7
8 Comments

Destroy My Hopes and Dreams

I've been looking for a new job recently. I applied on LinkedIn jobs, and various job boards. It is a very slow and depressing process. Typically, it seems like a random game of telephone. Job seekers apply to positions based on job descriptions and are screened by a recruiter or HR rep. The applicant may not be able to judge if they are qualified based on the job description. The applicant might not find a suitable job position. The job description may not reflect the actual opportunities available at the company. The initial screening might not be informed by the requirements of the position.

The idea I have is to build a tool that allows people to apply to a company in a similar way to students apply to college and grad school. First, a candidate periodically sends an application to the company. Then internally, the applications can be routed to different groups (for example frontend devs, backend, ML, finance, business dev) for review and scoring. Finally, when a hiring manager has a need, they can browse candidates who are in the system.

Would this work in practice? Feedback and comments much appreciated 🙏

What do you think?
  1. I like this idea, you should build it
  2. I've used/heard something similar
  3. What a stupid idea!
Vote
  1. 1

    Problem #1: most people are nice, and the way this survey is set up encourages people to tell you it's a good idea.

    Problem #2: Even if the survey was not set up this way, this will still give you poor data to validate your idea because you're not ensuring you are getting valuable data from your target market.

    I highly recommend this book and this book to help validate your idea.

    Identify your target market and talk to them. And don't just ask them if it's a good idea, because most people are nice and will say yes.

    Really try to understand their unique problems and challenges, and ask them how much they spend on a a solution to those problems/how much they would pay to make those problems go away. If you have people who are willing to pay, you are on to something.

    And good luck! Product validation is one of the hardest parts of launching a product, but the work you put in now saves a lot of migraines down the line!

  2. 1

    Love the idea, though find it difficult to adopt by company mean why they do so its seems like long process for them.

  3. 1

    Hmmmm. Isn't that exactly what a recruiting firm does? Candidates are screened by a recruiter, then entered into a database, and if a company has a need, the company contacts the recruiting firm and is supplied with suitable candidates. As a business owner, why should I bring this work into my company? How does this help my company?

  4. 1

    Here's a framework on how to find out

    1. if you're working go to HR and people who are hiring and ask them how they do it now

    2. If not make as many connections on linkedin, HRs love connecting so does managers, make a 100 - 1000 and start asking how they work right now and ask your idea as a question why don't they do your system

    you'll get your answer.

    1. 2

      exactly this.

      also, in theory, this sounds good, but I'll give you my experience hiring people for open positions.

      1. we post a very detailed job description on LinkedIn, and some other job boards.
      2. on day 1 we receive about 100-150 applications.
      3. on day 2-5 we receive roughly 200 applications per day.
      4. our HR department weeds out the bottom 90% of applications.
      5. our HR department do an initial phone screening with the top 10% of applicants.
      6. the respective hiring managers receive the top 2-3 applicants from the batch to do a follow up phone interview.
      7. after 3-5 applicants have been identified, they are all called in for in-person interviews or video call interviews.
      8. the preferred applicant by the hiring manager is hired.

      and now the most important part in my opinion: all these steps have to be completed within 5-7 days tops! most high caliber candidates (which we would like to hire, do not wait for weeks on end). they exit their job hunt pretty quickly. In other words, I have never ever been able to either find a good candidate from a database or been able to hire an amazing candidate from a stack of applicants older than 8-9 days.

      1. 1

        From what @dakl.

        It would be awesome if you can work on something which makes the process faster.

        Build a system which is faster than the existing one and to solve that you need to understand the current system in-depth. I suggest talking to as many HR as possible and see the process how they do it.

        Many current systems are bad but they solve the problem to some extent that's the reason people are using it. Simple adding a app and tech wouldn't help anybody.

        Many problems need a ground up solutions and paths not a tech alternative.

        1. 1

          In my opinion, this process is pretty fast. the only bottlenecks I see here, are actually manual human labour.

          • HR needing to set up phone calls
          • HR needing to talk to the candidates to filter the bottom 90% out
          • HR needing to set up follow-up interviews with candidates and hiring managers
          • hiring managers needing to do multiple in-depth interviews to find the right candidate

          I agree, that something must be done as this system is not very efficient as is.

          If something like a magic "thing" would exist, where HR needs to spend less time weeding our candidates, while retaining good candidate quality and hiring managers having full transparency in the process, reducing their interview time to maybe only the top 0.1% of the candidates (leaving them with the absolute top 2-3 people), now that would be amazing and something every HR department would love to buy.

          1. 1

            HR needing to talk to the candidates to filter the bottom 90% out

            If you can solve this one problem since remaining, seems to be addressed or going to involve other parties I think you can make the job of HR much easier.

            And that is value generation.

  5. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 15 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments