3 ms·

Cancer on top of cancer. Please someone better this platform and end it.

bdw5204 2y ago
I think you'd either need a better job market or a platform appealing to an audience that isn't on LinkedIn to better it and end it. Right now, you aren't moving the white collar recruiters because LinkedIn caters to them so people who want jobs aren't going to your alternative. Maybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf.
- matrix87 2y ago
  > Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf. Probably won't work because of classism
HenryBemis 2y ago
Now that this is the second comment is added to your comment, wait for another 5-7 minutes, then edit your initial comment adding something short and witty about life, the universe, and everything, and see the comments and karma exploding!!! :)
rachofsunshine 2y ago
Speaking as someone who worked on doing exactly that for a while [1]: as long as all the jobs are there and all the job seekers are there, it's very hard to dislodge. Empirically, users want "all the jobs" more than they want UI improvements or lack of engagement-bait posts. One of the very first things I wrote down for my current company was "build a service, not a product", where "product" here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
- mock-possum 2y ago
  With the current hiring landscape in web dev I’m not even sure all the jobs are there. :/
- mgkimsal 2y ago
  Some users want 'all the jobs'. Many other users would prefer access to job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment, perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers, etc. Many job posters don't like dealing with it either, but "that's where all the job seekers are!". No, they're really not. It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party.
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    ...is all very easy to say, but empirically didn't work. Or at least, our specific attempt at it didn't. One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of words long, and it doesn't even cover all the big points of how complicated actually trying to build something better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked on the problem for years, in the interest of being only a twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of the complexity of working on a problem in its full complexity. ---- > job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is. Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or direct apps on your company website (which tend to be higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry bye now". If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if not actioned on in a short period of time and send a message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up? ---- > perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually (limiting the number of messages they could send candidates). In practice, this didn't make the average message significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of their precious message credits. They stopped being willing to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even though in the vast majority of cases they weren't exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior is frequently irrational or uninformed!). Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect. That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the first place). That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational, which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a result. And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since those are the ones that don't get matched through default channels). And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things - when you know they're problems. But those solutions create problems of their own, often in unexpected ways. ---- > It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party. This is true, but what's implicit in your argument here is the claim that "being a marketplace optimized for good outcomes" is in fact the primary criterion for being a successful platform. I'm not saying LinkedIn is good for job searching. It isn't. I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and that building a better solution is harder than it seems. I don't mean to say it can't be done, or even that people shouldn't try. I'm trying again (just not with a platform), so obviously I think there is some degree of solution to be had here. I just think that this kind of comment betrays a kind of "one simple trick" attitude that just is not engaging with the complexity of the problem or with the fact that incentive structures often do not point to "make a thing that doesn't suck".
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
LinkedIn grew because of massive spam. They bought spammers from India. That phase of the internet has gone so I do not think this is possible anymore.
volkk 2y ago
actually doing some contract work for a competitor that is tackling job searching/candidate searching from a referral/recruiting perspective and i am very optimistic. i think if the execution goes well, it's going to be huge. they've raised a fairly sizeable seed round. somebody needs to kill linkedin--it's awful.

I think you'd either need a better job market or a platform appealing to an audience that isn't on LinkedIn to better it and end it. Right now, you aren't moving the white collar recruiters because LinkedIn caters to them so people who want jobs aren't going to your alternative. Maybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf.

matrix87 2y ago
> Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf. Probably won't work because of classism

HenryBemis 2y ago

Now that this is the second comment is added to your comment, wait for another 5-7 minutes, then edit your initial comment adding something short and witty about life, the universe, and everything, and see the comments and karma exploding!!! :)

rachofsunshine 2y ago

Speaking as someone who worked on doing exactly that for a while [1]: as long as all the jobs are there and all the job seekers are there, it's very hard to dislodge. Empirically, users want "all the jobs" more than they want UI improvements or lack of engagement-bait posts. One of the very first things I wrote down for my current company was "build a service, not a product", where "product" here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774

mock-possum 2y ago
With the current hiring landscape in web dev I’m not even sure all the jobs are there. :/
mgkimsal 2y ago
Some users want 'all the jobs'. Many other users would prefer access to job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment, perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers, etc. Many job posters don't like dealing with it either, but "that's where all the job seekers are!". No, they're really not. It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  ...is all very easy to say, but empirically didn't work. Or at least, our specific attempt at it didn't. One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of words long, and it doesn't even cover all the big points of how complicated actually trying to build something better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked on the problem for years, in the interest of being only a twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of the complexity of working on a problem in its full complexity. ---- > job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is. Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or direct apps on your company website (which tend to be higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry bye now". If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if not actioned on in a short period of time and send a message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up? ---- > perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually (limiting the number of messages they could send candidates). In practice, this didn't make the average message significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of their precious message credits. They stopped being willing to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even though in the vast majority of cases they weren't exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior is frequently irrational or uninformed!). Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect. That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the first place). That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational, which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a result. And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since those are the ones that don't get matched through default channels). And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things - when you know they're problems. But those solutions create problems of their own, often in unexpected ways. ---- > It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party. This is true, but what's implicit in your argument here is the claim that "being a marketplace optimized for good outcomes" is in fact the primary criterion for being a successful platform. I'm not saying LinkedIn is good for job searching. It isn't. I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and that building a better solution is harder than it seems. I don't mean to say it can't be done, or even that people shouldn't try. I'm trying again (just not with a platform), so obviously I think there is some degree of solution to be had here. I just think that this kind of comment betrays a kind of "one simple trick" attitude that just is not engaging with the complexity of the problem or with the fact that incentive structures often do not point to "make a thing that doesn't suck".

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

LinkedIn grew because of massive spam. They bought spammers from India. That phase of the internet has gone so I do not think this is possible anymore.

volkk 2y ago

actually doing some contract work for a competitor that is tackling job searching/candidate searching from a referral/recruiting perspective and i am very optimistic. i think if the execution goes well, it's going to be huge. they've raised a fairly sizeable seed round. somebody needs to kill linkedin--it's awful.