[tessro]

>> continuously trolling the depressing opportunities on Monster/NYU Careernet/Craigslist.

Is this system broken? Is there an opportunity for improvement in the way people find jobs, or is the best way to find good work going to increasingly be by performing memorable stunts to get eyeballs from prospective employers? I'm curious, especially in light of the relative lack of successful startups in the area.

[chime]

The system is indeed broken. Finding a job is a horrible experience for most people. If you know enough people in your selected field, it is usually not that bad. However, if you want to change careers, move to a new area, or are generally not interested in networking for networking's sake, finding a job is a soul-sucking misadventure.

Monster/CareerBuilder sites are absolute crap, especially for IT-related jobs. Indeed, Dice, and Jobing aren't that great either. The Web 2.0 job-hunt startups are just mashups of existing job sites so while the interface is cool, the content is no better. Most of the jobs have no mention of salary, benefits, or the social/managerial environment. Recruiters / headhunters are only interested in you if you are a potential fit for a specific job. The moment that job gets filled, you're back to square one.

I've actually been more on the other side of the job hunt i.e. finding people to hire. The problem there is that the good/quality coders are just impossible to find. Most of the resumes I come across are people who taught themselves Active Directory and are applying for ERP-coding jobs. I've looked at "superstar" job hunt sites like jobs.joel and jobs.37signals but there's barely any traction in my area (Tampa, Florida).

Surprisingly, Craigslist has been the best choice for me as a former applicant and as someone looking to hire. Craigslist is very blunt, direct, and accessible. The last part is the key here. You don't have to sign up for 10 services to place a job ad on Craigslist. As a result, I've found many more job offers on Craigslist that end up in an interview than other sites. I know with near certainty that someone is actually reading my email when I reply to a Craigslist post. I feel my email ends up in a large junk folder when I apply on other sites. Similarly, whenever I've posted an ad on Craigslist for a job, I've received direct emails from candidates and some of them have been pretty good.

I don't know how this system could be fixed. All I know is that there are a lot of good candidates and good jobs and it's not easy for them to find each other.

[jonknee]

Hey, I'm in Tampa. Maybe HN should have a better jobs section.

[ytinas]

I haven't found it so bad and I'm not great at networking. I just use consulting agencies, that's the only way I've ever had any luck. It's easier to get into a company via someone who knows people there, than just some resume in an email.

The trick is just to remember these guys are extremely busy. If it's more than a week old it isn't relevant anymore, so get a contact within lots of different agencies and contact them on a regular cycle (once a month is probably ok).

[mattm]

"I've actually been more on the other side of the job hunt i.e. finding people to hire. The problem there is that the good/quality coders are just impossible to find."

What can I do to stand out as a quality coder when I'm applying? I'm probably not the best on selling myself properly but I think I'm a good coder (and have had very satisfied clients/employers).

[chime]

Problem isn't what makes you stand out. Problem is where are you? How do I even find you? How do you find me? There are over 10k jobs on Monster for people with experience in LAMP in my area. Are you really going to apply to all of them?

[pw0ncakes]

The professions, and everything about them, are designed for people who don't have to work to earn a living, and who work out of service to society. Professional culture is a result of this. That's why rich kids do better in the professional environment. It's not anyone favors them because of their families. It's because they aren't ruined if unemployed for a while, so they don't fear the boss, get more respect, and handle a professional environment better.

The difference, circa 2010, is that nearly everyone has to work to earn a living. So the professional norms are out of date for most people.

This should shine some light on why interview processes are the way they are. For people who are working for love and leisure, a 2-month process from application to decision, with 2 or 3 rounds of interviews that require time off work, isn't unreasonable. For people who either (1) are unemployed and have a ticking clock, or (2) are employed but will be in trouble if they lose their jobs (which is likely if they're caught interviewing, in today's environment).

As for why it's so difficult to find good candidates, the interview process is a big part of it. Good candidates are only willing to go through with it for something approaching a dream job (for a hacker, Google Research; for a quant, DE Shaw). Otherwise, they ask their friends who they know and search informally.

Also, the fact is that most corporate environments are utterly mediocre and soul-sucking, and that hurts all but the most-established companies. There are probably 1000+ companies where a smart person could work and have smart co-workers, good pay, and interesting projects... but only a few stand out for having this reputation (e.g. Google). If you're not on this list of 20 companies, you're going to have a hard time proving that you're not one of those mediocre failboxes.

[starkfist]

The professions, and everything about them, are designed for people who don't have to work to earn a living

Which professions? Ambassador to France?

[pw0ncakes]

The culture of banking, law, medicine, academia and management come from an era when the people in those professions didn't have to work for a living and, as I said above, were working out of service to the world.

This is why interviews occur during the day, advanced education is required, and advancement is based on acquired social ability rather than technical talent, among other things. It's also why the 40-hour workweek does not exist in such professions. If you're working out of service to society, and not for wages, it follows naturally that you'd continue working until finished regardless of the clock.

Of course, this "working out of service to society" aspect is an utter fiction in many professions today-- especially banking and law. It's just a job for them, and why should it be anything more?

[ismarc]

Here's the problem with the current "employment opportunity discovery" mechanism. You need a large number of qualified applicants to review job postings and to reply to those, generating a "success" for a particular site for a particular company. You need a large number of accurate, quality job postings to attract applicants.

