Jacob O'Bryant
Home ยท Archive
A job board for people who aren't looking for jobs
10 January 2021

(But who might take a new job if a good one was presented to them.)

As I mentioned the other day, after Findka grows more I'm planning to monetize it by creating a job board. Since Findka is already a recommender system, it makes sense to extend the algorithm to cover the job ads as well. I'm thinking that at the top of each Findka email, I'd include one link to a recommended job listing.

At a minimum, Findka could recommend listings based on your article preferences. If you like articles about machine learning, you'll be more likely to get listings for machine learning positions. On top of that, there could be settings for indicating your preferences about jobs explicitly. For example, you could tell the algorithm to prefer remote, or Clojure, or freelance, etc.

Besides modeling the work, it'd also be interesting to model the interview process. I think if this job board is optimized for not wasting candidates' time, it'll be much better at sourcing the best candidates. Especially since the best candidates are likely to already have good jobs and thus have less tolerance for jumping through hoops. So we could let people specify preferences about things like interview length, whiteboarding, take-home projects and so on.

In the same vein, I read a post a few months ago that suggested requiring companies to commit to a minimum salary. The first contact would be initiated by the company and would include a lower bound for your salary if they hire you. So if the lower bound isn't significantly higher than what you're already making, you don't need to waste any time.

I think that could work really well. Users would need to connect to LinkedIn (or otherwise enter in their resume info for companies to browse), so I'd have it as an opt-in additional feature. Everyone gets job links in the emails, and if you connect to LinkedIn, you can also get interview offers directly from companies.

The end result of all this, hopefully, is that individuals will have more leverage over companies in the job market.

I don't write this newsletter anymore but am too lazy to disable this signup form. Subscribe over at tfos.co instead.