Hey everyone,
My wife graduated in 2022 and she was fortunate enough to land an internship at a small startup which then offered her a permanent position. But ever since then she has been trying to find another job as a frontend dev since the current one doesn't offer any growth opportunities. She started looking in 2023 right when the job market started tanking.
She's been at it for months with no success as there are little to no junior roles available and she spent most of her day refreshing linkedin to check for new opportunities.
At the beginning of this year I had this idea that I could automate the job search part for her by web scraping the search results page in linkedin. This way she could focus on work/portfolio projects and check when the tool finds new job opennings.
Long story short, what started as a small script evolved into a full fledged project since I realised this could help other people too.
The app is an electron desktop app which uses the underlying chromium instance to download the HTML of job sites and sends it to a Supabase edge function for parsing. It doesn't search the entire site, just what jobs are shown in the URL you paste into it. As of now it supports more that 10 sources including linkedin, indeed, dice, glassdoor, flexjobs, bestjobs, we work remotely and constantly looking to add more.
- thecodemonger 3y agoDaymnnn this is amazing. Feels like I need this too too.
- sebestindragos 3y agoreally hope this will help others as well
- tukajo 3y agoSuper cool idea!
- sebestindragos 3y agoThank you
- ValtteriL 3y agoBut did she find a new job using this?
- sebestindragos 3y agonot yet, still little to no new jobs for junior FE devs. But at least she doesn't waste time anymore refreshing linkedin and other job boards
- hnenjoyer_93 3y agoNot open source and you require a subscription to run a scraper from the user's own device? Edit: I see that it's free for now but still
- sebestindragos 3y agoWhat's wrong with that?
- boredemployee 3y agoWe basically don't know who the author is or what are they intentions, no available info anywhere.
- sebestindragos 3y agoFair enough and you see open sourcing the code as the only way? Or any other options?
- boredemployee 3y agothink about the user experience: 1) they go to your website, you have links to social websites like linkedin. 2) user goes to your linkedin page and there's no single person associated with it. conclusion: using "internet best practices" it sounds like a scam to me. so in a forum like HN i would expected you could open source it _or_ tell who you are, what data is being sent and collected, etc.
- sebestindragos 3y agonever thought about it that way. I'm a shy person so don't usually like putting my name out there. Also, personally, I've never cared who's behind a product, if I like it, I'll use it.
- pdimitar 3y ago
- derelicta 3y agoVery nice, but probably very US-centric aswell, so maybe displaying for what job market it applies might be a good thing :) But yeah reminds me in about a year I will also have to apply for a new job, and I'm certainly not looking forward to the whole process.
- sebestindragos 3y agoIt wasn't intended to be US-centric, most supported sites are international. We even have support for Naukri which is India only :D This is the full list of supported sites as of now https://imgur.com/a/hrvek3e https://imgur.com/a/hrvek3e
- derelicta 3y agoOh thats unexpected good surprise then! Is this list public so that I might take a look and see whenever my "needs" are met?
- sebestindragos 3y agoit's displayed in the app, when you try to save a new job search we display the full list of supported sites.
- redeeman 3y agohonest question, but... your wife is a developer, why didnt she make this?
- sebestindragos 3y agoShe’s a junior frontend dev, no backend experience. Also building an electron app has it’s own learning curve, then distributing via app store etc. The app’s UI is actually built by her. I’m a backend dev so my UI skills suck.
- taylodl 3y agoWould have been a great learning experience for her and been great to put on a resume and discuss during an interview. Because you made this for your wife, who's a developer, even if only a junior developer, it has a whiff of mansplaining to it, too.
- lostemptations5 3y agoI guess he could have just thrown her to the sharks instead of supporting her. But you must be right.
- taylodl 3y agoSince when does a great learning experience equate to thrown her to the sharks? If I'm providing you with a great learning experience, then I'm not throwing you to the sharks. He could have mentored her and start transitioning her away from being a junior developer. I suppose that's asking for too much.
- sebestindragos 3y agoDude, you're kinda rude. You try mentoring a junior FE dev into a full stack dev in 2 months and capable to build an app end-2-end with devops and everything. We do work together on the app so she's learning stuff.
- thecleaner 3y agothis is incredible !
- sebestindragos 3y agoHope you find it useful
- dangus 3y agoI think that while this is a decent idea, I would be more interested in tools that already exist that can actually do the physical applications automatically. An example of this is WonsultingAI’s AutoApplyAI product. Not an endorsement, I’ve never used it, just that I know it exists and what it does. If I’m going to pay a monthly fee (once your payment processing is ready ) why am I still having to apply manually when competitors will actually submit the applications for me?
- sebestindragos 3y agoThat's something I also want to build in the future, but for now focussing on the discovery part which I think is the bigger pain.
- x13 3y agoWhy does your app want to access my camera? (Using the Windows build)
- sebestindragos 3y agodefinitely should not, can you give me more details? Is it specifically asking for camera access? Not sure how Windows works, I'm on macos
- andy800 3y agoI built a similar project, for a single industry. Same concept strategically: scraping a bunch of web sites for job listing, aggregating, then providing direct link to the source: https://www.casinojoblist.com/ https://www.casinojoblist.com/
- sebestindragos 3y agopretty cool, but I think the projects differ a bit in the way they work. Firs 2 Apply only scrapes the list of jobs from the URL that a user saves, so don't have to crawl everything from linkdein. What did you use to built your scraper? Curious about the tech stack
- cushpush 3y agoMuch gratitude for your application, I have used it so far to apply to an opportunity I would otherwise not have found. Optimistically this will help me get back into a corporate gig using Clojure.
- sebestindragos 3y agoHey, that's amazing, thank you so much for sharing. Hope everything goes smoothly with the interview from here on.
- pdimitar 3y agoWhich websites do you use for the tool to scan?
- cushpush 3y agoJust LinkedIn searches and Indeed.com searches
- em-bee 3y agois there a way to get the windows version without going through the microsoft store? also any chance for a linux version?
- sebestindragos 3y agoonly via microsoft store for now because that was the simplest way to sign the binary and also get auto-updates for the end user. I'm looking into a linux version, main blocker there is that I can't find an out of the box solution for auto-updates. Hope in 2-3 weeks to figure out something.
- mid-kid 3y agoIf ms store is your solution for windows, then flatpak should be your solution for linux. ...I don't like either :)
- sebestindragos 3y agohaha, yeah can't say I'm a fan of the MS store either, but it works. for linux I think I'll go with AppImage, that seems to be the best option for electron
- sebestindragos 3y agojust added a linux build download option on the website. Debian only for now
- HeyTomesei 3y agoIt's cool, but how can it make money competing with the countless free job search tools? What's your differentiator?
- sebestindragos 3y agoMost other job search tools scrape EVERYTHING from the source sites and do the matching on their end which I don't think works great. Especially the scraping part, one can't simply scrape all jobs that exist on linkedin. So I think this approach will be a lot more accurate in finding jobs. Also have some features planned that should make it stand out, for example de-duplication of jobs posted multiple times in different locations.