Backward Job Board
What do you think about an inverted job board? People list themselves with what job they are looking for and what their qualifications are. Then businesses/recruiters can find job seekers in one place. Businesses could benefit from having a shorter time to look for people and job seekers would benefit by finding a job quicker.
Thoughts?
@VickiLanger it's indeed an interesting angle.
How would you manage demand and supply size differently? And what's your mechanism to ensure the job seeker's quality?
That's an awesome question. I'm not sure I have an answer. Hired and Vettery are doing similar things and I haven't really seen what they're doing to ensure quality. I know they have a "profile review" after a job seeker submits their profile, but I'm not sure what that consists of.
On the other hand, I wonder what current job boards do to ensure the quality of employee seekers.
Great idea Vicki, I wish you all the best.
There is a regular HN thread about this for example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419534 and I think https://www.toptal.com/ is in this space too. So based on that there are people looking to do it this way.
I am involved in recruitment and my company. We probably wouldn't want to wade through a lot of candidates if they haven't specifically applied though. So I hope the platform would help with this to some extent.
Thanks so much for the feedback. Do you get enough candidates as quickly as you’d like? My goal is to make the process quicker for both the business and the job seeker. I’m wondering if a good filtering system would make it so it isn’t like you’d have to wade through the pool. I’m also thinking it would minimize the time spent on all the people who are applying and are totally not qualified.
Hired.com and vettery.com are also in this space.
@VickiLanger — Based on @mcapodici's reply, sounds like there might be a market need for this for senior developers, not for all developers, and that would be a point of differentiation for you. Similar to how theladders.com differentiates.
As a senior developer and sometime startup entrepreneur, I would consider signing up for senior-dev-only site but would ignore a site that was for all devs.
We get enough graduates and junior developers, but not enough senior developers.
That problem is in our (non-US) country/city and others may have different supply/demand of talent. But reading on HN it sounds like people do find getting senior devs hard around the world (?).
The biggest pain point for us is getting quality senior developers to even apply, so if this platform helps with that it would be great and although I don't make the decisions about platforms ... I reckon we'd pay for that! But if it doesn't get us more senior applications, then for us it would be no more useful than any other job board we are using.
The wading aspect is annoying but not a big pain point really, just time consuming. I'd rather be wading through senior CVs than have none!
Hmm.. my experience with recruiters is they’re “feature driven, not benefit driven”.
Speaking from 20+ yrs of SDLC activity, from WebObjects dev to CTO and a lot of silly job titles in between...
Sorry, but I think the entire process is broken and most(?) Australian recruiters, internal and external, are a huge part of the problem. They typically look for keywords and # years doing XYZ and a few “essential” or “must have:” labels.
Most(?) recruiters cannot, or are not willing to read between the lines.
After ~10 years of hands on dev/test/deploy most people can generally pick up anything new( within reason) and be reasonably productive in a short time. Broad Experience makes a big difference, IMO.
If you follow the HR and L&D folk at all you’ll see them all talking incessantly about the ”future of work” and how everyone will have to reskill due to tech and automation, AI etc.
Recruiters, middle managers and other gatekeepers fear hiring the wrong person, because it’s so costly, so it looks like there is a skill shortage.
In fact the skill shortage sits firmly with the gatekeepers inability to see past the labels and categories ( “oh you’re a dev” or “ you’re a CTO, you can’t possibly learn ABC” ) Australian businesses love so much.
Many business say they invest in their people, training and professional development - I call bullshit on this. If they actually did provide PD they could hire a generalist with a history of continuous learning and train them for the desired role.
Thing is, they don’t do either.
Personally, I’m moving my path toward cybersec. I’m bored with most of the other aspects of the SDLC and do not intend to write code for other people anymore. This is incredibly difficult and frustrating due to the rampant gatekeepers standing in the way at every turn. Even trying to find an entry level role is torturous. Happily, you don’t need permission to learn to hack, reverse engineer and break shit... carving a path on your own terms is the best way forward in this backward country.
Please, by all means bring-on a change to how employers find new hires. The current process is a steaming pile of dysfunctional shit. 😐
No offence intended. /rant
Hired.com does exactly that for developers.
That they do. Thanks! 😊
I like the idea. Hired seems similar but more enterprise-focused. I have often wanted to just see a list of freelancers (ideally other Indie Hacker types) that are available now and be able to filter by certain criteria.
I tried out honeypot.io which is an inverted job board like your idea. So far, I have only received job offers from people who didn't read or disregarded my location preferences and all of them were way below the minimum salary that I would accept, which was another field in their form. So the issue seems to be that there's no incentive for the job-posting companies to do any filtering. They just blast their offer to everyone with the right keywords.
In general, my impression is that the good people where you'd reach out and make them a custom offer are already very visible to companies trying to hire highly skilled employees. And for the jobs where you don't care that much, there is little advantage on either side in an inverted job board.