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- Hacker News
- this is cool! incidentally we do a similar motion internally for members on https://www.hedgy.works
how did you think about evaluating quality when designing your ranker / fit scoring?
by rgbrgb - "quality" here is such an abstract thing.
There's a few metrics: seniority, salary range, enumerated skills (as requirements or as a person's skill set), and domain specific knowledge.
These are far from perfect, and I think in the future I will probably tweak how matches are scored, because how job postings are written and how 'Who Wants to Be Hired?" posts are at odds.
The former is one-to-many, where the job posting enumerates very specific requirements in order to filter that 'many' down to as few eligible candidates as possible.
The latter is one-to-many, where the 'I'm for hire' posting seeks to match as many of the 'many's as possible. This means down playing domain experience or specific technologies in order to appeal to as many possible viewers as possible.
Trying to pair 'precise and specific' with 'as general as humanly possible' is ... hard. Here we use 'tags' extracted from postings to match the domains and skills together. It isn't perfect. From what I've seen in this first run there aren't any matches that make it over 50% -- where 50% is a heuristic for the metrics mentioned above. This just means there's room for improvement.
The other side is the old game of 'tailor your resume to the job', which isn't in the spirit of 'Who Wants to Be Hired?' posts. You could very easily game this by just dumping a bunch of keywords into your post.
by all2 - Been manually sifting those 'Who's Hiring?' threads for a while. If this saves me some time, that'd be awesome.by Eastmill
- If its helpful, that would be great!
The matching algo is very raw at this point, so if you find posts that _should_ have matched but didn't, please reach out (email is in my profile) and I'll see what I can do.
by all2 - Always dreaded diving into those massive 'Who's Hiring' threads. This tool sounds like a much-needed shortcut for both sides.by jmutex
- FWIW, the user link is not working for me. I get 404.by jeenuv
- This is basically the same keyword matching every job posting uses correct?
But the optimal for those isn't to post a generic who wants to be hired but have a LLM rewrite your resume to match the job description isn't it?
by nottorp - > But the optimal for those isn't to post a generic who wants to be hired but have a LLM rewrite your resume to match the job description isn't it?
If anyone was depending on this to actually make interview decisions, yes, that would be something a candidate might do. Fortunately there's not that pressure on this project. :D
by all2 - This is neat! What I would do is I would have a list of tags and make sure every post gets pigeonholed into those because otherwise it might be hard to match tags if extracted on a per-post basis (e.g. I see `large-scale data systems` for a job listing, which will rarely match a candidate because it's so wordy).
Cool product though.
by dvt - This is something I'm considering. I was thinking we could probably hum it in with plain old vector embeddings, maybe?by all2
- It would be more useful if next to "remote" it also shows where the company actually is. I am sure many people don't want to work for us companies. Otherwise cool projectby herbst
- I think building a matching engine for this particular market is a cursed mission.
These two flavors of recurring thread read like oil and water to me.
by bob1029 - Did the same experiment sometime ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764151by lellow
- I left an incomplete section in the post body, then went shopping.
So here it is:
---
Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:
- individuals looking for jobs have extremely general postings
- companies looking to hire have extremely specific postings
- generally, match scores are very low (<50%) because of this mismatch
- individuals don't typically mention domain knowledge in any specific way
- individuals don't typically mention prior work history beyond time-in-industry (this makes sense on a public forum)
- individuals typically list technologies used
I don't have any conclusions to make right now, no advice for job posters or job seekers. It'll take two or three more of these before I've seen enough to start gelling the domain problems in my head.
by all2 - > It'll take two or three more of these before I've seen enough to start gelling the domain problems in my head.
I don't understand - there's years of historical data to look at?
by e12e - > If you've submitted a post to this month's 'Who Wants to Be Hired?", you can find your matching job listings at https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/:user_name, for example https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/G4Vi
I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.
Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.
Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.
Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.
by nrmitchi - I post once with a fake/hidden email address to be contacted. I received thousands of DocuSign emails...by Foobar8568
- > I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.
Ever since I posted once 6+ months ago, I've been getting random emails from people who found my "posting" on a bunch of different listing websites. I feel bad for them, some of them are even tailoring the resume. The position is no longer available..
by OsrsNeedsf2P - I don't see the blast. The endless non-job-related spam from "who wants to be hired?" posts is real, though, and actually creepy IMO. Looking at you today, pivotpaper.usby schmookeeg
- > this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy
People have been building HN job listing scrapers for years. Heck, I built one over a decade ago[1] (though it's offline now). This is a very common "Show HN:" project, and the argument that it's somehow bad faith and creepy is just absolutely nuts when posting on a public forum, specifically to get more exposure.
by dvt - > I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.
It's public information on a public forum. I'm not sure what the big deal is. There are lots of tools that do essentially what I've done here for various purposes.
> Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.
I have an account with them. I figured it was fair to say "I used this tool for vibe coding the idea". I suppose I could have left that out.
> Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.
Yup. I got distracted before I finished writing the post. I'll enumerate those things in another comment here in a minute. Life prevails.
> Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.
I'm not sure what you mean. I made a thing, I shared it. I dunno what else you want from me.
by all2 - The users in question are posting on a public forum under a username of their choosing, and it's still an invasion of privacy to read those posts and play pretend matchmaker?by usui