[BrianOnHN]

Great idea. Being in the job board business for a decade, here's what I think would be the challenges:

1. Organizational structure mismatch: The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions. Outside of startups, job postings may be drafted by a manager, but a committee, legal, and/or HR has the final say on what's in the posting. An assistant or VA is often the POC when the job posting is copy&pasted into the job board. This can be overcome, but it's challenge to try to reeducate the organization.

2. Chicken-egg Problem: The challenging part here is that your racing against many existing players with large audiences, and hoping that they can't reverse-engineer the solution before you catch up.

3. User Habits: I can't think of any "normal" person I know that looks for jobs without some negative catalyst pushing them into it. Meanwhile, I imagine that single people are incentivized a bit differently. Not that this wouldn't work, I'm just not sure if it would work the same as for dating. For example, "why would I feel motivated to complete a long profile when I can just spam my pre-made resume, since it will be required at some point in the future anyway." There are good answers to that question, but now you're entering the same re-education waters as in challenge #1.

[feoren]

> The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions.

That is a feature, not a bug: it means that candidates know that jobs they see posted on that site have actually been at least looked at by the actual team you'll work with. Filtering out jobs offers that are just HR buzzword soup would be exactly its competitive advantage over Indeed and LinkedIn job-spam.

> hoping that they can't reverse-engineer the solution before you catch up

Don't worry; they can't. Kodak couldn't even pivot to digital and they invented digital photography! Huge companies have awful, terrible, very bad, no-good software, and leadership that has no interest in ever adapting to anything. Besides, the niche is different anyway.

> "why would I feel motivated to complete a long profile when I can just spam my pre-made resume, since it will be required at some point in the future anyway."

Because you're catering to applicants who are picky about what job they're looking for. I don't just want any job -- the list of jobs I'm qualified to do is vastly, vastly larger than the list of jobs I'd ever want to do.

You're not trying to replace Indeed: you're trying to replace recruiters.

[BrianOnHN]

100

> hoping that they can't reverse-engineer the solution before you catch up

>> Don't worry; they can't. Kodak couldn't even pivot to digital and they invented digital photography! Huge companies...

Yes, b/c Kodak taught us that, better put: hoping that they can't acquire a better connected imitator before you catch-up.

> You're not trying to replace Indeed: you're trying to replace recruiters.

This is spot-on.

My vision is like "talent agents for the rest of us." There are additional challenges that I won't mention because their knowledge is a competitive advantage at this point. But yeah, that's what's up.

[ineptech]

4. As a hiring manager, I'd need different "profiles" for each team (one team mobs 24/7, another almost never mobs, etc)

5. What I would want as a candidate (a blunt and specific "warts and all" description of the team I'm joining) is not what employers would provide (vague, HR-y generalities like "we use cutting-edge technology" and "we prioritize work-life balance"). This was what turned me off from KeyValues.

But I hope these are tractable, because I very much like the OKCupid model and would use the product if these could be solved.

[BrianOnHN]

Good additions. I'd like to add that these are all challenges that will be faced by all competitors of the existing model.

Personally, that's what lead me to focussing on what might be the most innovative direction I can fathom instead of the incremental direction (aka "this for that" innovation). If I didn't recognize that all of the challengers would face this same uphill battle, then I myself would've built "OKCupid for jobs" by now. It would 10X the pure-spam nature of the current market if the execution was done well, but current players are too big. To conclude, you have to outthink them and create something that can't be reproduced with effectively unlimited budget.

[rglullis]

> The people posting the jobs don't know the answers to the required questions.

The questions should be answered by all the devs in the hiring team. You don't care about the compatibility between HR and employee, you care about compatibility between your peers and your direct boss.

> I can't think of any "normal" person I know that looks for jobs without some negative catalyst pushing them into it.

You can also solve it by making the match between team members. This way, companies could even ask their currently employees to participate, which means that people would be using the website even if they are not looking for a job directly.

[BrianOnHN]

I think you might be on to something.

What might a B2B employer-only network look like?

[giantg2]

A network of employers colluding on employment would look like an antitrust violation.