[mostlysimilar]

Glassdoor, Yelp, Goodreads... all of these user review services are terrible, but they are so entrenched in their respective markets they're difficult to disrupt. The value of these services is not the companies themselves, it's the users. They're essentially specialized social networks. Social networks take an enormous amount of time and effort to build. It isn't the tech, the tech is easy now. It's the people.

The companies that run these services contribute very little to their success. In fact many times they're popular in spite of the company. Think about how Yelp or Glassdoor will remove negative reviews if the business pays them, etc.

Just more landlords extracting value from things people create and enshittifying everything.

[4hEn]

Let's try and see if the problem can be reframed. It isn't really about reviews. It's about effective hiring. If you wanted to optimize hiring how would you do it?

Reviews might be unnecessary if candidates can collectively gather up the data that shows if a company is actually hiring, and actually reviewing resumes, and actually responding to candidates with above-generic feedback.

The reason this data isn't collected and presented is that job sites and application tracking software make their money from companies. There isn't a site that makes money from candidates to counteract this force. The power imbalance between candidate and employer is tilted in favor of the employer.

If a job post showed there are 286 applicants for a job would you bother writing a cover letter? I wouldn't. I would move on to the job posting that responds promptly and has fewer candidates.

If a job post showed there are 100 applicants, the job posting has been open for 30 days, and there are zero resume reviews, would you bother applying to this job and others like it in this company? I wouldn't. It means the employer isn't really hiring or is disfunctional enough to announce a position without giving it attention.

I'd even be willing to pay the recruiter for their time giving me somewhat helpful not legally binding feedback like we think "you're overqualified", "you're missing an important skill", "we're not sure yet". If the recruiter starts generating revenue for the company, the company might hire more of them.

I'd also be willing to recommend my friends to good companies.

[notahacker]

IIRC LinkedIn actually does tell you how many applicants have applied via their platform, but since it doesn't tell you 90% don't have the right to work in the country never mind meet the job spec in other requirements, it's not information that's particularly useful.

"We're the job board that forces you to jump through hoops to provide evidence of how active your hiring process is" isn't a sales pitch particularly likely to attract employers (in which case there's not much incentive for candidates to pay them either). And even if it did, it wouldn't replace Glassdoor' reviews - with all their inadequacies - for people that care more about whether the employer sounds better or worse than their current employer than whether they will get a job offer by the end of tomorrow.

[4hEn]

> but since it doesn't tell you...it's not information that's particularly useful.

If it did it could be - if it could show how many applicants are actually qualified. Then a job board that listed more prominently jobs from responsive employers could get attention.

I'm not sure it's "jumping through hoops". In a well functioning company, providing evidence for a hiring decision is something that must happen anyway. How can the recruiter justify why they said yay or nay to a candidate? They might not remember the details but they're probably scoring candidates in broad categories. These categories tell you "90% don't have the right to work in the country never mind meet the job spec in other requirements".

If this data is available and isn't communicated to candidates there could be some other reason, likely that job boards make most of their money only from companies.

[notahacker]

Expecting companies to do their candidate scoring on the job board's platform sounds like "jumping through hoops" to me. If I have a choice of job boards that let me and my team make my own decisions about filtering candidates and when and how to invite candidates to interview and one that expects us to use theirs, I'm probably not using the latter one.

Consistently identifying whether an individual has the right to work in a country from the semi-structured data in a resume is a surprisingly hard problem for software to solve (for n>100 countries, where the right to work is often a requirement not stated in the ad). And actual humans working in recruitment fail pretty spectacularly at "is this individual's programming experience appropriate" often enough

(There probably is a market for software that does that - and plenty of controversy when it turns out the AI process uses heuristics like "is his name Muhammad" to filter out 'unqualified' candidates - but not something you'd be likely to focus your effort on if your business is selling ads rather than HR systems ad buyers probably don't want to use)

[4hEn]

I didn't say you can't make your own decisions. I didn't say it has to happen on the job board's platform either.

> Consistently identifying whether an individual has the right to work in a country from the semi-structured data in a resume is a surprisingly hard problem for software to solve

Many job posts provide a field that requires the candidate to enter if they have the right to work in the country the position is located.

[cheikhcheikh]

then how do these behemoths go down? I'm sure there's a scenario or two where better solutions win eventually, is it all up to luck and time or is there an actual plan for that to happen

[lesuorac]

It's probably easiest for another company to pivot into this.

Say you have a maps / direction software with a very large userbase and decide to add a rating feature to locations. Or perhaps you have a professional social network and you add a feature to rate your employer.

[toomuchtodo]

LinkedIn.

[diracs_stache]

Then they cannibalize the money they extract from recruiters to harass me for roles/services i have absolutely no interest in. Could also disrupt the power balance with companies paying for said subscriptions versus the free users.

[notahacker]

Also, a cunning "growth hack" to improve user engagement ends up publishing employee ratings of their company in their colleagues' newsfeeds and sending out an email alert. This feature can be disabled by upgrading to LinkedIn Sales Navigator