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A head's up for Hacker News folks - this is entirely for jobs in Detroit. Some other feedback: - Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, an

A head's up for Hacker News folks - this is entirely for jobs in Detroit. Some other feedback: - Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying "whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form - Building powerful filters won't help most job seekers. Most job seekers keep the net wide because it's hard to predict what the perfect job is going to have as a keyword in it. (I helped build trovix.com, acquired by Monster, and ran dozens of user research sessions) - Your tour is way, way too long. At the end, there's a next button that doesn't do anything - Why can't I upload my resume? I have to cut and paste everything in to your fields? - I have a 13" Macbook Pro, and the site doesn't even come close to fitting in the horizontal width of my browser - green/red/blue buttons are ugly - There are numerous z-index problems around the site - the video, particularly of the mouse moving back and forth over the star ratings, is super distracting + a lot more issues - you guys should spend some time dogfooding this.

eggbrain 12y ago
Hey! Thanks for the feedback. I mentioned that there were only Michigan jobs in the comments below, but it's good to get more coverage on this. > Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying "whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form My salaries I had apparently came from a bad source, meaning they weren't representative of the real job. I want to make sure I'm representing the data correctly, and I don't want job seekers to apply for a job under false pretenses. > Why can't I upload my resume? Pdf and word document resumes are notoriously hard to parse. I originally had a parser for that, but people put their data in many places -- bottom of resume, top of resume, etc. Other sources ended up being easier to parse, so I went with them first. Stay tuned! > ... Doesn't come close to fitting the horizontal width of my browser I'm just one guy! I tried a bunch of devices, but I'm sure there are things I still need to fix. Same thing for z-index -- I'm sure I'll be tweaking for weeks to come. Stay tuned! > video is distracting Sorry about that! I will fix this in the next few days. I have a lot of work ahead of me. > you guys should spend some time dogfooding this I am! Up until a few days ago, only about 10 people had ever seen my site. I'll contine to improve it to make it a better experience.
patronagezero 12y ago
I didn't see this until posting my own comment regarding the same issue. Thank you for pointing this out Tim, I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Not sure why the downvotes. HN seems like the lolly pop guild on steroids with a code to punish anything perceived as negativity, regardless of the usefulness.
jnbiche 12y ago
Dude, it's 1 guy. Not "you guys". How about focus on the positive, too? I think the getting back in-depth analytics for job-seekers on suboptimal aspects of their job-seeking campaign -- particularly those who aren't getting many bites -- is the most powerful and refreshing job site feature I've heard about in years. I hope he makes it big, because I'd like to use that feature. It would be a great way for the constant self-improvers to find the most effective upgrades to make to their job profile ("should I learn OCaml, or go deeper with SQL"?), and could also be a godsend to those folks who are being blocked from the job of their dreams by a single "cringe-worthy" aspect of their profile, but who don't know it and don't have friends who will tell them.
keithwarren 12y ago
This is a little tone deaf and lacking deeper thought. Surface level stuff like x color buttons are ugly is not really helpful. Telling a guy who has been focused on this for months he should spend more time dogfooding - again, not helpful. What really got me though was complaining that you could not upload a resume. Seriously, give it some thought. Parsing non-structured data in an accurate way is a very hard problem and I would venture getting highly accurate results on 80% of resumes would take hundreds or even thousands of man hours to build a system, getting it on 90% or more could be exponentially more difficult. It simply is not worth the investment of time unless you have a breakthrough technique, and if you have that - well that is your startup, not a job site. Feedback is awesome, but not everything that crosses your mind is worth sharing.
- timcederman 12y ago
  I've given it three years of thought, particularly on the resume parser. It's not tone deaf either. Do we want to give everyone who has built something a pat on the back, or do we want to help them build something awesome? Also, you complain about that my feedback is too hard to address, but then simple stuff like non-ugly buttons is unhelpful? re: dogfooding - often folks will build something and then not holistically test it. You don't need a user study to try something from end to end and pretend to be a user. Just a helpful reminder to do the simple stuff to make something great.
  - keithwarren 12y ago
    I don't think patting people on the back is useful but if you really want to help him build something awesome, be specific. Your buttons are ugly because they are too small, the text is hard to read and the back button is actually slightly wider than the next button, even though they are joined together. Back is also red which tends to denote a destructive action that cannot be undone, a yellow might be better. ^ that is feedback. Saying your buttons are ugly is not helpful feedback.
- tibbetts 12y ago
  It's all the right stuff to be thinking about. Pull from linkedin or something if you can't extract from a resume. Or hire some low wage work at home english majors to manually extract the resume data and offer people a "build my profile for me" option where they just send a resume. And it's easy to spend a lot of time on dogfooding. If people don't want free advice, they wouldn't need to post here.