I've thought about this space for quite a while, fragmenting job sites all charge money to the company just to post an ad. From that, you expect a user response. I think the ideal method would be to have an indexed, structured database of potential applicants, people who are interested in potential job offers. Company's then input their requirements and a list of potential applicants is spit out, no identifying information, just the raw skills/experience (10 years with C++, 15 with C, 2 with C#, etc.). The company then pays $x to solicit that potential applicant into applying for the job. This preserve's the anonyminity the current system has (no personal identifiable information revealed until application takes place) and allows companies to spend significantly less time attempting to discover potential applicants. It's not without it's massive drawbacks (you need the index of applicants, get companies to use it, get applicants to keep their information up to date, gives the applicant a feeling of not trying to find a job, HR does the hiring so they may not pay for the grey area applicants when normally they'd at least make it to the hiring manager) but you can overcome some of these by providing the traditional service as well, company's pay a "nominal" fee to list a position and applicants search/apply.

From what I've discovered, the best jobs are the ones you can't find. They're posted on the companies job listings and sit there, or the current job search systems have crappy indexes and include more cruft than quality (try a search for 'c linux' on one for a good example). Hmm...maybe there's room in this sector if one could tap into a large number of people who are interested in anonymously being considered for other potential job opportunities.

[lhuang]

Your last paragraph is on point.

I disagree though with your idea about a database of applicants thats searchable by skill.

I think your system would fail without a means to authenticate and validate people's credentials, plus without a validation layer it'll only encourage people to exaggerate or lie about their skills.

The other problem from the perspective of an applicant is submitting resumes and cover letters to online postings often feels like all work for no gain. Most of these postings feel like black holes. You submit something and (typically) never hear back.

Maybe an improvement to your idea is some carrot/stick mechanism, that at the very least, incentives both parties to stick to good behavior (timely submissions of RELEVANT resume / cover letters and timely responses from the companies that listed the original posting). This would solve for some of the frustration these sites illicit.

[ismarc]

Yeah, validation layer was one of the many, many issues with the system. Maybe a dating site type system...have an index of jobs and applicants. Free to send messages back and forth, completely anonymouse. Messages are "request for application", "application", "denial of application", "denial of request for application", "application accepted" (not you're hired, but the application was received and we're reviewing it), "request for screening" and "accept/decline screening". You can't send a message if you have one pending a response. Make it 100% free, charging money to increase the number of pending responses you can have and still send a message.

Don't mind the rambling...this is literally typing as I think.

[semanticist]

Indexing large amounts of candidate data, including extracting 'skill' information from CVs, is pretty much a solved problem. It's what my employer's products do.

We also have products that do 'Candidate Matching' - which is exactly what you're talking about here, taking structured requirements for a specific job and then seeing who in the database matches. We normally do it against a recruiter's own local DB, and can do some degree of matching against internet job boards, LinkedIn, that sort of thing.

There was some interest in a product that would index all of the job boards for every UK local authority/council for one client, but that fell through. Going through every company's individual job postings is just impossible, and wouldn't help anyway: in my experience the best jobs are the ones that say 'no agencies', and it's only recruiting agencies who are spending on the kind of software we make.

[smokinn]

Giles has a video he wants to sell you: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to...

[lhuang]

A joke an econ professor once told me:

"Look under your foot, do you see a twenty? No? Well, thats because someone already took it."

The point was a generalization of the fact that in a free market, arb opportunities don't exist because market inefficiencies are corrected in real-time.

Thats not always true, but the general point is.

The problem with finding good jobs on Monster, CL, etc. is that, more or less, there aren't any. Good jobs fill fast, most often through backdoor channels - networking, campus recruiting, etc.

The jobs that flow down to sites like Monster and CL are those that smart, skillfull people don't want.

Think about it from your own perspective. If you wanted to hire someone for a job, chances are you would turn to your circle of friends and trusted advisors and ask them if they knew anyone. You branch out from there like a ripple, with each ring being less focused and more general, until you hit mass market sites likes Monster.

I think this is why the majority of jobs on these sites are usually low-paying admin type work or one-off small business contractual work.

LinkedIn attempts to solve for this, but they I don't think they have a direct enough of a mechanism for doing so.

Other sites fail too because most operate under the assumption that they can do better by improving usability and don't really address the underlying problems, so they suffer from the same issues (namely no good work).

The sites that I think do a better job are those that are niche industry focused. Niche sites help job seekers find relevant (to them) jobs and job posters find relevant hires to fill those positions. This helps both parties filter down, which I think is their value-add.

Ultimately whatever improvement that hopes to be successful needs to focus on ways to either change or divert the current way most employers find employees - word of mouth and personal networks.

Perhaps better mining tools for LinkedIN would solve. I think some functionality that lists job seekers by skill (profile, resume) weighted by in-network relationships may help.

Another idea is scaling the head-hunter model for public consumption. Something where as a job poster, I could send a request out to my network on linkedin, and there would be some sort of incentive (money or otherwise) for those in my network to recommend people the know. There is already natural incentive to do so... having a solid network is a good skill to have by itself; knowing good people says good things about the type of person you are.

Just some thoughts. I know relatively little about this space, so my opinions are just based on my own experiences.

[_delirium]

That joke actually reminds me of a more common counter-joke: when an economics professor sees money on the street, he doesn't pick it up, because it can't really be there

[MrFoof]

Yes. Isn't this what Spolsky and Atwood are trying to improve for computer professionals? Granted it's a specific niche of the market.

Matching these sorts of unique demands with a wildly varying supply is a devilishly hard problem. It's not much different than dating sites. I'd put both dating sites and job boards in the "better than nothing" category. However I've always maintained that if you could find a very high-quality partner (or employer, or employee) as easily as it is to Google for most things, you will be the richest person on earth.