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Tell HN: "Who's Hiring?" Threads Are a Mess
76 points by jackowayed on May 16, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments
I've never been a fan of how hard it is to sift through "Who's Hiring?" threads, but the recent "Who's hiring in <region>?" threads are not the solution. They clutter up the homepage more, and they still don't fix the fact that there's 63 comments on the "Who's Hiring in Europe Thread?" and there probably aren't more than 5 for any one city (so if you don't want to relocate, you're still getting a low signal:noise ratio).

What we need (unless pg were to want to actually add some kind of structured hiring functionality, which seems unlikely) is a standardized format that makes it easy to Ctrl+F through them to find things you want.

Here's a proposed format:

<general description of the job, mentioning the company name, what you're doing, the level of experience it is, etc. whatever you want>

Location: <List any way someone would refer to your location or locations nearby-enough that it still applies. Include the word "remote" if you'll accept remote workers>

Technologies: <List all of the technologies that someone in this job will be using>

Position: <Include the word the word "developer", "designer", or "infrastructure" if it's one of those, but you can go into more detail>

So first you describe the job like normal (but possibly leaving out some of the info that will come later), then you add what amounts to metadata to make it easy to search through.

Here's an example of how a job (http://posterous.theresumator.com/apply/JbAS4A/) would look when translated to this format (Note that I'm not associated with Posterous and that I may be misrepresenting the job in this post. I just chose it because it was on the jobs page.):

Posterous is looking for battle-tested, seasoned, war-hardened backend infrastructure engineers who love building and maintaining software used by millions of people. You'll work with a driven team of like-minded software engineers to build the next great Internet treasure. You are a skilled craftsman when it comes to capacity, uptime and scaling, and love it when your site is humming along like a well-oiled machine.

We want someone who has built for massive scale and will be able to build our tech stack to support hundreds of millions of uniques per month.

Compensation includes full time salary, generous equity compensation plan, and benefits.

Location: San Francisco, SF, Bay Area, Silicon Valley

Technologies: Linux, NoSQL, MongoDB, Casandra

Position: Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Note that I listed "Silicon Valley" as a location even though it's not. Someone looking for jobs in the Valley would probably be willing to consider jobs in SF, so they should list it. When it doubt, list it.

It's a little rough and certainly needs some tweaking, so I'd love comments on how to improve it. But I think that some standardized format like this could make it a lot easier to look through these. If you're looking for a Rails job anywhere, Ctrl+F for "rails". If you're looking for a job in NYC, Ctrl+F for "NYC" or "New York". Much easier than having to look through them all.



Speaking as someone who has hired multiple times from HN:

I agree that the nascent trend of "Who's Hiring in XXX" has got to stop.

I strongly disagree that what we need is to formalize the job listings and make them searchable.

I strongly disagree that we need to loosen the "YC only" restriction on job ads.

I strongly disagree that what we need is a YC-style job board.

I'm with the other commenter on this thread that said that one of the strengths of the "Who's Hiring" thread is that it's a way to learn about what people are doing and what companies are engaged with HN. It's not a job database. It's a conversation. When I've posted positions here (note: we're still hiring!), I've been thrilled to get comments and questions and to be able to answer them publicly.

My suggestion:

There's already a leader list, and there's already a user profile. news.arc should just look at people's profiles as they're saved, and if the profile says "we're hiring", add that user to a list of users who are hiring. Keep another list. If you want to scan through everyone who's hiring, there's your database. The rest of us can just keep talking about what we're doing and having conversations and not worry about optimizing things or geeking out on how to run a job board.


One thing that comes to mind after reading this comment - maybe what we really need is a HN startup directory? A list of startup names as titles, comments and voting (so you would easily know which one is interesting).


http://startuply.com.

Guess who funded them?


Nice. However, there's only 2 jobs in Berlin from Music Pictures whereas it said clearly on the other post that SoundCloud is also hiring in Berlin. http://ventureloop.com lists more here but then again those are all VC backed. So, somehow another job board didn't solve the problem.


I've never minded the disorganization: I think of these threads as a good way to see who's busy and learn about a few new companies and products.

Besides, considering the high quality of opportunities that are usually offered here, time spent combing through these threads is more efficient than sifting through the piles of trash on regular job sites.


+1.

It's interesting to see it in this form; otherwise, you could miss interesting opportunities that aren't in your local area. I referred one non-local (WRT to me) person to an interesting post because of that.


Really, this would be neat, but would it help at all?

If you actually wanted a job, why not just read through them all and contact the ones that are near and interesting? - it's really not that hard, I read them all and I'm not even looking for a job.

HN could instead do with a proper job board. I'd suggest that a job board should not be restricted to advertising just specific jobs like every other board does. In a small startup roles will not be that well defined yet. You should be able to post just a company and say they are looking for good people, by stating:

  - What the Company does / the problem it solves
  - Capital raised and current situation
  - Technologies currently used
  - Location


To be honest, I quite like the lo-fi nature of the "Who's hiring" process on HN. If you really are looking for a job I think spending 15 minutes (if that) on a (admittedly poorly organised) thread isn't too much hassle in my opinion.


Sounds like a perfect use for the workatastartup.org domain name :).


Instead of the first point (what the company does) I suggest link to a Company website. 3 other points are very good - maybe one more point with the salary/equity info?

And all of those posts should be aggregated under http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs link.


There should be link for further information, yes. Though I think you should be a quick pitch inline - actually thinking about this a bit more, there should be char limit on it too, say 500 chars.