eggbrain 12y ago

Hey! Thanks for the feedback. I mentioned that there were only Michigan jobs in the comments below, but it's good to get more coverage on this. > Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying "whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form My salaries I had apparently came from a bad source, meaning they weren't representative of the real job. I want to make sure I'm representing the data correctly, and I don't want job seekers to apply for a job under false pretenses. > Why can't I upload my resume? Pdf and word document resumes are notoriously hard to parse. I originally had a parser for that, but people put their data in many places -- bottom of resume, top of resume, etc. Other sources ended up being easier to parse, so I went with them first. Stay tuned! > ... Doesn't come close to fitting the horizontal width of my browser I'm just one guy! I tried a bunch of devices, but I'm sure there are things I still need to fix. Same thing for z-index -- I'm sure I'll be tweaking for weeks to come. Stay tuned! > video is distracting Sorry about that! I will fix this in the next few days. I have a lot of work ahead of me. > you guys should spend some time dogfooding this I am! Up until a few days ago, only about 10 people had ever seen my site. I'll contine to improve it to make it a better experience.

patronagezero 12y ago

I didn't see this until posting my own comment regarding the same issue. Thank you for pointing this out Tim, I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Not sure why the downvotes. HN seems like the lolly pop guild on steroids with a code to punish anything perceived as negativity, regardless of the usefulness.

jnbiche 12y ago

Dude, it's 1 guy. Not "you guys". How about focus on the positive, too? I think the getting back in-depth analytics for job-seekers on suboptimal aspects of their job-seeking campaign -- particularly those who aren't getting many bites -- is the most powerful and refreshing job site feature I've heard about in years. I hope he makes it big, because I'd like to use that feature. It would be a great way for the constant self-improvers to find the most effective upgrades to make to their job profile ("should I learn OCaml, or go deeper with SQL"?), and could also be a godsend to those folks who are being blocked from the job of their dreams by a single "cringe-worthy" aspect of their profile, but who don't know it and don't have friends who will tell them.

keithwarren 12y ago

This is a little tone deaf and lacking deeper thought. Surface level stuff like x color buttons are ugly is not really helpful. Telling a guy who has been focused on this for months he should spend more time dogfooding - again, not helpful. What really got me though was complaining that you could not upload a resume. Seriously, give it some thought. Parsing non-structured data in an accurate way is a very hard problem and I would venture getting highly accurate results on 80% of resumes would take hundreds or even thousands of man hours to build a system, getting it on 90% or more could be exponentially more difficult. It simply is not worth the investment of time unless you have a breakthrough technique, and if you have that - well that is your startup, not a job site. Feedback is awesome, but not everything that crosses your mind is worth sharing.

timcederman 12y ago
I've given it three years of thought, particularly on the resume parser. It's not tone deaf either. Do we want to give everyone who has built something a pat on the back, or do we want to help them build something awesome? Also, you complain about that my feedback is too hard to address, but then simple stuff like non-ugly buttons is unhelpful? re: dogfooding - often folks will build something and then not holistically test it. You don't need a user study to try something from end to end and pretend to be a user. Just a helpful reminder to do the simple stuff to make something great.
- keithwarren 12y ago
  I don't think patting people on the back is useful but if you really want to help him build something awesome, be specific. Your buttons are ugly because they are too small, the text is hard to read and the back button is actually slightly wider than the next button, even though they are joined together. Back is also red which tends to denote a destructive action that cannot be undone, a yellow might be better. ^ that is feedback. Saying your buttons are ugly is not helpful feedback.
tibbetts 12y ago
It's all the right stuff to be thinking about. Pull from linkedin or something if you can't extract from a resume. Or hire some low wage work at home english majors to manually extract the resume data and offer people a "build my profile for me" option where they just send a resume. And it's easy to spend a lot of time on dogfooding. If people don't want free advice, they wouldn't need to post here.