I have been building a service for a few weeks in Rails, partly to gain familiarity with Ruby on Rails, but mostly as it's the service I was looking for a few weeks ago and couldn't find. Some days I think it's a fantastic idea; it would have solved my problem a few weeks ago, so surely other would like it! On other days it feels pointless. I'm looking for advice and opinion from HN before I sink too much time into this.

A bit of background: I have just got a new job. I already had a job, so I was in no rush to make a bad decision. When trawling the various job sites and careers pages of companies I was interested in, the problem for me wasn't finding job that I was interested in. Rather it was narrowing down to the ones that I wanted to apply for.

I had (still have!) a huge mess of bookmarked jobs. I tried to enter the job details into a spreadsheet to compare them side by side (salary/bonus/skills etc). This doesn't work. I create a directory for each company that I like, which will contain: - Any info from the company (PDFs detailing the job, assessment work they ask me to complete) - CV, tailored for that position - Cover letter, again tailored for that position - Notes, detailing any contact with the company and anything that enters my head (I usually end up with a good list of questions for interviews this way)

This was the most frustrating part of the job search for me; I found it hard to organize digitally.

My idea is to simplify this process by allowing the user to give my site a URL (in most cases from a job site such as monster) and my site goes away and grabs all the data it can about the job. The user collects jobs painlessly this way, and can then examine them at their leisure - something I'm very much still working on. I used a very early version of my site during the last week or so of my job search, and found it to be extremely useful.

To illustrate my idea, I have put online a VERY scrappy version. In the future when the site is 'finished', most of the ongoing development would be in writing and maintaining the interfaces to the various job sites. At the moment they aren't my focus as I have a decent base of data to work with; as such they have fallen into a state of... disrepair. As such I have only uploaded the monster.co.uk interface, and it isn't in that great condition. The following link is worth copying, if you paste it into my app it will serve as a good example, though feel free to play with any other links!

http://jobview.monster.co.uk/Social-Media-Assistant-Graduate-Online-Marketing-Executive-%E2%80%93-2-1-or-above-exceptional-graduate-Job-London-London-UK-97033328.aspx

Again, this isn't supposed to be an MVP! I am simply offering a peek into my idea! Is it worth pursuing further? I hope I explained it well, I'm no writer :)

The site is at: http://mycalling.co.uk (clickable link in comments)

Thanks for your time.