Not sure about Salary/equity details, it brings up all sorts of issues, whether they are in it for the money and lack of knowledge of the market rate. Also it's specific to a job, rather than just a call out to people who want to be involved which could be anyone from people straight out of college to people with 20+ years experience doing technical or non-technical jobs.


Or... people could just use one of the 278 existing job sites that have proper search and are generally better suited to the task than a generic forum.

If you want to bring YC people together it might be easier to agree on a "secret handshake", like the string "YCYC" somewhere in the description?


"[...]use one of the 278 existing job sites[...]"

I like to know what people in this community are working on.

I'm not, however, interested in job openings in general.

My points are: 1 ) a job site is not the same, unless it is tied to this community. 2 ) even if a secret handshake existed, I wouldn't be likely to start my day searching a job site for "YCYC"


I disagree. I think there is real value in preselecting applicants by only posting jobs on a site which have people with a certain interest reading and participating.

Posting on a generic job posting site, in my experience, bring in a lot of applicants who are not those that I am looking for. Posting on a site like YC gives a very different type of response.


I understand where you're coming from, but don't agree. The unstructured nature of "who's hiring" and the fact that it's entangled with the other conversations going on here are what makes it alive and different. Occasionally people who don't have any roots here try to make more traditional job posts, and those stand out like sore thumbs.

There are two rules to be respected. One, don't rush to systematize things, especially human things. Two, when communities spontaneously create new patterns, that's valuable and should be attended to delicately, as if one were discovering a new species.

Two companies that have done an amazing job of following spontaneous user trends are Twitter (e.g. hashtags) and Reddit (e.g. IAMA). The trick seems to be to wait a long time until the pattern is clear, then provide nonintrusive support to enhance what is already happening. The obvious temptation is to impose familiar structures (do it "right") that are foreign to the spontaneous life and end up killing what was interesting about it.


Really, the most important things are:

- Where is the company located?

- Is remote work a possibility?

- Is remote work only available in-country (or a select list of countries -- e.g. USA and Canada only)?

- A reminder to people to make sure they have contact info somewhere (there are always a couple of posts that say 'email me' with no email address in the post or profile).

These only seem to be loosely followed. If we could cement these as constant reminders / rules to the people posting jobs in the threads it would go a long way.

[ It could also help to have a standard format for location. It's annoying when someone only says their company is in 'Canada' but you have to hunt down the information (i.e. company site) to realize they are not in the part of 'Canada' that you are looking for. ]


Maybe it is time to get http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs a little bit more useful and turn it into a job posting board? Then it's just one step to create a specialized submission form to make things more organized.


As far as I know, currently only YC backed companies can post on HN jobs.

To make it more broader (and perhaps more useful), anyone with more than a certain karma threshold (e.g. 500) can also be allowed to post a job opening on it. A certain number of karma points (e.g. 50) can be deducted for making every job post. This strategy would keep it clean and free from recruiters, and since the post is coming from a 'accredited' HN user, it would possibly have a good chance being interesting and useful enough for most of us.

The additional problem this would solve is that it would allow job postings to be visible for longer durations than what's possible with regular news threads.

Just a thought.


Or simply allow HN members to flag blatant recruiter postings, and after 3-4 flags (or whatever) the post gets removed and the person's account gets blacklisted/deleted/warning sent depending on the number of offenses. It would be easy to tell a recruiter's account as the account would be fairly new, with few posts and low karma.


I think this is a great idea! Using the karma system already in place could I think provide positive incentives and a nice way to do some minimal screening right off of the bat. It could even still give preferntial treament to YC companies if pg preferred.


I agree.

But I can also see why PG would prefer to "positively discriminate" (ok, carefully chosen words there) to just YC companies on /jobs.


Problem with YC companies is that they are US only (am I correct that you must move to US to be funded by YC?). This site is multinational so non-US people will never see anything interesting on /jobs site.


Well I agree, I personally love YC but would probably never run any future startup I might create through YC - even though I live right here in San Francisco.

The issue of geography doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that this whole community is set up to support, promote and evangelize YC and it's portfolio so I'm not surprised /jobs remains YC only.


Hmm, personally I'm ok with the free form posting + reply format the community has evolved. No need to change anything. Keep bureaucracy at bay!


It's a status quo.

The reason people are posting jobs here is because of the community and the select group of people participating.

But if you create a YC Job Board then you loose the community and you increase the audience of the postings to be much much larger and outside of the original target audience (eg: just think of all the job board aggregators, the jobs would end up on, etc).


Idea: since the comments are hierarchical there could be a thread for each continent.


Add one for telecommuting.


My personal suggestion would be for PG to loosen the restrictions on the "Jobs" section to not be restricted to those that have gone through YC.


Listing any relevant names for the position is a huge plus. I'm tired of first cycling through all the matches for "NYC", then everything for "New York City".

Another thing I'd like to see is differentiating full-time and part-time/internship positions. Maybe a "type" field could be useful as well?


Speaking as a startup CTO who would love to recruit HN hackers, I'd welcome any additional structure that helps people find my jobs - a "microformat" as suggested by the OP, or a proper job board, or anything in between.


This would actually be a good use for an HN wiki, as suggested here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330602


Time for Hacker Jobs?

http://jobs.ycombinator.com


If only this website had a section for potential employment opportunities...


That is for ycombinator funded startups only.


someone should create a job posting board platform and get every high profile blogger to start their own job board for their audience.




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